TV's 24: entertaining--as fiction: weekly "lifeboat" decisions of super-agent Jack Bauer protect the lives of fictional millions, but without addressing the real moral consequences of situational ethics.

A Disclaimer: Before starting this review, you should know that I love the television show 24. I may even be addicted to this unusually timely and thrilling show about the intelligence world, a fast-paced hour-long adventure that follows the fictional CTU (Counter Terrorism Unit), a Los Angeles-based division of the real U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

But there's a thin line between love and hate. Even as I watch this remarkable show, I can't help thinking about relatively recent news, which claims U.S. agencies with similar powers to CTU have performed extraconstitutional renditions on our captives of war, sending them off to certain torture in foreign lands. It also seems that the CIA has tortured a few suspected Taliban, Iraqi insurgents, and al-Qaeda themselves.

And recently, Michael Chertoff, the head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, not only told the New York Times Magazine that he had seen almost every episode of 24, and consequently had "operation-center envy," but he also appeared publicly with the show's producers, writer, and some of its actors at an event sponsored by the Heritage Foundation.

All of which is kind of cute, except that Chertoff's TV-watching habits, "center envy," and appearance at the event entitled "24 and America's Image in Fighting Terrorism: Fact, Fiction or Does It Matter?" made it appear that the United States' top Homeland Security official endorses 24's extra-legal attitude toward rendition, torture, murder, and other illegal activities. The quandary for us quaint TV-watching moralists, of course, is that 24 is a terrific show, maybe one of the best ever.

During each segment of 24, the CTU crew battles an incredibly sophisticated enemy that has plotted, during different seasons, to: kill the United States' first Afro-American president; explode a nuclear bomb in downtown Los Angeles: release military-grade nerve gas in a high-density metropolitan area; plant a body with an incurable bio-weapon/virus in a Western city; and override the controls at every nuclear plant in the United States, resulting in a massive meltdown.

24 is unique. Unlike any other show in television history, it not only purports that its one-hour segments are occurring in "real time," but the two dozen shows in each season cover the 24 hours in a single, action-packed day, also in real time. Plus, the show's production values (camera work, sets, costumes, special effects, hardware, etc.) appear equal to that of a multi-million dollar movie. In fact, that's how 24 could be described, as a long, but really exciting, Hollywood movie.

Viewers of 24 tend to flock together and talk obsessively about the show, and usually the topic of the moment is along the lines of: "Could you believe what happened! I never would have expected that they would have ...!"