As you’ve probably determined over the course of the past week or two, I’ve had a lot of close encounters with a lot of different folks thanks to this TCA press tour, but certainly one of the most high-profile of the bunch would have to be the one tonight with Keifer Sutherland. Sutherland made an appearance at Fox’s all-star party at the Santa Monica Pier, and although he pointedly hovered by himself in a corner for several minutes after his arrival, he was, thankfully, gracious enough to make himself available for a brief press scrum…

As far as the new season goes, Sutherland admits, “We’re still really working on it. We tend to do shows…well, map out ideas…eight episodes at a time. I don’t know if that’s a conscious effort or if it just happens that way, and we really are…and I say “we” kind of very generously…Howard (Gordon) and Joel (Surnow) and Bob (Cochran) have really been focused on making those eight records right. I know, because someone else said it to me, that you all know about the female president. I think one of the things that the show’s always done, even though Jack Bauer is a real apolitical character, they’ve had a really interest comment on American politics through the different Presidents, and I certainly think this is going to be a very strong one, so that’s something to expect.”

The relationship between Jack and the new President is, as far as Sutherland can speak to at the moment, relatively nonexistent. “They don’t start off…she’s not on his radar at all. Jack is starting from a very, very different place this season. You know, at the very end of Season 6, he was abandoning this as a life, and so we kick off and see not so much that it keeps drawing him back in a context that he wants to pursue anti-terrorist work but that certain things that he has done over the years that start to come back to get him. So that’s really where he starts off in the season: he’d like to let it all go, but he can’t. And then how the President and Jack Bauer will cross paths at some point in that day, I honestly can’t tell you. It’s not that I don’t want to, I just couldn’t!

The first four episodes that they write…and last year, I thought that the first four episodes of Season 6 were really four of the best episodes we’ve ever made…but (those first four episodes) inform the rest of that day. They’re also very aware that they’re seen over two nights, back to back. So they’ve all got a different context, these four episodes, than the rest of the twenty, and they have to really write and cater to those for that reason. They have to be right. We’ve been known to go to the absolute wire, and this year will be no different. But (those episodes) will also open up everything you get to do for the next twenty episodes, or it’ll shut you down, and we have learned that…and again I say “we”!…they have learned over the last six years, and every year is an effort to make fewer mistakes. Every year’s got them, we run into bumps all the time, that is the cost of trying to do something different or new. And each year, we start the season off a little slower, trying to avoid as many bumps as we can before we start.”

Sutherland says the new season will take place mere months after the previous season finale, and that it will start in the morning again, although he admits that “that’s as much a production issue as anything else. We shoot in the summer when it’s daytime and we get longer days, and we shoot night scenes in the winter when we have longer nights.” Hey, wait a minute: if it’s only a few months, then how is there already a new President? “That’s a great question,” he acknowledges. “In all fairness, they haven’t put an absolute time down.”

Sutherland is only vaguely apologetic when it comes to discussing the backlash against the show from the fans and critics after the previous season. “I felt the same about last year as I did every year,” he shrugs. “Every year, there are moments that are better than we had ever expected, and there are moments that are disappointing for us. I read a lot of the criticisms, and some of them I agreed wholeheartedly with, and some of them I did not. Again, I thought the first four episodes of last year were four of the best episodes we’ve ever done, and I felt the same way about the last four, and there are moments in-between where we settled. I think that the writers…and I don’t want to speak too much for them…but I think they had a hard time getting my storyline going without my doing a whole lot of stuff that I’d already done. So, y’know, last year was a huge learning experience for us…but, again, it doesn’t feel any different to me than any other year. I mean, all the way back to the first year, there’s stuff where all of us go, ‘What were we thinking?’ But we have done well, and we have been given so much incredible support by all of you, but you have to have your shot (at us) at some point, and last year was as good as any. And we certainly hear you. We’re always looking over our shoulder a bit! But, y’know, it is what it is. Our job stays the same. We try to do the best we can, but it’s such a complicated format to write for, with the real-time aspect, and every year, there will be struggles.”

In closing, don’t hold your breath waiting on that long-rumored “24″ movie showing up anytime soon, though. “We are so focused on the show right now that I couldn’t imagine that any of the writers have even thought about that,” says Sutherland. “I think we’ve collectively agreed that that will be the first thing that we’ll do after we finish the show.”