The city so nice they named it twice is about to get a taste of a little Jack Bauer, according to EW.com.

Sources confirm to me exclusively that 24 will be relocating to New York next season — at least on screen. (The show will still be primarily shot in Los Angeles, with some NY location footage mixed in.)

Production on Day 8 gets underway next month, but already details are emerging. In addition to the move to the Big Apple, CTU will make a comeback under the leadership of a new, yet-to-be-cast male character by the name of Brian Hastings. Described as an MBA type with a razor sharp intellect, Hastings will be joined by two new twentysomething agents (one male, one female), as well as Mary Lynn Rajskub’s returning Chloe.

New York City has been pretty ignored in the world of “24,” as a show about terrorist strikes in the Big Apple probably hit a little too close to home. The producers have apparently deemed it the right time to make the move.

“I think Jack Bauer is certainly in a position where he’s questioning a lot of the things that he has had to do either by his own choice or by orders,” said our man Kiefer Sutherland, “and certainly at the beginning of the season, you see him in Africa, very disconnected from the United States. And so he is wrestling with his own history, about what he actually believes was right and fair and whether or not he was, in fact, the kind of person that should have been put in the position to do these things. It’s a through-line that really travels all 24 episodes this year. And so there’s this constant balance of defending, for instance, in the Senate investigation, his own actions. On a much cleaner level and a much more personal moral level, he questions those things greatly, so this inner struggle is something that carries him through all 24 episodes.”

Of course, if you’ve been watching this season, then you’ve probably already noticed how many times Jack has been standing up for his actions after being condemned by others. This might…just maybe…be a case of the show’s writers lashing out at their critics.

“I would be lying if I said there wasn’t some of that in there,” said producer Howard Gordon, with a laugh. “Obviously, there was the conundrum of how do we do a show that had taken quite a bit of heat for allegedly advocating this way of law enforcement and this way of countering terrorism. It was a nuance and it is an evolving question that plays, as Kiefer said, throughout the entire season. So I counsel patience, and I hope people have the patience and the appetite and the desire to watch through the whole season, because I think the answer to these questions will not be known until the very last episode.”

Yeah, but here’s the issue: whenever Jack does something, he gets results, and whenever people don’t follow Jack’s methods, they don’t get results.

Sutherland agreed with this point, but he re-emphasized, “You really do have to watch the 24 episodes to see the conclusion that is drawn from this. Yes, based on the television show, if you look back over the seven years, the results that he gets help him move the plot forward, but in reality, I think they’ll tell you that less than 10 percent of the information they get from situations like this are helpful, in fact, can be misleading. So you have to realize that in the context of this debate, it is a television show, and we are driving the plot forward. It is dramatic, and we use it for those dramatic purposes as well. But underneath that, we certainly raise the moral questions of what is right and wrong.”

Boy, that’s some heavy stuff, I tell you what. Let’s lighten things up a bit by getting a few comments from Mary Lynn Rajskub about her experience of shooting “24” while pregnant, shall we?

“I wanted to become more of a method actress,” Rajskub assured us, “and so since they wrote my pregnancy on the show, that’s how committed I am to my acting career: that I decided to get pregnant as quickly as I could in real life.”

That’s possibly not true. But what is true is that Rajskub was grateful to the producers, writers, and basically everyone involved in “24” for being willing to work around her blessed event.

“I’m very, very lucky with my schedule on the show in general,” she admitted. “I don’t have to work every day, and I feel a little guilty, but it worked out very well. During shooting, every time I stood up from behind the computer, it would be cut and they’d bring in the body double. And then people were very nice and said, ‘Would you like a glass of water? Would you like to sit down?’ So it was a pretty dream scenario for me.”

And is it true that the baby, which has since been born, weighed a staggering nine-and-a-half pounds?

“Yeah, thanks for asking,” replied Rajskub, adding – with an appropriate series of hand gestures – that “he had to be taken out that way, not that way.”

TMI, Mary Lynn. TMI.

In closing, let’s jump back to Kiefer again – I mean, he is the star of the show, after all – and see how he feels about the fact that Jack Bauer has become such an iconic character.

“You know, it’s something I think I’m still trying to figure out…and I’m not trying to be funny,” said Sutherland. “We spend our time working, and we’re very focused on that. We had our 150th-episode party the other day, and we’re so focused on the episode that we’re shooting that when you actually look up and realize that you’ve made the equivalent of 75 films, which is a career, we’re kind of shocked about that. Every once in a while, I look up and I realize, walking down the street, that my name, apparently, is not Kiefer anymore. It’s Jack. And people will talk to me like that.

“I have to go back to the terrible events of 9/11 and the fact that this show was written a year before those terrible events,” he continued, “but the way it was broadcast at that time and when it was finally released…I remember I was walking around at least for a month, if not two, in a real cloud. And I remember one guy coming up to me and saying, ‘I can’t wait for your show to go on.’ And I remember thinking, ‘How on Earth could you be thinking of something like that at a time like this?’ And I said that to him. And he said, ‘Well, it’s exactly because of a time like this that I am thinking about that.’ And I think somehow, because this character had these unbelievable responsibilities and yet he was very human. He could take care of David Palmer, but he couldn’t protect his daughter and his wife. Nothing about Jack Bauer or the show ’24,’ I feel, is black and white. It lives in a very gray area, which I think is very human, and I think that people were very receptive at that time to accept something very human like that, because I think we were all very vulnerable for quite some time after that. And so I think that that’s how he might have permeated the culture on some level.

“But,” Sutherland reiterated, “it’s something that I’m continually trying to figure out.”

As season premieres go, “24” has certainly had more explosive openings, but I liked what they did here, and also what they didn’t do. The show had gotten way too insular in terms of everything happening in Los Angeles, so moving the show to the east coast is a nice change of pace. Even better, the terrorist plot involves a threat that would actually affect the entire country. (No power or drinking water? Yikes.) Yes, it’s a riff on the plot from “Live Free or Die Hard” – and there is absolutely no way that they would ever get those planes synced up so that they would both hit the crossing point of two runways at the exact same time – but if it means that we don’t have to worry about a nuclear weapon this season, that can only be a good thing. They were also smart to acknowledge what a walking cliche Jack Bauer had become. “WHO ARE YOU WORKING FOR?” (*stabs man in genitals with spork*) That couldn’t have been easy for the producers to admit, but it needed to be done.

“Mr. Bauer, do you swear to kick the butt, the whole butt and nothing but the butt, so help you God?”

However, I’m still trying to wrap my head around Tony Almeida as this year’s villain. We still don’t know why he switched teams – and that’s good that they haven’t revealed that yet, that was the ‘what they didn’t do’ that I was referring to – but I’m not sure they can possibly come up with a rationale that will satisfy me. At the moment, he appears to be a free agent of sorts, a contract guy that offers his services to anyone willing to pay for them. God knows he wouldn’t be doing the bidding of a mass murderer like General Candyman any other way, right? And are we really to believe that Jack is only now learning that Tony is still alive? Yes, he was kidnapped by the Chinese hours after Tony’s supposed death, but he came back…years ago. I’m thinking the first thing someone at CTU would have told him is that Tony is not dead. They better have an answer for that as this season unfolds.

And man, did they stunt-cast the bejeezus out of this season. Janeane Garofalo as an easily stressed techie? Please tell me that Chloe O’Brien literally eats her alive at some point in the season. Bob Gunton, aka the warden in “The Shawshank Redemption,” is on Madame President’s staff, and Colm Feore is the First Man? There’s no way I’m looking at him without thinking of “Storm of the Century.” Bonus points if they work the phrase “Give me what I want, and I’ll go away” into the dialogue. Lastly, the great Kurtwood Smith is the senator that is trying to bring Jack to “justice.” Now, I like Kurtwood Smith, but did they really need him to play that part? You get the sense that the suits were nervous, so they snagged as many name actors as they could. It’s overkill, of course, but that’s Hollywood for you.

For those of you playing the “24” drinking game, The “Damn it” counter is at three, though Jack only said one of them.

All in all, not a bad way to start the season. Not great, but who knows, maybe that’s a good thing; in years past, they would blow the doors off the show in the premiere, only to implode six episodes later (ahem, abandoned plot involving Jack’s “nephew” in season six). The ads for hours three and four even hint at a big bombshell dropping. Maybe they finally get it now: the premiere is useless if everything that follows is shit. Yep, that’s what blogging a show will do to a person: turn them from a fan to someone who simply hopes that he’s not blogging about shit. Sigh.