FOX has officially picked up Kiefer Sutherland’s new series Touch for a second season. It’s currently unknown whether it will air during mid-season again or be given a full 22 episode season order. I assume we’ll find out more details in the next few days at FOX’s upfront presentation.
The series has been renewed despite mediocre ratings. After having a successful premiere with 12.01 million viewers, ratings continued to drop every week down to a series low 6.43 million by the seventh episode.
Congratulations to Kiefer Sutherland, Marci Michelle, Nicole Burke, and all of the other former 24 crew who work on Touch. Former 24 director Jon Cassar’s episode airs tomorrow night on FOX.
18 Comments
Comments ClosedGerry Mander
May 9, 2012 at 10:25 pmWhich brings me to my main point; that being with this news, we can kiss bye-bye to Jack Bauer’s big screen adventure until at least early 2014, as even if they reconcile their differences over budget/salary with FOX and production begins next spring, there’s no way the ’24’ movie will be released up against the ‘Hunger Games’ sequel ‘Catching Fire’ and the Roland Emmerich-directed ‘White House Down’, both of which will be big-budget affairs and are released in November 2013, so a 2014 release for ’24’ is more likely… the problem with that is it will have been four whole years since the series ended, and will there still be an audience large and passionate enough about all things Bauer to justify a $40m budget?
Risilence
May 9, 2012 at 11:41 pmBMAN
May 10, 2012 at 12:15 amRorshachLives!
May 10, 2012 at 12:48 am24 Spoilers
May 10, 2012 at 2:11 amTouch started off well and then quickly nosedived in viewership within the first handful of episodes. It’s had a massive advertising campaign (World Series commercials etc) but very little word of mouth, critical reaction is mixed at best, it’s a very expensive show, and it’s already been given the best possible lead-in (American Idol, FOX’s number one show).
Unlike a lot of other shows which had a slow start but then gradually built up an audience, I feel like this series already had its chance and blew it. I’m not sure what else they can do to improve ratings at this point.
I agree that it would’ve been in everyones best interests to relaunch “24” as a movie franchise instead.
24fan07
May 10, 2012 at 2:44 amJomskylark
May 10, 2012 at 11:57 amThat being said, I don’t like it more than a 24 film. :P
Northern Star
May 10, 2012 at 10:34 pmAnd the best time to release a ’24’ movie (if you’ll allow me to disagree with you,
RorshachLives!) was back on July 24th 2008, when the movie was originally scheduled for release, but didn’t happen because the ’24’ producers realized they couldn’t make the series and prep the movie simultaneously, and put it off indefinitely, thereby blowing a big hole in 20th Century Fox’s (who were banking on the ’24’ movie being their big summer release that year) summer ’08 schedule, leaving them no option but to throw together the second ‘X-Files’ movie at relative short notice in order to have something released that July… and look at how that ended up!
Personally, I happen to believe that Kiefer Sutherland was wrong to sign up for three additional seasons in 2006, it was obvious at the time he wanted to concentrate on other projects – he all but said it in interviews at the time – but felt an admirable sense of loyalty to the show that revived his faltering career, and did his duty to keep it on the air for a while longer, whereas he probably should have just signed on for both a sixth (and final) season and the inevitable movie. If the producers’ knew going in that the sixth season was the last one, they would have approached it very differently (as evidenced by the last eight or nine episodes of the eighth season), would have went absolutely go-for-broke and no-holds-barred on it, and it would have worked like gangbusters (in my opinion) because nothing would have been off the table, and it would have had real dramatic weight behind it, something the eventual sixth season lacked for the most part, and as for the movie, considering how big ’24’ was at the time, not to mention how much Fox wanted the movie for summer 2008, the ’24’ producers would have had absolutely no problems getting a very substantial budget, possibly as much as $70m, unlike the current predicament they now face, where Fox don’t want to pay out more than $30m, simply put because ’24’ is long past it’s commercial and creative peak, whereas had Kiefer signed on for the movie in 2006 when the show was at it’s zenith, the studio would have bent over backwards to facilitate it with every resource at their disposal, but the series went on too long, it missed it’s optimum time to make the transition to the big screen, and it’s now paying the price for that unfortunately. I do still hope it gets made, but I fear the longer it’s put back, the less chance Fox will want to put tens of millions of dollars behind what they will increasingly see as a franchise whose time has come and gone…
Guest
May 11, 2012 at 3:23 amBMAN
May 11, 2012 at 5:01 amCatherine
May 11, 2012 at 6:02 pmAnd he posponed the 24 movie that gave him the role of a lifetime to do that …I love Kiefer but I’m very disapointed :(
Guest
May 11, 2012 at 8:47 pmRorshachLives!
May 11, 2012 at 9:26 pmAnd as far as the proposed ’24’ movie that was originally to be released in 2008, they were right, in my humble opinion, to put it off until the series was finished, and knowing how tight Fox are (as recent events have proven, ’nuff said!), I would guess they wouldn’t have got a cent more than $65million at most – which is still some serious coin – considering it was to be shot in Prague, London, and Morocco, all of which are considerably cheaper than filming in the U.S., and the studio would have wanted a maximum return on minimum expenditure, which makes their reluctance to give the current ’24’ movie script the minimum $40million being asked of it all the more perplexing…
I’m very much looking forward to seeing ‘Person of Interest’, as I’m a big fan of both Jim Caviezel and Jonathan Nolan, but no-one here in either the U.K. and Ireland have bought the rights to it yet, why I don’t know, I guess if it was anti-American liberal propaganda like ‘Homeland’ it would have been snapped up in no time, but if ‘Person of Interest’ is as good as people say, we just may have the next ’24’ on our hands; a truly original and innovative action series that will build up a wide audience as it goes on, and maybe even a movie if successful enough…
24fan07
May 12, 2012 at 3:02 amPOI is a decent show, especially for CBS which only does lame cop shows 99% of the time, but it doesn’t have a thing on 24.
kim
June 9, 2012 at 2:51 pmfranco rojas escorza
June 9, 2012 at 4:40 pmbarrett
July 12, 2012 at 5:45 pmBILL
August 12, 2012 at 3:10 am