On the fifteenth, there was a smattering of protests in cities around America—”Tea Parties” ostensibly designed to speak out against the Obama administration’s changes to the tax code. The cognitive dissonance level of the events was quite high, beginning with the fact that most people protesting will likely pay lower income taxes under the Obama plan, to a 60-year-old great-grandmother surviving on Medicaid and Social Security fearing the creation of a welfare state, to signs reading “Obama is a Socialist” and “Obama is a Fascist” being hoisted right beside each other.

One sign at a protest reads: “I love my country but fear my government”. Certainly an admirable notion—except these were the same people who but a year ago equated speaking out against the Bush Administration with treason and whose slogans were more to the effect of “Love it or Leave it.” It’s as if they’ve all suffered major memory loss.

The nature of memory is an interesting and fickle thing. The media has often been painted as contributing to society’s shorter attention span, not trusted to remember what happened last week unless we’ve been continuously fed information in bright and shiny packages. It’s why there’s a general distrust by networks of highly serialized programming and why shows always have to have “Previously on…” segments to catch people up. But audiences have longer memories than they’re given credit for.

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24 is a show that has been cited by kookier elements of the right-wing when defending the use of torture on terrorism suspects—including Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. After the disastrous, meandering season 6 in which a character said what we were all thinking when he yelled, “Mister President, this doesn’t make any sense!” the showrunners knew they had to re-tune the show, and get away from the bad habits that six years of formula can do.

So instead of CTU hunting terrorists, the FBI is hunting terrorists. And instead of attacks threatening Los Angeles, there are attacks threatening Washington, DC. And instead of Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) torturing people, there’s—okay, there are some things you don’t mess with.

And yet the show is working better for it all. The beauty of 24 is that it’s turned surprise and suspense into formula in a way that Hitchcock would be pretty proud of. Yes, 24 is highly unrealistic and should really come with a label reading “WARNING: DO NOT CONFUSE WITH JURISPRUDENCE.” But it’s comfort food in the way you know that every hour will end with a crazy twist and we’ll spend most of the next hour finding a new equilibrium, both in the plot and with the crazy character motivations that have to be forged for the plot to make sense.

The latest episode ended with a twist that even I’m not sure I can fathom—the show’s so past double agents, and even triple agents are passe—so of course they have to go to quadruple agents. No spoilers, but if you predicted that the twist was “_____ who we thought was good is actually bad and kills _____”… well, you’re probably smarter than Antonin Scalia.

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Pushing Daisies, R.I.P. With ABC canceling its most whimsical and original show, television has suffered a great loss. But Heroes benefits from a large gain as Daisies showrunner Bryan Fuller returns to the fold, taking the reins and showing exactly how the quality of writers determines the quality of the show. Heroes suffered from many of the same problems that 24 did, with the characters being less than human beings and more vehicles to push the plot along—and Heroes never really had that great of a plot to begin with. But Fuller has come in, and rising from the ashes like the right-wing’s skepticism of government, the show is actually getting much, much better.

A show like Heroes has to be about the characters, because there’s no way a superhero television show can hope to compete with the effects budget and scope of a superhero feature. Under previous management, the show headed in an untenable direction, moving from a threat to nuke New York to a threat to infect the world with a deadly virus to… a threat to crack the world in half, I believe. Fuller returns the focus to a smaller scale, pruning extraneous plotlines and focusing on character development. The writing is subtler and more insightful, focusing on feelings of alienation and guilt that are concomitant with superhuman ability. Brothers Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia) and Nathan Petrelli (Adrian Pasdar) sit down to have a real conversation—things actual brothers do. And with a simple talk about baseball they evoke more pathos than the past two seasons of hunting and fighting each other.

The latest episode, “1961,”  is a cathartic one and marks a sea change in the show. It redeems Angela Petrelli (Cristine Rose) from the realm of cartoon supervillainy and paints of a portrait of childhood loss and righteous anger. Other characters work through their own problems, and through their talk, seem to give a great “Fuck You” to previous writers: basically saying “I know the way we’ve behaved in the past two seasons made no sense, but things are going to be different now. I promise.” Let’s hope they are.

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One show ends, another begins. Battlestar Galactica, probably one of the finest works to grace television this century, has drawn to a close. Over the horizon and ready to replace it is Caprica, a prequel spin-off set on the eponymous planet half a century before Galactica. It’s an ambitious work, and one facing a lot of apprehension. A major fear is that the show will feel meaningless since we know what’s going to happen. (SPOILER ALERT: Caprica gets nuked!)

But it works, mainly for the same reason a show like Rome worked even though we know Julius Caesar was assassinated, and the same reason why Heroes is starting to work again: the grand sweep of events is plot, but characters are the story. And people watch television for the story.

The show immediately sets an entirely different tone from its predecessor, starting in a jam-packed nightclub that probably has more people in one scene than you might see in an entire episode of Galactica. (Another reason to love the opening is that it makes fun of the notion that seeing a guy shoot someone in the head is standard fare for television, but when you see two bare-chested women making out, you know you’ve entered the height of corruption.)

Galactica was great in that it showed that science fiction didn’t have to be all spaceships and space battles; Caprica goes one step further and shows that it doesn’t have to be about that at all. Like Kings, it takes place in a world that’s like ours, but not—and it’s in that space between “the same” and “not really” that the show gets to explore themes that you couldn’t do as well in a straight drama. Things like the nature of memory and identity, the process of religious conversion, the power of information technology, the minutiae of the building blocks of scientific development, and love transcending death. Yes, it goes there.

The performances in the show range from great to serviceable, but it is the pilot and thus can only go up from here. Joseph Adama (Esai Morales) doesn’t have the gravitas and irrepressible charisma that his son has on Galactica, but he has room to grow into it. And the various actors who play the teens and children in the show feel a bit stilted, as if they haven’t fully committed to this other world. But whatever faults of the cast are made up by Eric Stoltz’s Daniel Graystone—nuanced and gripping, he shows a man wracked by tragedy and consumed with obsession. It’s fine work.

The pitfall the show has to avoid is to not rely too much on Galactica for relevance; little moments like finding out the origin of the term “Cylon” or discovering that the legendary jurist quoted in Galactica got his start as a mob lawyer are great, but stuff like this could prove wearying in the long-term. Caprica has to be its own show, but it’s looking like it knows how to be.

And we can give it some leeway. Knowing that the genocide of billions started with a father’s attempt to reconnect with his daughter—that’s poetry.