TV dramas offer grievance backstories but ultimately reframe them as illegitimate

Evidence

Recent television dramas seem to challenge this basic distinction. Behind the grim certainty of Jack Bauer’s fatalism, 24 seems to relish its portrayals of the U.S. government as flawed and at moments even morally bankrupt. Similarly, Sleeper Cell provides its terrorist characters with ample opportunity to state their grievances; their backstories appear to lend a degree of legitimacy to their violence. However, in the broader arc of these shows—with their eventual, if tortured, triumph against evil—such grievances are ultimately framed as illegitimate. The complexities of history and religion are eventually boiled down to Arab/Muslim individuals spewing nonsensical, hateful rhetoric at the United States or Israel. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 169