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Things just got a lot worse for Jack Bauer. A lot worse. How do we know?

Paul Motherfucking McCrane.

Which Paul McCrane are you most familiar with? The skeevy, muttonchop-sporting hoodlum from Robocop, who falls in some toxic waste and winds up splashed across a windshield? (Literally splashed -- it's awesome.) Or the finicky stickler, Dr. Robert Romano, who everyone most assuredly did not love. (As they loved Ray Romano -- you see what we did there?) That unfortunate doctor was notable not only for his short fuse and prickly bedside manner, but for having not one but two gruesome run-ins with helicopters, the second of which led to his untimely, but not unwelcome, death.

And now here McCrane is again, as Graham, The Shadowy Guy With An Earpiece on 24, acting like the Presidential advisor from Hell, a Mephistophelian George Stephanopoulos. So McCrane -- who, oddly enough, with his twinkling eyes, fringe of red hair and shiny bald skull, looks quite a bit like the aggressively non-malevolent Ron Howard -- has shown he's no slouch when it comes to playing the meanies.

But for those sensitive types among us who spent our childhoods not torturing frogs or beating frosh, but who instead spent hours writing maudlin poetry and strumming absently at a guitar, while trying to squeeze a single tear out of one eye to roll plaintively down one cheek -- well, we remember a different Paul McCrane, don't we? We remember a Paul McCrane whose head was full of hair, whose hair was full of red, and whose heart was full of artsy teen ennui. We remember the Paul McCrane of 1980's Fame, in which he played the winsomely monickered Montgomery MacNeil, a willowy mama's boy at the performing arts high school who tearfully, quiveringly, came to terms with his own homosexuality. Then got totally reamed by that asshole Puerto Rican comedian. Who was himself all messed up. But then they all stayed friends in the end. Or maybe Montgomery committed suicide. It's been a while since we've watched Fame.

But it hasn't been awhile since we've watched Paul McCrane (boo-ya! It's called a segue, kiddies!), and we're always glad to see him, clown hair or no.