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Last week, the highly anticipated CIA series 24 premiered on Fox. For those of you who haven't spent the past five months imbibing network premiere dates and series synopses until you close your eyes at night and picture Gilmore Girls's Lauren Graham locked in mortal combat with time-slot rival Sarah Michelle Gellar, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- as I do -- and until your very sweat starts to smell like the pages of TV Guide -- as mine does -- the premise of 24 is that each hour-long episode represents one hour, in real time, in a particularly action-packed day in the life of CIA agent Jack Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland. In the first episode, Bauer learns of a plot to assassinate an African-American Presidential candidate; in addition to the job of thwarting the plot, Bauer is told that there is evidence of a mole within the Agency, and is ordered to find him or her. Bauer almost immediately summons District Director George Mason, and as soon as Mason enters, we know he's the mole. Why? Because he's played by Xander Berkeley.

Xander Berkeley, basically, is shorthand for "evil." His evil, mind you, is not always turned up to maximum power, as in Air Force One, in which Berkeley plays a dead-eyed Secret Service agent who's secretly working as a mole on behalf of Gary Oldman's bad, airplane-hijacking Russians. Sometimes his evil is only at, like, a 3, quietly humming below the surface as he plays Julianne Moore's cold, distant husband in Safe. Sometimes he gets to fan out his campy tail in a display of cartoonish amorality, as a crooked lawman in Shanghai Noon. Or he can exert control in a muted, middle-class way, as he was playing a staid cop married to Sissy Spacek, secretly pregnant and considering an abortion in If These Walls Could Talk.

We're not entirely sure why Xander Berkeley always plays characters of varying degrees of evil. We suspect it has something to do with his eyes, which are...well, dead. There's nothing going on there -- or, at least, so it appears. Playing evil characters puts those dead eyes to good use squinting, sneering, smirking, and, finally, widening in terror right before the hero inevitably kills him. The point is, once he appears on the scene, in pretty much any TV show or movie, you can be fairly certain he's up to no good.

Our favourite exception to the Berkeley = Evil rule is the 1981 camp classic Mommie Dearest -- according to the IMDb, his first film role. Berkeley plays the adult version of Joan Crawford's son Christopher, and appears only in the final scene. Given nothing to do but sport a mop of curly blond hair and try to look shocked as he learns that his deceased mother has left him nothing in her will, Berkeley's appearance is fleeting, but gives an impression of things to come; just as Christopher's character is a cipher about whom we learn basically nothing, so will Berkeley later play average-looking, seemingly neutral characters whose compliant blandness and dead-eyed detachment is the perfect disguise for a core of pure evil.

EVIL!