Some stuff we know about the Nov. 23 Fox TV-movie and the 7th season of "24" launching about a month and a half later:
* The movie, shot in South Africa, is set in the fictional African nation of Sangala.
* Robert Carlyle’s character is Bauer’s best friend; they haven’t seen each other in something like a decade.
* Carlyle claims he doesn’t know if his character will appear in the 2009 episodes.
* The 7th season takes place at least four years after the 6th. We know this because Chloe O’Brien is now the mother of a 4-year-old.
* There’s now a female U.S. president. The successor to David Palmer, John Keeler, Charles Logan, Hal Gardner, Wayne Palmer and Noah Daniels is played by Cherry Jones (“Signs”).
* Sprague Grayden (“Jericho”) will play the president's daughter.
* The president’s son, played by Eric Lively (“The L Word”), will be seen in the movie, and will go missing at some point.
* Carly Pope (“Popular”) will play the son’s girlfriend.
* Jon Voight (“Transformers”) will play an evil mastermind in both the movie and subsequent episodes.
* Tony Todd (“Candyman”) will play the evil Sangala dictator in both the movie and subsequent episodes.
* Janeane Garofalo (“The West Wing”), who played an FBI agent in “Clay Pigeons” and Mary Lynn Rajskub’s boss on “The Larry Sanders Show,” plays an FBI agent in season seven.
* Gil Bellows (“Ally McBeal”) will play a State Department employee in the movie.
* John Billingsly (“Star Trek: Enterprise,” “The Nine”) has been cast as somebody named Latham.
* Series icon Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard) and his giant soulpatch live.
* We can expect the seventh season to be set several months after the movie.
You can still watch a trailer for the 7th season, some of which was shot last fall before the writer’s strike, here.