As we embark on what has already established itself as one of the weakest new television seasons in history (I've already given up on every new show I've tried to watch this fall), it's necessary to give credit where credit is due:

It's very difficult to think of an original idea for a network television series. This fall's new dramas all seem to feature doctors or LA cops and the comedies all seem to feature fat working class men married to hot women. And when people come up with great ideas for television shows, they fail. Murder One struggled through its first season, but couldn't complete Season 2, while I still lament the early demise of E-Z Streets five or six seasons ago.

But perhaps the only thing more difficult than creating an original dramatic premise, is carrying that premise through an entire season. Even the aforementioned Murder One fell apart at the end of its first season (I don't even remember anymore who the killer was, but I know I wasn't impressed) and E-Z Streets was canceled before it had the chance to get weak.

So 24 should be cheered for giving network television an exciting shot of adrenaline when it debuted last fall and it shouldn't be faulted too much for just how badly it screwed itself up down the stretch before righting the ship for an exciting final episode or two. Creators Robert Cochran and Joel Surnow had a great idea for a television show, they just didn't have enough great ideas for an entire season of that show. 24 begins with a bang, but by mid-afternoon, the red herrings, double crosses, plot contrivances, and redundancies just become too much. I followed the story to its end, but mostly out of curiosity. I stopped genuinely enjoying the show in the early hours of the evening.

****It should be noted that in most of my film reviews, I try to avoid discussing anything that happens after, say, the first hour of a movie so as to keep things fresh. Clearly I can't do that with 24. I'm going to break this review up in various ways, since I can't really discuss each and every episode in detail. Usually I avoid doing categorized reviews like this, but I'm going to here. Forgive me, if you will. And I'll let you know before I give away anything massive. But be aware that I'll be frankly talking about the show. So if you see a subject heading that has potential to spoil things for you, just don't read. In the "Characters" subheading, I'm going to talk about people who appear from beginning to end and things they do, so beware. I won't, however, discuss the very end of the series without MAJOR spoiler warnings.*******

BASIC PLOT/PREMISE
24 is one day in the like of Counter-Terrorism Agent Jack Bauer. Every episode is an hour in the "longest day of his life." It's the day of the California Presidential Primary and Senator David Palmer is on the verge of becoming the first African-American presidential nominee from a major primary. But somebody doesn't want that to happen. Bauer's daughter Kim is kidnapped by two thugs, leaving Bauer's estranged wife Teri to try to find her. Meanwhile Bauer has to find the mole in his agency. Meanwhile a major secret about Senator Palmer is about to be exposed. Meanwhile years old grudges are going to come to the surface. Can Jack Bauer prevent the assassination of Senator Palmer, keep his family safe, and finally get some sleep? Not for 24 hours.

THE SHOW'S STYLE:
Every episode is, in theory, shown in real time. There are frequent appearances by digital clocks to serve as reminders of the format. At all times, several different plot threads are going at once, which requires interesting juggling. 24 uses split screens to show subsequent actions as well as to maintain concurrent perspectives. And all the while the editing jumps around from story to story. That, presumably, is how an entire day manages to pass without a single character going to the bathroom.

The real time format produces interesting advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are that tension builds wonderfully. Even a red light at a traffic stop becomes nerve-wracking. However, the explicitness of the format leaves you constantly aware of how much the show cheats. And the show cheats with increasing regularity. Major mood shifts occur in two minutes of screen time, but we accept it without question because we spent those two minutes with another character. When we return, our TV and movie trained mind just accepts whatever happened even if it makes no logical sense within the confines of the show. By the end, the producers also basically seem to have given up on eliminating time holes. Darkness, for example, arrives in a time lapse image of the sun setting that clearly couldn't have happened in ten seconds. It's a crock. But it's fun to watch.

Watching the show on video or DVD tampers with the Real Time structure. When the show originally aired, it went into commercials with a digital clock read out and came out of commercial having skipped those minutes of the story since the time was actually passing. On DVD, though, the three or four minute commercial breaks disappear. So rather than being 60 minutes (give or take) per hour, we're left with 44 minutes (give or take). That rushes things along in ways that, once again, are both positive and negative. On one hand, you lose the cliffhangers that are integral to every episode. Rather than waiting a week, you just move along to the next episode. However, by watching it in one or two sittings (or five or six), you better capture the ebb and flow of the day and the overall tension builds better.

OUR MAIN CHARACTERS
Jack Bauer (played by everybody's second favorite Sutherland, Kiefer)- Jack Bauer is the head of an intelligence agency known as CTU. Bauer's in charge of the office, but some people don't trust him after he had two agents thrown in jail for corruption. He has a teenage daughter and a wife who left him a year earlier. He and his wife are hoping to patch things up, but over the course of the day, things are going to come up from his past to try to keep them apart. But Jack has lots of military training and he's a tough nut to crack. Since Sutherland hadn't really had a good part in the movies in five or ten years, you can understand why he jumped at this opportunity. Over the course of 24 hours, his is the dominant character and Sutherland plays the part perfectly, with hardly a wrong note. He has authority when necessary and he's also a sympathetic figure. But most importantly, he gives the character a manic edge, suggesting a willingness to do anything. This is a great performance, by far the best he's ever given.

Senator David Palmer (played by Major League's Pedro Cerrano himself, Dennis Haysbert)- Over the course of the program, we learn nothing about David Palmer's politics and I'm not even sure what state he's from. There's a hint that he was once a star college athlete, but it's hardly discussed. What we do know, is that David Palmer is a man of morals, who has sacrificed a lot to get where he is and that there are some things about his family that he doesn't know. Will he put his family ahead of politics for, perhaps, the first time ever? What is the dark secret his children and hiding? And what is his wife's role in it? Can he be a president and a father? In addition to Sutherland, Haysbert gives 24's other defining performance. All too often what the scripts give Haysbert is simplistic moral rectitude, but he always finds something more complicated to play. Any lesser a screen presence and the frequently dull Senator Palmer plotline would have sunk the show.

Kim Bauer (played by Elisha Cuthbert)- Jack Bauer's yummy daughter. No matter how much danger she's in, she manages to keep her cleavage in her sweater, but only barely. She spends the first half of the show with the exact same sweaty glow that must have taken hours to perfect. We don't learn much about Kim except that she's a rebellious teen and that she took Jack's side in the separation. And basically, over the course of 24 hours, whatever can go wrong for her goes wrong. Cuthbert isn't really much of an actress, but she looks great. There's not much for her to do besides be a teenager in peril. And the Stockholm Syndrome romance that develops between her and one of her abductors is handled very badly as the show began to suffer.

Teri Bauer (thanklessly played by Leslie Hope) Teri is Jack's estranged wife. She began to feel distanced from him because of his dedication to his job, but after they were apart, she realized how much she cared for him. Teri feels out of touch with her daughter. And basically, she's a shrill one-note character for the entire duration of the show because of the script and because of Hope's performance. This is the danger of the show's premise — if a character is one-note in the beginning, it's tough for them to plausibly undergo an arc as the day progresses. Teri is annoying and weak from the second she appears and she never recovers. For me, this is part of what cripples 24. The women are always in danger and they's always worried and whiney and their performances suffer. They're reactive rather than proactive for 24 episodes. That's pretty amazing.

Nina Meyers (played by the relatively inexperienced Sarah Clarke)- Nina is Jack Bauer's second in command at CTU. Nina also had an affair with Jack that ended when he decided to return to his wife. When everybody at CTU becomes a suspect, she does as well, but mostly she's Jack's go-to. But is she too deeply involved emotionally? Probably, since she moved from Jack to another CTU agent, Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard). Sarah Clarke's inexperience shows throughout the season of 24. I was never for a second able to take her seriously as a relatively high ranking intelligence operative. Part of that is Clarke, but part of it is also the fault of the writers, who never let Nina make any important decisions. She constantly yields to Jack and plays second fiddle and so she, like the other women, is mostly reactive throughout. Also, if you've seen the final two episodes and then go back and watch the first part over again, her performance doesn't make any sense.

Sherry Palmer (played by Penny Johnson)- Senator Palmer's equal-partner wife. At first Mrs. Palmer appears to be just a devoted partner for the Senator, but gradually, her ambitions become increasingly clear. She's not Lady Macbeth, exactly, but she's getting there. She insists she's always working in Senator Palmer's best interests. And she probably is. But what does that mean? Johnson's performance is very broad, but it's suitable for a broad role. And Sherry becomes increasingly manipulative, Johnson becomes more interesting.

Among the supporting characters, Xander Berkeley (one of my favorite character actors) is excellent as Bauer's weasly suspicious superior George Mason. Mia Kirshner (Exotica) is slinky and sexy as one of the terrorists. And Dennis Hopper predictably chews scenery as the big bad guy in the final four episodes.

THE BEST EPISODE
12 a.m.- 1 a.m.: The Pilot 24 starts well. It actually starts magnificently. With the possible exception of the commercial-free Alias pilot, the 24 pilot was last season's best hour of television. It sets up the series as the story of a father who just wants to do the right thing. What do you do when your daughter goes missing and your co-workers may be involved in a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate and then a plane blows up in the desert and then everything may turn out to be related. Do you help your family? Do you do your job? And who can you trust? The pilot had to be edited after 9/11 and having seen the original, I can vouch for it both being better and yet probably inappropriate for a country in mourning. The DVD would have been a good time for the creators to restore the original pilot. But they didn't.

WORST EPISODE****Spoilers****
8 p.m. to 9 p.m.
As the story repeats itself over and over again and as viewers listen to Hopper's hilariously bad accent, each character becomes totally irrational and abandons any semblance of consistency. With the help of horrible Hopper, 24 finally plunges into camp and I laughed through the entire episode especially when sexy Kim, now in jail, actually gets in a bad girl's face and challenges her to "Bring it on!" and then proceeds to start a riot in the women's prison holding cell which, tragically, isn't as sexy as it sounds. Jack also displays a weakness never hinted at previously and gets a supporting character killed for no reason. The episode ends with Kim being kidnapped for what feels like the thousandth time.

OTHER PLACES THINGS GO WRONG
***major spoilers***
Vanishing Characters-What happens to Mia Kirshner's Mandy? What happens to Eric Balfour's Milo? What happens to Daniel Bess's Rick? Etc. Etc. Etc. Poof. They all just vanish.

Oh God, *Again*?- First time, shame on me. Second time, shame on you. Third time? Couldn't somebody have been more creative? Basically, everybody you think is evil might be good and everybody you think is good might be evil. Yawn. That means that is the pilot makes a character seem really bad, he or she might be the only person Jack can trust by breakfast and by lunch they might be evil again. This flip-flopping destroys motivations and makes for inconsistent performances. And everything has to keep repeating because the writers only had a limited number of ideas. So if the women get out of trouble, you know they'll be in big trouble again almost immediately. And if Jack thwarts one assassination attempt, you can bet that a whole new set will be coming along soon. By late afternoon you've seen everything. It's when consecutive episodes end with key witnesses dying without giving Jack more information that you wonder why anybody even bothered.

Amnesia? You've gotta be kidding! One character has a totally empty amnesia story arc that wreaks, once again, of a show run out of ideas. It does nothing to progress the plot at all. It just drags things out a bit longer. Not good.

Dialogue and supporting character casting- While the show is structured well (except for the repetition) the dialogue is always trite. There's not a single memorable or intelligent line of dialogue in the entire 24 hours. But writing is more than just dialogue, it's plotting, so I give credit for some of the latter. Meanwhile, the supporting characters and actors are really really bad, like the sleazy CTU agent who oozes corruption or the caricature of the undercover cop. Basically, the casting department dropped the ball on this one.

THE DVD PACKAGE:
It's a nice transfer of the show. But there ain't much else to it. 6 disks, 4 episodes per disk. There's one alternate ending and commentary on that alternate ending. And there's an introduction to the show which, strangely, is on the 6th and final disk. The show is also letterboxed, even though when it aired it was full-screen. Since I'm pretty sure the framing was mostly done for full-screen, the letterboxing adds very little to the experience and mostly serves to cut off foreheads.

THE ENDING ***TOTAL SPOILER***
Frankly, I wasn't unhappy that Teri died because I found the character annoying. However, I found the execution of her death to be ham-handed and not really well integrated to the overall plot. The alternate happy ending isn't much better, but at least it doesn't kill off a main character just to be edgy. The number of plot threads left open at the end is huge as well and I don't know if Season 2 will deal with any of the things that seem arbitrary, like Nina's national affiliation. What was up with that?

MY HOPES FOR THIS SEASON
They didn't have enough ideas for last season, so I'm uncomfortable with the possibilities for the new season. Here's the only way it works for me — Jack, after the events of the first season, is a broken man. He gets called in to help President Palmer, but by episode 4 or 5 we discover that Jack has gone around the bend and *he* intends to kill Palmer, at which point the show introduces a new hero (Emilio Estevez anyone?) to track Jack. That's how I would handle it. Nobody, however, asks my opinion.

FINAL THOUGHTS
I'm recommending this product because 24 makes for compulsively watchable viewing even when it stinks. The red herrings make it unpredictable even if many of the twists defy logic. The editing is masterful and Stephen Hopkins, who directed most of the episodes, did an excellent job moving the story along. I've almost forgiven him for The Ghost and the Darkness even if I'll never forgive him for the Lost In Space movie.

So if you've got the time to kill, sure, go get the DVDs of 24. It's the best and worst that television can offer.


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD