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The Genre: Action/Suspense

The Format:Box sets from Fox containing 8 or 9 disks each. Each series consists of 24 episodes, but the total time is shorter than 24hrs, due to advert breaks.

The plot:

S1: Midnight. Jack Bauer, head of the CIA's Los Angeles Counter Terrorist Unit, is suddenly thrust into a chaotic and exhausting 24 hour marathon of death, deception and terror as he struggles to prevent the assassination of a presidential candidate, find the traitor within his own organization, and save his kidnapped wife and daughter.

S2: It's been over a year since his wife's death, but Jack Bauer and his daughter are still reeling from the tragedy. The two are estranged and Jack no longer works for CTU. But an urgent phone call from the President plunges Jack back into another 24 hour nightmare of pulse-pounding terror and suspense as he races against time to prevent the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles.

S3: It's been three years since CTU agent Jack Bauer thwarted a terrorist attempt to plunge the United States into war. Now he's back in L.A. after working undercover for six months bringing down drug lord Ramon Salzaar. But then the FBI receives a phone call threatening the release of a deadly virus in Los Angeles if Salzaar isn't released from prison within six hours. As CTU races to locate the virus, Jack realizes that the only way to prevent additional terrorist demands is to find the source of the virus - by breaking Salzaar out of prison himself.

As I write this series 4 is about to get a release on DVD in this country, so I thought it might be a good time to do something a little different to my normal anime reviews and have a look at the series thus far.

I first heard about 24 a very long time ago.

A friend told me about it, having read an article in Empire magazine. At the time, Charlie Sheen was going to star in it. And it was a film. Now it wasn’t going to be a 24-hour long film, but it was (and this is the key part) going to take place in real time.

I guess part of the reason is that most things don’t really play out in as short and exact a period as 24 hours. You really need to be thinking in terms of a dramatic race-against-the-clock scenario and it therefore doesn’t lend itself to things like comedy or normal drama. The event has to be big. Really big.

It’s also a pretty big risk. If that big event seems phony, or you don’t get engrossed in the characters then you’re going to turn off pretty quickly. There’s also little hope of really pulling in more viewers as the season progresses – it’s so reliant on a consistent audience, in the cutthroat world of American TV this is a really big gamble.

But there’s another reason. It’s not my reason - it’s one mentioned on the episode commentary tracks – but I think it’s very true. It’s the mobile phone. Without the now ubiquitous presence of the small, hand-held cell-phone in all of our lives, 24 just wouldn’t work.

With the use of phones there’s now no need to actually bring characters together. You don’t need a 'fateful meeting', or even any physical interaction at all, because you have phones. People on the opposite sides of the world can talk to each other as they go about their daily lives. Interestingly, the use of the phone in this way was actually a key element of the classic Die Hard, though there the phone was actually a two-way radio, as used by the hero of the story, who was a cop. I guess nothing's really new.

Of course, phones are only a part of it. What’s really needed is a peril. The thing that drives everything forward is a ‘big danger’. Something cataclysmic, devastating or world changing that our hero, Jack Bauer, must prevent.

In series one the peril is an assassination attempt on Senator David Palmer – a black Presidential Candidate who seems a shoe-in for getting the job. In the second series, the threat is that of some form of nuclear device on US soil, and in the third, the danger comes from the threatened release of a deadly bio-weapon.

But the problem with them is that they tend to feel a little 'tacked on'. Once they’ve happened and you sit down and really think about them, they often don’t really ‘add up’. There are some glaring contradictions that don’t quite wash.

The third series does even worse on this side, with Jack supposedly having become addicted to heroine. This starts off as a sort of throw-away thing that pops-up occasionally, but by about a third of the way through it’s very clear that the writers have either abandoned it as a bad idea, or have simply forgotten about it.

Going cold turkey from Heroine as Jack does is not a pleasant experience and the very idea that he would be capable of saving the world whilst coming down is quite frankly ludicrous. And this isn’t me being pedantic or anything, it’s very clear that this is a glaring mistake of some magnitude.

Another problem with the third series is that it feels vaguely un-original, as most of what happens has kinda already been done before. The betrayals, the twists, the secrets revealed – they’ve all been covered in the first two seasons.

And there’s a desperate attempt to get rid of some of the key players too. It’s like these guys didn’t want to do another series, so they had their own deaths written into the contract :/.

My favourite season then, is the second. And it’s by far and away my favourite. In fact, I would be so bold as to say that the second season of 24 is perhaps the greatest television ever created. Indeed, I say this so much you can sometimes find me on my own down the pub explaining just how great it is to a pint of beer I’ve been nursing for a good hour or two.

Let me explain. Kim Bauer, it seems, is almost incapable of going through a single day without getting kidnapped, or involved in a drug shoot out, or threatened by someone with a gun, or.... well, the list is actually endless. This girl, we are supposed to believe, is the worlds most 'in danger' person. Hell, she seems to be able to get in a massive multi-car pile-up when simply popping down the local convenience store to buy milk :/.

This girl is a grade-A walking disaster area. And not in a good way. Whilst we’re busy wondering what Jack’s up to we’re kinda forced to sit through watching her nearly get eaten by mutant chipmunks or something. The only good thing about Kim is that she has enormous breasts. And she runs quite a lot.

My advice then, is to use the amazing power of the DVD and skip past all of the Kim bits. Just watch Jack do his thang. You’ll thank me for it.

The Summary:

S1: Good idea, spoiled slightly in the execution.

S2: Quite possibly the greatest television ever produced.

S3: Took itself slightly too seriously and tried to do too much, but entertaining nonetheless.

The Score:

S1: 2/5

S2: 5/5

S3: 3/5

The Pictures:

(click for larger versions)