TV Review :: 24 - Season 1

It's hard to begrudge the first season of 24 for some of it's faults. Afterall, the whole real-time serial aspect is pretty unique and I wouldn't imaging it'd be something the writers would have perfected the first time around. Also, as I understand it, the series wasn't sure it'd be around for the long haul, so the story is broken into two clunky acts, the first of which ends around episode 13ish in case the show wasn't picked up. This is fairly easy to see, regardless of if you looked it up or not. It's really obvious that there was a lot more thought put into the first half than the second, which is forgivable. Being an untested network serial drama in your first year, where you might get canceled after two episodes, isn't easy. So I assume you make a lot of concessions in order to front-load your story. ...and front-load they did.

The first act of season one is positively thrilling. The story itself starts out around midnight, the night before the California Democratic presidential primary, and begins as a set of three seemingly unrelated stories. Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) Federal Agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) gets called in to work over a non-specific threat on the life of presidential candidate David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert.) Meanwhile, Bauer's daughter Kim (Elisha Cuthbert) sneaks off to a party leaving Jack and his wife Teri with an "i" (Leslie Hope) to try and find her, while Jack attempts to balance the troubles of both the nation and his troubled family. Then, over in story number three, something fishy is going on in the Palmer camp, seemingly unrelated to the aforementioned assassination plot.



It's hard to discuss anything in detail since the events of, say, episode four would kinda ruin episode three if, like me, you hadn't seen it. Needless to say the stories eventually interweave as things get progressively more intense and sinister. Now, obviously we're not talking about the first season of The Sopranos or anything, but for a network political/crime thriller, the first act is some pretty top-shelf stuff. Some of the plot devices are a little far fetched at times, but the bad guys are left ambiguous enough that you have no real reason to sit around second guessing how they managed to build such a complicated mouse trap for Senator Palmer and Jack. The first act builds up the kind of suspense that leaves you begging for mercy with no end in sight as things seemed to always be going from bad to worse.

The story climaxes and has a brief cooldown which serves as the start of act two. Now, again, I don't blame the show for this, but the two-act thing really ruins the momentum of the story. Especially given that this is all supposed to be taking place in a 24 hour period. This is where the suspension of disbelief breaker comes in and you start asking questions, and questions are never a good thing to be asking a network serial, since odds are, they're not going to get explained. The rest of the season remains suspenseful, but a far cry from the first half, leaving a sort of clusterfucked final three episodes and a double-twist ending. One of the twists is quite good. The other is... well. Dija ever see The Village? It's not quite that bad, but it's close. (For the record, the twist in the last few seconds is the good one, not the one that closes the second to last episode.)

Thus I concluded season 1 in about three days.

It made for an easy viewing and left me interested enough in the surviving characters to want to keep going. It's not without it's obvious problems and would be far better suited for HBO, since it's somewhat unrealistic that every other word out of the perpetually angry Jack Bauer's mouth isn't "fuck," but it's an interesting concept for a show, despite the obvious limitations to the storytelling. There are moments you'll find yourself screaming "oh, come on!" at your screen, but those are quickly washed away by the next interesting plot twist. So if, like me, you managed to avoid the show entirely, I'd say it's definitely worth giving it a shot.