24: Day 1 Review

I'd like to kick off my 24 Season One review with a side note about the show I wrapped up before starting my 24 "binge" (I plan to work my way through all my TV show DVDs over the next few months so my free time will be well spent indeed. Coming off of watching the brilliant series "The Prisoner" (which I posted about a little bit ago), 24 seems awfully small.

However, The Prisoner is unlike most other shows, and 24 is by far one of the more entertaining series to come out this decade.

Season one begain soon after the September 11th attacks. This may have changed the series entirely from what it was initially created for. In the first episode of the series a plane is blown up over the Mojave desert (that desert makes some dramatic returns in later seasons). Since they had already filmed many episodes of the series by the point the attacks happened, they were set in that story element. Personally I think the decision to cut the actual explosion of the plane, only to see the glow from the outside was a perfect artistic decision, if not the correct change to make for the sake of decency.

Anyway, let us not concern ourselves with only 1 hour of the series. The best is yet to come in the series as we follow CTU agent Jack Bauer off on a wild ride of being the hunter and hunted, which change at the snap of the fingers.

This season, like all following seasons do have their downsides. There always seems to be at least some plot "twist" or plot turn that makes absolutely no sense from a narrative standpoint, and seems to only either serve as filler, so they don't stretch out the more strong material, or as some kind of inside joke from the writers and producers who had friends that told them they could never get X on the air. Letting X be either a gay prostitute and his John, a dumb as bricks kid who feels safe only by searching out the person who kidnapped her earlier, or completely inept federal agents continually screwing things up with little to no questioning of their abilities.

This season is the most believable and straight-forward of the seasons, with genuinely shocking plot twists at times that the newer seasons could only dream of.

Season one stars: Kiefer Sutherland, Leslie Hope, Sarah Clarke, Elisha Cuthbert, Dennis Haysbert, Xander Berkeley, Mia Kirshner

***1/2 /*****