‘… on the day of the California primary.’

    This blog post takes place between 11 a.m. and noon on the day of the California primary.

Is anyone besides me flashing on that intro (OK, so I paraphrased) from every episode in the first season of "24" today? Probably not. It’s probably just because I only saw that season recently. Not being a tube watcher, I had never seen it until I rented it a couple of months back.

Of course, I’m not going to bring it up without some editorial observations:

  • I was really disappointed by "24." I had heard for years that the series was high-quality stuff, but there was nothing special about it in my book. Its central conceit — that everything takes place in real time — is undercut by packing an entire conventional TV action-genre episode worth of extreme action into each hour. Come on. A guy doesn’t run out and have a physically exhausting shootout running around through a bunch of warehouses, in which his best friend is killed, while the hero is slightly wounded while simultaneously carrying on an extremely nerve-wracking, frustrating attempt to track down his endangered wife and daughter on his cell phone — and then do it all over again the next hour, and then again 22 more times, without a moment’s rest. It’s so absurd that you cease to think of these as real people pretty quickly, and just morbid fascination keeps you watching. A true-to-life, high-quality series that showed real time would have hours of relative tedium in which the plot isn’t advanced at all, but character would be revealed in ways that would keep you interested. You might even have the hero catch a couple of hours of snooze time while things went on elsewhere.
  • Before long, I got really, REALLY irritated with Jack’s wife and daughter for seeming to go out of their way to make stupid decisions that placed them in completely unnecessarily dangerous positions. (Eventually, I just started fast-forwarding through those parts, which had no point other that to step up the viewer’s anxiety without advancing the main action.)
  • I felt positively violated by the completely cheesy, completely unnecessary horrible thing that happened at the very end of the last episode of that season.
  • Speaking of manipulation: How about the way one episode goes to great lengths to show you that a certain character, despite suspicions you may have had, is really decent and even noble — then, in order to surprise and shock you thoroughly, that person turns out to be the embodiment of evil later on. We’re not talking the shades of gray that make a character real. We’re talking about wild, extreme, completely inexcusable swings from cartoon good to cartoon evil, just to shock you, the viewer.
  • But it wasn’t bad enough to keep me from watching the second season, which went a lot faster since I was fast-forwarding through the parts with the daughter (even though she was portrayed by Elisha Cuthbert; being cute didn’t make her character any smarter).
  • That second season contained the most absurd compression of highly complex plot developments yet seen. Within an hour (OK, within two), Jack is pulled out of seedy inactivity back to active duty; cleans up and shaves; is called in to interrogate a guy, shoots him, cuts his head off; takes the head in a bag to another guy to get into that guy’s good graces; locates, gains the trust of and completely infiltrates a terror cell, and heads out with that cell to commit an act of terror on his own headquarters… Come on, people — in real life, he MIGHT have been able to accomplish the cleaning up and shaving part, but probably wouldn’t have been able to get through L.A. traffic to the office. And infiltrating the terror cell, even though he had previous contacts with it? A year, if he was lucky. Maybe if you see these things a week apart from each other it helps with suspending disbelief. But one after another as a way of turning off the brain on a weekend? Forget about it.
  • This is the scary part. Dennis Haysbert was SO good as a presidential candidate — WAY more presidential than either Ronald Reagan or Fred Thompson, to mention other actors who played or tried to play the part — that it was spooky. Without telling us a thing about his background or positions, he came across as a guy who would actually win the California primary and then the presidency, with none of this uncertainty we face today. A Nixon-in-68 type campaign of total control of media access to the candidate, having him speak only rehearsed lines, could put a guy with that kind of presence into the White House. My only consolation is that nowadays it’s hard to imagine controlling access to a candidate to that extent.
  • Oh yeah, one more thing: Jack’s in trouble over torture (and cuttin’ guys’ heads off and stuff) and the series is supposedly being revamped as a result. OK, whatever. If the series had been more credible, I’d take that more seriously. Who, besides Tom Tancredo, actually sees Jack Bauer as being for real?
  • Oh, and did you know that "24" is now, like, totally committed to fighting climate change? I am not making this up.

Now you see why I blog. I just barely scratched the surface of things I wanted to say about a TV series that I don’t really think is all that interesting. Imagine what I could write about "House." Or "The Sopranos." My advice: Don’t get me started.

4 thoughts on “‘… on the day of the California primary.’”

  1. Richard L. Wolfe

    Your comment on Dennis Haysbert isn’t so far fetched when you consider who the current governor of California is and the only thing stopping him from running for president is the Constitution.

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