Okay, this show is supposed to take place in real-time, over a 24-hour period. Kiefer Sutherland plays Jack something, some kind of anti-terrorist squad leader. A black presidential candidate in Los Angeles on the eve of the primary is allegedly the target of an assassination plot. Off we go.
Is the black senator Republican or Democrat? Unlike “West Wing”, “24” doesn’t have the guts to risk alienating the other 50%, so we have the ludicrous scenario of politicians who never once talk about any politics. Even more ludicrous is the idea of a black Senator. That is science fiction.
We find out that Jack turned in some of his own people for bribery. That’s why some of his own staff don’t like him. This firmly establishes one of the most prevalent and ludicrous precepts of American public mythology: only an annoying and self-righteous individual can ever effect any good in society. Teams suck. Cooperation is bad. Collaboration doesn’t work.
He is called in by his boss because one of their agents in some foreign country found out about the assassination plot.
First problem. This is real time, right? So Jack’s daughter, Kimberly, says good night at about 1 minute into the first hour. About four minutes later, Jack and his wife Teri discover that Kimberly is missing. (She snuck out with friend Janet York to see some guys.) They logically assume that she ran out, but less than five minutes later Jack is already calling her former boyfriend to ask if she is there.
She travels fast, this girl.
Kimberly tells the guy, Rick, that her father is dead. (He’s not, yet.)
Hand-held camera. This is an affectation, not a style. It’s like mannerism, and exaggeration of technique for it’s own sake. It’s stupid. Do they hire incompetent camera men for this effect? Or do they train their camera men to wobble and wiggle with the camera?
At 12 minutes in, Jack is phoning a friend at the police department to ask if he could do Jack a favor and keep an eye out for his daughter. And the reasonable cop says, what, are you nuts? She’s been missing for 10 minutes! Of course not. He says, I’ll get right on it. Your daughter has been missing for ten minutes and I’ll drop what I’m doing and start prowling Los Angeles to see if I can find her. Because I have nothing else to do at the moment.
Coincidentally, Jack’s commanding officer, ___ discovers that someone inside “the agency” may be involved in the plot. Rather, he discovers that he’d like to have Jack investigate the question at that particular moment.
District Director Mason is supposed to brief Jack about something. Jack finds out he’s lying, so he shoots him with a tranquilizer dart. I’m not kidding. Nina helps Jack because obviously she’s sexy and is in love with him. Jack relates that when some evil person named Phillip D’Arcee’ or something was “taken down”, $200,000 disappeared. He suspects Mason took it. Convention number 2: evil people never come from Indiana or Iowa or Kansas. They come from France.
Nina approaches Tony to hack into a bank account in Spain for Jack. Tony doesn’t like Jack, especially because he likes Nina and she is perversely in love with Jack.
Jack approaches Jamie and asks her if she can hack into all the passwords associated with a telephone number. She says, “if you have a warrant”. Jack doesn’t but in American television mythology all the heroic men break the rules all the time and, unlike the FBI or CIA, never for bad reasons and they never inadvertently invade the privacy of innocent people or cause sure-convictions to be thrown out because they violated the suspects’ rights.
In television land, these men are never wrong. We nod approvingly. Can’t let the law and civil rights get in the way of stopping crime, by golly. Here, “24” embraces the lamest, most boring television cliché.
Jamie is a genius because she has invented a way of jumping a signal through the phone lines onto a computer hard drive and then de-encrypting a user’s password. She doesn’t say, “maybe I can”, or “sometimes I can”, or “it depends on what kind of security they have and what kind of operating system and how they stored their passwords”. No, she can just do it. She does brain surgery as a hobby, on the side.
As it turns out, Jack wants the passwords because they belong to his daughter. She is out of the house for 27 minutes and her parents are already, successfully, breaking into her private e-mail.
The Presidential candidate, Palmer, takes a call from “Maureen”, a television reporter, after midnight. Do you think Presidential candidates– senators– take calls directly from someone identified as a reporter after midnight? It turns out the reporter has a juicy allegation to report– but Senator Palmer is not told this before he agrees to answer the phone. This is another example of how 24 doesn’t really achieve the look and feel of reality.
Kimberly checks her cell phone and sees that her mother has left five messages. She tells her friends, having not had sex yet with Rick, that she intends to go home. I can guess what’s coming. She is now being established as a “good” girl. She didn’t have sex. She is sensitive to her mother’s feelings. She is suddenly more prudent than she has been all evening, and even shows reluctance to accept a ride with the guys home. I smell victimization coming up, big time. We would be less sympathetic to her if she had sex with the boy, like her friend Janet did. That would prepare the viewer for a dire fate: she deserved it.
The French photographer, Martin, and Andy try to join the mile-high club. Andy says why don’t we get together in LA. He says he’s going to be very busy. Upon leaving the bathroom, Andy says, “see ya” even though they sit beside each other and are likely to get reacquainted fairly soon.
Jack confronts Mason over the missing $200,000. Tony has traced the money to Mason’s account. Jack uses this information to blackmail Mason into telling him the source of the information about the hit on Senator Palmer. Unfortunately, since Jack has no way of verifying this information, it’s a little ridiculous for him to assume that Mason has given him accurate information.
Insanely, Jack asks Nina to “cover” for him. We are given to understand that an anti-terrorism squad, responding to a threat on a presidential candidate’s life, can spare a leading member for a while? And he can be “covered” for by a sympathetic co-worker? Well, after all, he hasn’t seen his daughter for 35 minutes now.
Meanwhile– everything in this show is “meanwhile”– Andy has planted a bomb, blown an escape hatch, and exited the 747. Now we know why she said “see yah”. A bomb she leaves behind blows it up. Tony alerts Jack: a 747 just exploded. In real life, I suspect that initial reports would be “a 747 disappeared”, and then, “a 747 crashed”, and then, after a few hours at least, “police suspect an explosion of some kind” or “some witnesses reported seeing a fireball” or something. A few days later: “police now suspect that a bomb may have exploded on board the 747”. But 24 is economical with it’s time: in just minutes, Tony is reporting to Jack that a 747 has crashed and we already know the cause.
I’m griping, sure. 24 is fairly compelling as drama because the principal characters are somewhat interesting and the story has laid out a large number of hooks: the lost daughter gone astray, the possibly corrupt senator, the senator’s suspicious wife, the honest cop, the crooked cop. Geez, now that I list them all– how many cliché’s exactly does it take to do “ground-breaking” drama?
All the makers of the show have to do is get you to care enough about these people to sit through 20 minutes of obscene commercials and tune in next week.
The most fun part of shows like this, and movies like “Gran Torino”, is the fantasy of having it both ways. You can be as stupid and rude and violent as you want, and within the fantasy of the show, you will still be loved.
[Update 2022-07-28] I was way too generous here — I was afraid of hurting the feelings of some people I knew who were enamored of the show. “24” really was pure dreck, and fascist to boot (by which I mean that it glorified violent, illegal police tactics, including torture).