Just a heads-up:  this review contains a lot of Amazon Affiliate links.  I receive a portion of any purchases made through these links, at no additional cost to you. —TPP

Good ol’ Ponty sent over an unexpected treat:  this excellent review of the early 2000s hit television series 24—at least, it’s his review of the first three seasons, along with his initial impressions of the fourth.

I remember when this show debuted.  It was the perfect show for the War on Terror, back when that conflict still enjoyed some popular support among the American people.  It was quintessentially Bush-era American:  a brave lone warrior, coupled with a good counter-terrorism team, found the terrorists, while also resorting to (and often being the victim of) “enhanced interrogation techniques.”  It was a time when we wanted terrorists, both on-screen and in real life, to get roughed up indiscriminately, “human rights” be damned!

24 delivered.  I hadn’t thought of the show much since those halcyon—and, it turns out, dying—days of cable television until Ponty sent along this review.  So come bask with us in those pre-Great Recession days, when it seemed like maybe we could actually install functioning, Western-style democracies in the Middle East.

With that, here is Ponty’s review of the television series 24:

If you don’t know already, I love box sets. Get me a good series and I’ll gorge through them like a fat man who has been denied an all you can eat breakfast buffet for a year. I like rewatching them too, if the journey is interesting enough, because that’s what does it for me; the meandering paths down which our protagonist(s) voyages, the shaping of said character(s). Despite getting a couple of new box sets at Christmas 2024 that I still haven’t watched (Homeland and Six Feet Under, not to mention a cartoon series I haven’t seen since I was a child, The Mysterious Cities of Gold), we decided to jump into a series Tina bought me last year; 24.

Now, Tyler will tell you this is very unusual for me. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t review something until I’d watched all of it but since we’re looking at different stories with a long continuing thread, I figured I’d write this up now, even though we’re only partway through season 4.

For those who haven’t seen it, each series of 24 charts a number of episodes on a story line that covers one day, each episode charting multiple story threads over one hour. It follows the team at CTU (the American counter terrorism unit) as they attempt to stop whatever calamity has befallen them in a particular series. Calamity, by the way, is the right word. The writers of 24 have a lot of fun. I compared them the other day to the organisers of 110m hurdling final who want one of the runners to win but impede his race in a number of interesting ways. The first three hurdles get steadily higher. Then there are tripwires. Then there are deadly booby traps. After that, other racers attempt to hobble our runner and then it ends with an explosion with the other 7 runners throwing our winner over the line, broken, bruised, cut to shreds but alive and victorious. This really is an edge of your seat show.

The main protagonist of 24 is Agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) and I wouldn’t say it’s hyperbole to state that he is despised by almost everyone in it. The villains in the first 3 series would like nothing better than to kill him, scatter his body across all continents and have someone ritualistically defecate on his pieces every now and then. Some of his own colleagues despise him because he likes to play outside protocol and in this series we’re currently watching, where the brave and intelligent CTU agents have been replaced by modern workers – either dangerously inept, ambitious or both – they just hate him because he’s good. Unsurprisingly, we like him for just that reason. He works with high tech, yes, but he’s an old-school action character who despite his unorthodox methods gets results. Granted, in the first 3 series, it’s very much a team game, everyone chipping in to help out when he gets captured, tortured, or he has to rescue the millionth blonde who has been kidnapped (trust me, it happens a lot), though the way things are going in 4, it looks like he’s going to have to rely on his own wits because his new colleagues are shockingly stupid.

The story arcs so far have been excellent. The first series had a load of twists and turns, which was pretty surprising for a run of the mill action/spy thriller, giving us the opportunity to play the who-can-we-trust guessing game and finding enough new plot twists to keep it interesting. The second series had CTU looking for a nuke, the 3rd, a biological weapon. The villains are interesting, the stories are fun and the side plots blend in superbly with the main action. I have a hunch, a sneaking suspicion that 24 is going to lose its edge in 4 but I hope I’m wrong. We’ve very much enjoyed what we’ve seen so far and are hopeful that if the creators don’t bring some of the 1-3 cast back, they at least replace this new CTU with characters more competent and with something more about them. After 4 episodes, I’m not invested in any of them and if one of the Islamic terrorists in this series dropped a bomb on their offices, I wouldn’t feel the slightest bit bothered by any one of them disappearing off the screen. In the first 3 series, we got the opportunity to meet, to invest in a multitude of characters and whether we liked them or not, they provided value, a reason to watch the show. Many of this new lot, in 4, are tedious, nauseating, uninteresting.

I’ll keep going with it but if this turns into a one-man show, as great as Jack is, it’s going to be a slog to the end.