The television drama 24 has been nominated for 12 Emmys. I suppose I can understand why. It is gripping. I have never in my life paid attention to the Emmys, but I'll be interested to see how 24 does this year.
Not being able to watch the show for the past four seasons because of schedule conflicts and not being much of a television watcher in any case (I cannot abide commercial interruptions every ten minutes, for one thing), I decided to rent the first season on DVD and watch it this summer. I confess to having been won over. The storyline is a high tension, high adrenaline experience that lifts the viewer into a state of suspense from which he finds himself unable to climb down. It's only with difficulty that I could stop watching at the end of an hour. I felt compelled to stay with it through the entire DVD of four episodes, and, like a chain smoker, as soon as one DVD was finished I went out to rent the next one.
Even so, there were times when I found myself cringing at the implausibilities. 24 requires one to suspend a lot of credulity. Regular viewers of the program might find my complaints both outdated (since they're based on the first season) and perhaps a bit picayune, but I was struck by the fact that so many people could experience so many stressful, life-threatening and otherwise extraodinary events in the space of a single day without suffering complete collapse sometime around breakfast.
The show is also poorly cast, at least in its minor characters. For instance, in the very beginning we meet two young women, one of whom has just blown up an airliner full of people. These two actresses seem highly unlikely in the role of killers, being more suited to play a couple of girls planning a trip to the mall. Then there's Senator Palmer's son who is supposedly in his upper teens yet he's a foot shorter than his father. Nor does the main character, Jack Bauer, played by Keifer Sutherland, look the part of a near superhero.
Even worse, the writers have so many people killed in the space of one day that had something like this ever actually happened the national guard surely would have been called out and martial law would have been imposed to meet what would have been seen as a national crisis. Indeed, I don't know how the CTU (Counter Terrorism Unit) had enough staff left after the carnage to return for a second season.
Moreover, every major female character in the show, except perhaps Bauer's wife, was either incredibly stupid or evil.
Finally, in a show about counterterrorism, it just seemed an inordinately servile bow to political correctness to portray the terrorists as white Europeans and not Middle-Eastern Muslims.
Even so, despite these irritants, the show is addictive, and I'm afraid I'll be unable to resist starting season two this weekend. I might even tune in the Emmys.
