24
Fox
Tuesday, 9 p.m / 8 p.m. CST

Fox's "24" is an action-espionage drama that unfolds in real time — meaning that the hour it takes you to watch it corresponds to an hour in the lives of the characters. Correspondingly, Flak will be providing a written-in-real- time-alongside-the- show review of "24" each week for the duration of the series or until the gimmick of the review becomes tiresome.

Episode 1: 12 a.m. – 1 a.m.

OK, here we go.

Blah blah exposition. They're explaining the concept of real time and saying that the story is set in L.A. the day before the presidential primary. These title cards are brief, but are the really necessary? I mean, every second counts, right?

It's clever to start the story in a different time zone, and to use all the split screen, picture-in-picture stuff — I don't know if other real-time narratives have taken adequate advantage of those. We'll see if "24" does.

Ah: Produced by Brian Grazer and directed by Stephen Hopkins. Brian Grazer is Ron Howard's business partner and produces all his movies; Hopkins is a somewhat workmanlike director: Blown Away, Lost in Space. I liked his direct-to-video … oh, what was it called? With Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman. Real anonymous title; a cop/suspect cat-and-mouse thing that turned out to be an interesting study of marriage. Under Suspicion is what it was called.

At home with Jack (Kiefer Sutherland). Is this going to be just the rote establish-the-lead-as-a-damaged-family-man character stuff? I don't suspect that we're going to be able to spend a lot of time with the family for this to be the crackerjack roller-coaster ride all the critics are talking about.

Oh. But the daughter has run away. Where is this going? Is it a good thing that we won't be closing the chapter on the family immediately?

I'm not sure how well all this split screen works. I commend the audacity of the filmmakers to try it, and, to be sure, having more than one camera capturing the same movement is proving to be effective at a strictly graphic level. I doubt we can expect transcendent use of split screen, but, again, points for audacity.

Oh boy. The Euro bad guy. Blah blah blah. Oh, and he's a bad boy, too; flirting with the brunette. They're not doing a bad job setting up the female character; perhaps she'll become instrumental, like helping them chase down this guy.

So Jack works for a counterterrorist group that's charged with preventing the assassination of Sen. David Palmer, the first African-American with a shot at the presidency; an interesting angle, or at least subtext.

So what are they going to do with the commercial breaks in the inevitable DVD release? I like that time continues to elapse during commercials, but it'll seem odd when people watch the episodes commercial-less.

The last real-time movie I can think of is John Badham's Nick of Time, which I haven't seen but of which I've heard nothing good. What attracts middling directors to such a difficult task?

Are they really going to establish a genuine the-daughter's-romping-around-with-boys subplot? There's no (believable) way that will ever tie in to the main action. They should just storm straight ahead and stay with the major players of the major plot — fretting over whom the daughter's sleeping with may humanize Jack, but there are better ways to do that than the old family crisis trope.

A lot has happened to Jack already — not only must he live incredibly close to work to have gotten there so fast, but he's already been told by his boss to try to find a mole within the Agency and he's shot another superior with a tranquilizer dart. The script actually handles the exposition very handily — I'll have to look for the screenwriters' names next week. The way it dispenses information about Jack's snitch-busting past, about how the senator they're trying to protect will defund the intelligence agencies (clearly pre-Sept. 11), how it establishes the character relationships (Jack plus two and home, Jack plus two at work) … all very neat.

Ah; so that's why they established the female passenger so well. Got me. Although — hm. She's going to blow up the plane. This seems like overkill, from a plot point-of-view. Something to deal with a future episode, I guess, but I wonder if this story choice will continue to stand out as wretched excess: just an excuse to show an explosion.

Ha! Except they don't show an explosion. Jitters about the national mood, I guess. Too bad the last-minute re-edit seems so obvious.

How bizarre — they're ending the episode on the creepy note of the daughter and her friend (both high-school aged) being driven across town by the just-met, recently-turned-evil college-student beaus. This is making me nervous, particularly now that they've also established that Jack's wife — did I mention their marriage is troubled? — is out looking for her daughter with the other girl's father, which seems like the set-up for an infidelity storyline. It would be like Hopkins to over-burden the narrative with extraneous detail and impossible synchronicity to ratchet up "excitement." I acknowledge the difficulty of sticking with one story for 24 hours — a difficulty imposed by a fickle and easily distracted audience, I guess — but they strain the audience's willingness to suspend disbelief if Jack's daughter is being sent off to be threatened with rape while Jack's wife is considering cheating on him while Jack has 23 hours to prevent an assassination.

The critics' breathless praise of this seems odd — though well acted, it really wasn't terribly exciting, either in an action sense or in a crackling-drama sense. It's too early for a summary judgment, of course, and maybe other reviewers have just seen more of the series than I have. It certainly has its hooks in me; let's see where we go from here.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)