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 14: 1 p.m. – 2 p.m.

A new hour of putting off talking about the distinction between film and television starts now.

Actually, not really. I am going to take a stab at it this week, and hopefullly get at least part of the foundation laid down. So: Are film and TV fundamentally different? In the terms of the idea of cinema as an art form unto itself, no, they're not. They both rely on the same tools and conventions — the shot, the cut, etc. The same fundamentals.

So are film and television identical media? The only difference really worth mentioning here is the basic technological difference between how a filmstrip contains consecutive images separated by black space (24 frames per second), and television is constantly overwriting its existing image one line at a time (and broadcasts at video's 30 frames per second). Does that affect how we perceive or retain the images? It's up for debate — Roger Ebert thinks there is. But that's cerftainly outside the purview of what's being addressed here. And the relative size of film and TV screens is worth mentioning, and will be mentioned later, but TV screens are big enough and so many movie screens are small enough, particularly for those sitting in the back rows, that this might not be a distinct enough distinction at a formal level. And as was discussed last week, the shape of the image, its aspect ratio, can't be considered a distinguisher either.

Back to the show for a moment: These scenes with David and Sherry Palmer would be great drama in any TV show. The unravelling of the MacBeth machinations is important; the show's strategy of using that conflict to bind the two halves of Jack's story together is now totally apparent. And not only are they doing it well, but they're finally connecting it to the larger Forces At Work — Karl implicating the Palmers' son, Keith, in the psychiatrist's murder as leverage to keep Palmer under the thumb of his financiers, who almost certainly play a part in whatever Serbian nuttiness is apparently underpinning the larger conspiracy.

Ooh, and this is well-built. David can't tell Keith what he knows about the murder because he doesn't want to tell him that there's been evidence planted that frames Keith. That move makes Keith think that David is covering up his own bad dealings, when in fact it's his protection of Keith that's caused him to capitulate as much as he has. Slick.

So film and television use the same building blocks. Are there any worthwhile distinctions to make between them? Well, yeah; we have to consider the distribution. Now, I'm about to say things that have oodles of exceptions, but we're no longer considering things from a formal level. We're moving down a stratum to address something more situational. That said: TV is primarily structured around advertising. Not in an Adbusters, the corporartions-are-fouling- the-content way, but to say that the majority of television programming — minus PBS, HBO and their ilk — is built to include commercial breaks. And film is structured to provide between 80 and 180 minutes of content in order to validate your ticket price. Now, obviously, there are untold quantities of exceptions to this — you can't reasonably build an argument of this calibre by only considering U.S. television and Hollwood movies — but these blanket assumptions will serve for us to comprehend some basic distinctions.

Meanwhile: This dressing-down of Jack is tiresome. It feels like padding to fill an hour.

I pooh-poohed the idea of screen-size difference as a formal distinction between film and TV — something that might mark them as being different at their core — but it is a valuable distinction here, because it becomes a marketing thing. Namely: TV favors tight shots of talking heads, whereas film favors broader tableaus because the picture is bigger — you can pick out smaller details.

The bit with "Alan" — who we'll now call Kevin — trying to get back in the good graces of the conspirators, only to be undercut … that was really good. He's served as a great bad guy.

Anyway: Just because you can pick out smaller details or comprehend more complex or smaller movements doesn't mean that films always exploit this, or that TV can't try to be subtle about its compositions. But, for the most part, it's not, and this brings up another non-formal issue about TV — TV is something you can walk away from, whenever you want. From a practical point of view, TV has to be much more redundant, much more obvious. A viewer in a theater can be expected to give his or her undivided attention. That's not to say that film's aren't plenty redundant, but TV is always more so.

It's funny to think that Jack was able to squeeze in his initial debriefing in the plot-convenient 15 or so minutes he was given (and which we saw little of). Could you explain "24's" plot in any reasonable detail in 15 minutes?

So these are three practical differences between film and TV: between uninterrupted feature-length stories and shorter stories divvied up by commercials, which we'll call the basic structural difference; between the larger screen and the smaller screen, which we'll call the basic compositional difference; and between undivided attention and divided attention, which we'll call the basic viewer difference.

Let's just touch on the compositional difference and be done with this for the week: You might not think this really holds much water. After all, you've watched plenty of movies that looked like they could have been on TV — they're all shot in close-up, they don't trade on your ability to perceive the fine detail viewable on the larger canvas. Why bring up the fact that film can do this if it never does? Film rarely does it because most Hollywood films are designed to be shown on televisions. It's a marketing thing. Whip-smart industry columnist David Poland once wondered if a movie's theatrical run was simply becoming a warm-up, a publicity push, for the studios to maximize profits in the ancillary markets. It's a sad trend that diminishes a lot of the filmmaker's palette. But: That's enough for now. We'll pick this up next week.

Tony's defense of Jack was nice — good machismo-through-loyalty stuff. And it certainly helps further polarize viewer loyalties: These new CTU interlopers are pansies who can't possibly compete with the purity of Jack's core team.

And more detail about Jack's Kosovo mission. Very curious. Let's see how this gets spun.

And what's behind this scene at Palmer's old hotel room? This is the undemocratic nature of narrative storytelling — once you've started a scene that doesn't seem to fit into the structure, you're instantly suspicious.

That's good split-screen — Nina finding out that the phone has been professionally wiped down counterpointed with the man whom she saw using the phone now screwing on his silencer.

Teri has an ovarian cyst? Looong shot. When all is said and done, expect a tally of the show's worst implausibilities.

So is this what the show is going to devolve into? Plan B is going to be the same as Plan A — to kidnap/threaten/harm Jack's family in an attempt to coerce Jack? As was mentioned, Jack's story apparently has two halves; this episode started the second half, but if it's going to be the same story as the first … major dismerits.

What whiplash, having Palmer in the CTU office. So much of what the show trades on is the instant identifications of familiar settings to orient yourself. The mix and match of Palmer showing up is jarring.

And he wants to speak to Jack. I'm anxious to see what revelations we get in the next episode.

(A note about the image: I'm running out of still and publicity shots from "24," and so, as threatened, I've had to resort to using funny-looking pictures of Kiefer. This one's from Dark City. I've got a good two-shot of Jack and David for next week; after that, it may be Young Guns time.)

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)