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.

What is this "previously on '24'" business? How can they fit a synopsis and an allegedly 60-minute program into a 60-minute slot? Are they sacrificing commercials before and after to find the time? Or is this some kind of wormhole that we're observing? Is the first part of every hour going to be spent watching time fold in upon itself for two minutes, or am I being too literal? Next week I'm bringing a stopwatch.

Oh; never mind. There's the answer. The story's starting at 1:02 a.m. and some seconds. Sigh. Rules of the game, I guess.

They really start things off with a bang; all this interoffice politicking is given more urgency by the suffocating time frame. The writing really doesn't seem to be conforming to standard TV pacing. There's no reason that it should, but there aren't a lot of reasons to expect that it wouldn't.

Well, there is one reason to expect better: co-creator Joel Surnow, whose credits include, among many other things, the brilliantly conceived "Nowhere Man," a paranoia drama that kicked off UPN's first season as a network. They cancelled it after that first season, before its storyline was resolved. It was frustrating as all get-out to watch it shrivel up and die on the vine, but it established Surnow to me as a TV talent to watch. And sure enough ….

Oh! Did you catch that? A pause! After Alan and Teri find the condom wrapper where they suspect their daughters have been. It's a concern to me that by focusing on the edge of your seat, the show's not going to bother building the rest of the chair with little, important things like pauses. Quietness. Those small moments that give drama its weight.

A major element of filmed narratives, in both movies and TV, is redundancy — repeating information over and over again for maximum retention. Another commendation of the writing is how it layers in sufficient redundancy in without it seeming overdone — bringing up enough incidental references to some aspect of the conspiracy or the characters to keep everything hopping in your short-term memory. This is fine stuff.

Did I mention the edge of the seat? That whole thing with the shooting is well done; the informant is a good use of shorthand development for a superficial character — make you feel for him a little before they obligatorily fill him full of lead, and in less than three minutes.

The split screen is being handled pretty well; the bit where Tony grabs the transcript of Jack and Nina's phone call and surveys the office. It uses the fragmented screen to juxtapose elements — almost a comic book quality. I mean, of course split screen is deeply cinematic, but it's rarely used; Brian De Palma and Peter Greenaway have done memorable things with it, but it's almost regarded in the same class as, say, 3-D. An outmoded technique, a cheesy effect. "24" is different in how it uses split screen — it sets up separate windows on a black background and fades them in and out. It's an important difference; a window over an image gives a sense of zooming in to capture a detail, or providing some commentary on the action. But when there's not a background image to provide a superstructure, it becomes more about panel construction, shapes, reading the individual images as well as the gaps between them and the space around them. And that's a comics conceit.

This is good action for television. Action TV has been mostly ghettoized by confining it to series based on a cartoon character — "Walker Texas Ranger," "Nash Bridges," etc., back as far as, say, "The Dukes of Hazzard," and even further than that. Primal film grammar used in its simplest way, and always centered around dumb plots. But this really does crackle like a moderately good action movie, and with doubtlessly a much smaller budget. Of course, shattering prop windows don't cost much, but it's certainly believable.

Kiefer just cut off a dead guy's finger. Hot damn.

It's less gross than what you'd find in your average "X-Files," but "24" has established such a good sense of vérité that you feel stuff like that. This is a good time to mention how good Kiefer Sutherland is in this. He really works the camera well, and the show is grounded in his quite believable humanity.

This daughter subplot is … sigh. I just want to watch the assassination thing. Is that so much to ask? All of the actors caught up in this girls-and-boys-with-roofies story are able, but it really does feel like you're being wrenched out of the main story every time it comes up, and although its tension is real, it seems like the distraction for a sleight-of-hand trick. The thing that you're not supposed to be watching.

This is good, tense stuff with Palmer, too. What is it about parking garages that makes them such great, uneasy settings? A kind of modern hell, I guess — underground, impersonal, cool, gray, lifeless.

Wow. And there goes Richard. Sorry to sound so redundant, but this is pretty electric stuff, and it's shot really well for television.

… And here comes the daughter stuff again. Is this what the episode is going to end on, again? What's the big idea? We've had two deaths — no, four or five — and that's what they give us as a closer? I just can't get behind it.

Well, at least that's not how they concluded things. We got a good twist instead, and one that they didn't really prep you for — which is a good thing. Yay for red herrings.

They definitely aren't skimping on the plot developments; this is moving at a breakneck pace, faster almost than something like "Law & Order," which has built a reputation on cutting out all the fat and only showing the most significant plot points. Of course, there's a question of credulity — that show gives you a sense of how greatly it's compressing time, which this show, of course, does not.

The side effect of such rampant excitement is the huge expectation it sets for each successive show. And the week that "24" fails to live up to that … well, wait and see.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)