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 4: 3 a.m. – 4 a.m.

Hm. A more traditional intro sequence. In lieu of the recap…? No.

"24" is in trouble, ratings-wise; not in such trouble that it's going to be pulled, because there's too much face for Fox to lose with this super-hyped Best Show Ever. But it's a tough time slot; it's easy to believe that, particularly with the real-time gimmick, audiences feel alienated from the show if they haven't watched it yet (hence, I suppose, the new "I'm Jack Bauer" intro); and its Tuesday-night must-see viewership has potentially been heavily diluted by all of the repeats — I think the first couple of weeks, it ran as many as five times between Fox and FX, and it's now been tapped to repeat in "Pasadena"'s slot indefinitely.

In these episode reviews, I've been recording reactions, which, because the show is so exciting at its most superficial level, gives the impression of me offering it an out-and-out rave — I'm reacting to the excitement it's transmitting, with little chance for summation. And while I like "24" a lot, I'm not as totally transfixed by it as much as those earlier pieces might suggest. The ability to be more reflective and step back a little is hard to do when you're writing as your watching and doing it all in an hour.

One of the things worth stepping back to look at is the structure of the show as one story. The four episodes have been very similar in terms of pacing and energy level, but they have managed some adequate character development among the top — wow — dozen characters (Jack, Nina, Jamey, Tony; Teri and Kimberly; Alan and Janet; Dan and Rick; Palmer and his wife (Sherry?). These aren't the most vibrantly drawn characters, but they are sufficiently individualized, which can't be casually dismissed.

And here's the overkill I'm worried about. Why is the dad picking a fight with a cop? I mean, sure, daughter in distress, etc. … and now he's under arrest. That's ratcheting it up too tightly, straining audience goodwill too much — not to mention adding insult to injury with the second daughters-driving-past -the-parents scene in 150 minutes. That's dramatically sloppy, and perhaps endemic of the corner these stories have painted themselves into — how many times can you do frantic parents, office intrigue, etc.? You have to keep forward momentum, not just repeatedly hit the same tropes.

But they do well by those tropes from time to time. Bringing Mason, the extortee from the first episode, back in to orchestrate the Counter-Terrorist Unit office lockdown — which is looking as much like part of the net being tightened around Jack as his daughter's kidnapping — and then giving Mason that good scene with Nina, is laudable. The show has to fold in on itself from time to time and bring back incindental characters, because all good paranoia/conspiracy tales do. And as well-worn as the agency-man-forced- to-work-outside- the-agency set-up is, some things are just integral to the genre.

Interesting that the address encoded on the keycard appears to be where the daughters were last night. I don't know whether to anticipate this turning out to be All About Jack, with everything structured like a trap to bring him down and/or — how's this for prognostication? — frame him for the Palmer assassination, or whether he's set up simply to be the noble man navigating the rapids of the corruption all around him. They could play it either way, but with the revelation that the daughter has been kidnapped … well, it puts a new spin on things.

So it's been 36 minutes and no one's helped the girl sprawled in the road? I guess it is 3:30 in the morning. … Oh. Asked and answered.

I try to type a lot during commercials, but I'm always captivated by the Ali previews and have to stop and watch them. I'm probably showing my hand too much, as I'm likely to review the film and should be more objective, but I'm looking forward to loving that movie.

OK. And since I'm on a commercial digression, how interesting that Gap has chosen "Give A Little Bit" as their holiday song. Supertramp: That's holiday!

Something that's not widely publicized about syndicated shows and TV Land reruns is that the average program-to-commercial ratio has increased so much over the years that they significantly cut content from those older shows. A good place to catch it is in "The Simpsons," depending on how conversant you are with the old episodes — watch one at 5 p.m. and marvel at where the jokes and timing went. I bring it up because, if we haven't reached the commerical super-saturation level yet, they're going to have to cut time out of "24" for re-runs, and it'll screw up the synchronicity. Although 44 minutes of program is, frankly, not very much; I can't imagine losing much more time to commercials.

So at 44 minutes of program, minus about three minutes for credits and recap to bring it down to 41 minutes, the whole run of "24" is actually only going to have about 16 hours of content.

Of course, that's assuming that there's only one season of "24." Which, to me at least, doesn't seem like much of an assumption, but I've read insinuations elsewhere that Fox is considering a multi-season run for the show. Does that make any sense to you? Even if the story of the Palmer assassination were to spill over into another day, well … I mean, if nothing else, all these characters are going to have to sleep at some point. The glory of "24" is what a one-shot it is. … Hm. Interesting. Maybe Joel Surnow learned from "Nowhere Man" not to expect the nets to give you more than a season when your show is conceptually interesting.

You know, this has been a real nothing-happens episode. Jack skulking around the warehouse with the cop and the parents shackled; while there's been a lot of jumping between stories, that technique is so de rigeur for "24" already that you don't really get a sense that all this inactivity is being creatively counterbalanced with the daughters' fate to build Hitchcockian suspense. That's in part because nothing much has happened in that storyline either, but mostly because there's just no longer any weight to the technique of cross-cutting, because all the show does is cross-cut frantically.

Let me take a moment to roll that observation around in my mouth a little more: Nothing has really happened this episode, particularly versus previous episodes. They established the lockdown and Morse as an antagonist; they resolved the issue of the other daughter; they had the scene between Palmer and his wife that establishes Palmer's uncertainty about the accusations against his son; they had Teri and Alan sitting by the side of the road; and Jack doing very little.

And another the-parents-drive- past-the-daughter scene. What a trite device! It's so played out it's almost comic anymore.

Speaking of which, that's one thing that "24" doesn't have: a sense of humor. I might even support the idea of a do-nothing episode, say around hour 8 or 9, as a chance for a little decompression and mood regulation (although a slow, light-hearted hour is probably hard to pull off when your daughter is kidnapped by terrorists).

And now, three paragraphs later, I have to mildly recant my complaints about how so little has happened this episode: When the story threads get resolved this well — the fate of the cop; the hand-off of the daughter to the terrorist; and that last explosive conversation with the suspect — it almost makes up for the earlier sluggishness. To hearken back to the earlier bit about the structure, this is really not a bad place for the fourth episode to end. There's a sense of a stopping place, a larger pause: a small resolution with each daughter, who now have somewhat separate storylines, and a small resolution with all the inter-office back-and-forth as the lockdown at the CTU offices ends, which was the climax-to-date of that storyline. It doesn't make any of the other time-wasters any less disheartening, but this is probably the first time in "24" that there's been any sense of some storylines ending and new storylines starting, and they can be forgiven for having to pad the episodes out a little bit to get there.

And, look: I didn't mention split screen.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)