Major SPOILERS for the first season coming up, folks.
Since Gadarene asked, some specific critiques:
Palmer was so weak-willed at the beginning of the show I couldn’t find myself rooting for him. Certainly, (were this non-fiction) I wouldn’t want to see him dead, but I also wouldn’t want to see him in the White House, either, so the efforts to protect him didn’t seem that important to me. (I remember describing him to my father as Hamlet-like, and I wouldn’t vote for Hamlet, either – but at least he had a sense of humor.) And once Ferragamo was killed, the fact that Palmer did not immediately that second expose the whole sorry charade exacerbated this.
Jack was terrible at his job. Sure, he saved Palmer at the breakfast, but why was Palmer even in danger? Because Jack smuggled in a gun! Yes, I understand his family was being held hostage (maybe just his daughter at that point), but protecting Palmer was his job. If he wasn’t willing to sacrifice his family, he shouldn’t have been the man in charge.
The bit where the agent who hated Jack shot that guy despite direct orders to the contrary was just absurd. And the fact that said agent was not immediately arrested for murder despite firing at an unarmed man in contravention of his orders was unbelievable.
The whole amnesia thing was laughable, and very clearly a product of the writers saying – “Shit! We have six more hours to kill and nothing for Terri to do – what can we come up with?”
When Elisha Cuthbert went to the “good” kidnapper’s place for help, IIRC she was told that she’d better get out of there before whossisname’s brother showed up, but she then proceeded to sit around for half an hour (while the scene was elsewhere) until he did.
Everyone at CTU was down on Xander Berkley despite the fact that he was the only person there who acted professionally.
Penny Johnson’s character was pretty interesting at the beginning of the show (although she was clearly a Hillary Clinton caricature, which is something I generally have no patience with), but by the last half of the season it seemed that the writers were purposefully seeking out ways to make her the villain, making sure that whatever she did it was the most personally abhorrent option among those available, even if it actually didn’t make any political sense.
It took the pretty speechwriter girl (that Penny Johnson was trying to set up with Palmer) like 15 minutes to go up in an elevator once.
I thought the part where the staffer who’d been duped by the assassin stabbed him instead of going through with the plan (which might have resulted in the end of the threat to her boss) was overly melodramatic and hard to credit, although if that were the only problem with the plot I could forgive it as an unlikely but not impossible reaction to her being used.
Etc., etc.
Now, there were things I liked about it. Most of the performances were good (altho’ the typically reliable if not stellar Penny Johnson was overly strident and Sutherland himself wasn’t given much to do except yell at people and then cajole them into helping him), I liked the identity of the mole – I didn’t figure it out until right before it was revealed. I liked Lou Diamond Phillips’ appearance, as well as Dennis Hopper’s surprise entrance. (Although ever since The Usual Suspects, establishing a character’s ruthlessness by having him kill his friends isn’t that impressive anymore.) Finally, I enjoyed the inoxerability brought on by the ticking clock. However, the fact that they had at any one time up to five different stories going on that they could switch to undercut this severly; the way to make a show like this great is to put a clock on it and then keep the camera on one character for the whole day. This would keep the writers more honest about the clock than they were on this series.
–Cliffy
P.S. Gadarene, didn’t we meet at a D.C. Doper lunch once? I think you’re were going to the law school from which I had recently graduated.
