l never watched the show while it was first run. This rainy weekend I decided to try watching it. I got throught the first season. I like the idea of everything happening in real time. My problem is that everyone on the show is so very stupid.
No! Don’t drive straight into the city…drive down a lonely country road while people are chasing you.
You’re running away from some very bad men? By all means don’t run in to a populated area like a major street or shopping center, run into a warehouse district and hide behind a dumpster.
Does it get better or does the stupidity just go on and on?
YMMV, but for me the constant Idiot Balling that you mentioned, contrived and formulaic plots, and the hugely annoying way that the show’s creators f***ed with the audience turned me off after awhile, despite Kiefer’s stellar acting and presence.
I think most people thought that the best seasons were two through four, and it got a little preposterous after that.
A LOT of suspension of disbelief was always necessary, but I enjoyed the whole thing, for what it’s worth.
See I thought season four was a pretty boring follow up to the fun storyline in season three. But then season five was pretty exciting, despite being so often ridiculous. Then season six was both boring and ridiculous and it pretty much stayed on that track.
There are a couple characters who are fun enough to stick around for, and the empty addictive entertainment has it’s value if you just want to zone out for a while, but please do yourself and stop taking it seriously right now.
The characters have 7 more seasons to smarten up. They won’t though.
24 was one of my favorite T.V. shows ever. Everyone loves to hate on it but it was perfect. From season 5 all the way to the end, I went over to a friend’s house to watch it. It was a party show. Something you can have fun watching with friends, cheering for Jack or even the bad guys, then talk about it all week in anticipation of the next episode.
Don’t take it too seriously and you’ll enjoy it. I’m not sure if you should or need to watch the other seasons though. Not being able to watch it with a group of friends might take away from it.
Pretty much everyone other than Jack Bauer and Chloe OBrien are morons.
I think it originally tried to make some sort of compelling moral statement about justifying the use of torture to save lives. But mostly it just turned into Keifer Sutherland pistol whipping people while he screams/harsh wispers at them.
And gets caught int he snare? And then goes home with the mountain man? and nearly finds herself kidnapped again? We’re just about finished with season two. Not sure if I’m going to even try to watch season 3.
I think it might be the format of the show combined with the stupid. I can see how people might like the long drawn out “real time” format, I guess. I cannot imagine trying to watch this show on a weekly basis and staying engaged.
I certainly enjoy my fair share of dumb fun TV, and can even handle a certain amount of stupidity from the characters. Perhaps it’s just watching it in “real time” that I can’t handle.
The problem is that the nature of the show pretty much requires them to keep trying to top what they did the previous season. For some shows that formula works fine, but when you’re dealing with the safety of the world it causes things to get rather outlandish.
The utterly ridiculous storylines became part of the fun for me, and I thought it stayed entertaining through season 6. The last two seasons lost me however.
I’m pretty sure that 24 was the first show that got regular, weekly threads started about it here, and I’m proud to say I had a small hand in that being the case.
Just adding two more thoughts, and then I’ll shut up: the concept at least promised something grittily realistic and engaging, on those terms, which is what initially attracted the show to me, but it became obvious to me at least that they were making up about half of it as they went along. Aside from that, I think the biggest tell for me that the format simply didn’t work, at least in the long run, was that 2 part special ep they showed in the middle of one of the latter seasons, which involved the White House getting invaded. I found it to be awe-fully compelling and exciting, but by the last half hour they just had to try to tie up all loose ends and get back onto the main plot track, and you could see all the momentum and drama that the first 90 minutes had built up slowly seep away like from a leaky balloon as the temporarily quickened pace was gradually slowed back down to “default” levels, and the next week we were back to the same old bump and grind.
There’s a reason, in other words, why nobody (well, nobody sane anyway) tries to make 20 hour movies (aside from the sheer practicalities involved of course): you simply can’t sustain good drama over such a span-huge sections will end up dragging, pretty much by default, interspersed by the occasional gripping moments. I think if Kiefer had decided to do this as a film series (or a long-term miniseries of 2-3 hour TV films every six months or so-yes, still done in “real time”), as a mix of James Bond, John McClane, and Jason Bourne, it would have worked tremendously. But the format ended up feasting on itself like the mythical Ouroboros, until there was nothing authentic and compelling left.
I agree. The producers were never able to adequately handle issues like travel time, eating, and bathroom breaks in a way that didn’t draw attention to the fact that the whole real time gimmick didn’t work.