Didn’t they drop the (explicit) real time thing in the second season?
I don’t remember if they dropped the “events occur in real time” line at the beginning or not, but they kept the ticking clock.
Also CTU doesn’t perform any sort of background checks on their employees.
In 24’s defense, that whole sequence was pretty much the high water mark for “Kim being stupid in distress”.
The ticking clock is used significantly at least once in a way that took a couple of seasons to explain away. I thought it was a brilliant brick joke.
The “events occur in real time” tag comes and goes throughout the series.
The wording before each episode, yes, but the ticking clock was always there and the story was told as if everything happened as you saw it. The ran story elements in parallel, and used visual transitions to aid the perception everything was occuring simultaneously. And each season was one 24 hour period, each episode of which covered 1 hour (unless they ran 2 hours back to back).
The stupid goes on and on. And the improbabilities mount. I watched 7 of the 8 seasons, but to be honest there was a lot of suck.