’24′ makes each second count
There is a reason why theatres have been forced to resort to raising prices on popcorn, watered down soda and packing 30 minutes of commercials before their opening trailers. It’s the same reason that the movie industry itself has seen a seven percent drop in attendance over the last year. It’s not because the movies are getting worse. From my experience, they’ve always been bad. It’s because television has gotten so much better. In leaps and bounds we’ve traveled from “Gilligan’s Island to Lost,” from the 60′s kooky “Batman” to today’s sophisticated “Smallville.” Of these, no television program gives us a more satirized and suspenseful filter for the times than FOX’s long running action drama, “24.”
“24″ is now into its fifth year, but since television made the leap to DVD it’s become a rolling snowball, gathering followers with every turn of its never ending clock. Although highly stylized, “24″ presents a living comic book which graces the wings of absurdity but does not climb aboard. The only thing that stops lead character Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) from becoming a Batman incarnate is the lack of leather tights and a cowl. With its cast of insidious recurring villains and heroes, “24″ draws causal connections between fantasy and current real world situations. The threat isn’t just terrorism, but everything the writers can strip from today’s news headlines. War in Iraq, anthrax poisoning, domestic hate crimes, and corrupt politics have all been masterfully entwined in past seasons of “24.”
Ironically the greatest threat and most oppressing enemy to Jack Bauer is perhaps the only one shared by everyone watching the show. It’s a bold digital yellow clock that takes over the screen five seconds before and after each commercial break, time. The possibility that so much can happen in 60 minutes, much less that so much can happen in a single day is remote to say the least. But everyone has faced a situation in which everything that mattered depended on beating the clock. Sports, homework, work, relationships, everything that’s anything at all faces the same enemy. “24″ is the first show to address the issue with a standing real time clock which documents every second that drives the show. There are no forward cuts or flashbacks, and there is no dancing around it. Time is an ominous criminal that Jack Bauer is helpless against. It steals every second.
Given the confines of what the writers deal with to make a plausible scenario occur in real time while still being entertaining, (nobody wants to watch Jack sleep for the first six episodes), they’ve done a miraculous job. The problem is that the format of the show makes story revisions nearly impossible to hide. The solutions don’t always work. In one episode Jack’s daughter, Kim, comes face to face with a mountain lion while caught in a hunter’s trap. With no way out of the situation, Kim is supposedly doomed. You can almost see the writer scratching out the idea on paper as the mountain lion regards Kim for a few seconds and then casually walks away.
But when the writing doesn’t work, the acting is always there to serve as the show’s saving grace. Kiefer Sutherland heads a cast of actors who make their extraordinary situations believable by breathing meticulous authenticity into their characters. There are no super models cracking omega codes for the pentagon, (although a few of the computer programmers at CTU seem a little young), and the glitz and glamour of the James Bond franchise have been replaced by gritty realism.
When the show’s plot clicks, it’s an amazing, thoughtful thrill ride into the social depths of terrorism and its effect on every moment of our lives. Like the show “Mission: Impossible,” American television’s reaction to the Cold War, 24 will be remembered as a series that stood for a time when the fear of terrorist attack became a reality. It is Hollywood’s answer to the hopes extinguished and flared by the 9/11 terrorist attack. For Jack Bauer the clock is always ticking, and everything is just a matter of time.
Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Feb 17 2006. Filed under Other.
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