TV Roundup: 24, #13
Our preposterously named experiment, The TV Roundup, has come to Lucky 13. (Which, by the way, is an excellent bar in San Francisco should you be in the neighborhood. Great jukebox.) Before we get into this specific choice, let's review how we got here:
21. Kids In The Hall
20. Taxi
18. Dexter
17. The Simpsons
16. The Daily Show
15. Mad Men
The next show on this list is a victim of itself -- after its fifth season, if I had made this list, it would have easily been in my top ten. This was event television, pure and simple, and it earned its stripes with fantastic episodes week after week.
Unfortunately, it then followed up with three more seasons, and each one of them knocked it further down this list.
I'm talking, of course, about 24, which despite over a third of the show being mediocre (and often boringly so), is still my 13th favorite show of all time.
I didn't start watching the show when it started, and it took my friend Scotty about a year of telling me I had to watch it. Scotty is persistent - if he thinks you should see a movie or TV show, or read a book, or eat a particular brand of ice cream, he'll tell you so often that it'll happen - if for no other reason than to get him to stop. (Love ya, kid.) Sometimes it doesn't quite work, but in the case of 24, I was immediately thankful.
As everyone knows, the title refers to the construct of the show -- each season takes place over 24 hours, and it's shown in "real-time" -- theoretically, this means if it takes a character "five minutes" to get from place A to place B, that's how much time it will take. The hero, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), works for the Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU) and always finds himself in the middle of massive conspiracies -- and always has to make the tough decision, often blurring the line between right and wrong.
I should say right now that even though regular readers of this blog - I believe there are two or three -- know that I'm a liberal weenie who wasn't all too crazy about the previous administrations redefinition of the word "torture." And many justifying it would actually use Jack Bauer as an example of why harsh illegal techniques were acceptable. Why does this not bother me? Because it's a ridiculous, fictional show. People who want to base public policy on a TV show need to check themselves.
But, I digress. As I mentioned, I didn't watch this show from the start -- and let me tell you, if there was ever a show built for DVDs, this is it. The first season is focused around President David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) and a potential assassination attempt on his life. Bauer has been assigned to protect Palmer - and as a result, his own family (Leslie Hope and Elisha Cuthbert) is endangered. And, while there were plenty of twists and other plot points ... that was pretty much it. And the show was amazing. Simply amazing.
Cougar: What the hell did I do?Each season thereafter, the show clearly felt the need to top itself -- and while there were a few missteps (I'm looking at you, Kim vs Cougar) -- generally speaking it discovered new ground and consistently ended almost every episode with a truly shocking twist.
Sure, at some point, you started looking for the employee at CTU who was really a mole, and if you believed they caught the bad guy in the third hour, you clearly weren't paying attention. But they still made it clever - and perhaps reached their creative zenith in the fifth season where Gregory Itzin absolutely stole the show as President Charles Logan.
Logan did look uncannily like Nixon at times, but his character was a brand new one - full of everything you want in a sympathetic villain. Without giving anything away, let's just say that Logan was the last character who made decisions that made me and my wife talk to the TV.
You know what I'm talking about, right? Where a character does something ... or says something ... and you all of a sudden realize that the plot has taken a hard turn in a new direction, and you can't help but just say out loud, "OH MY GOD" or something similar. That's what I'm talking about. Watching the first five seasons of '24' was a chatty event.
And then ... poof. The show started to lose me in the sixth season -- without saying too much, let's just say that there is a major event in the first few hours that it is inconceivable to believe people wouldn't even be talking about a few "hours" later. Of course, the show has to move forward -- but I started losing faith right then. And then, it really started going off the rails. By the middle of the 7th season, I wasn't just losing credence in the writing ... I was getting bored. In an effort to one-up itself, it started getting so ridiculous that I actually jokingly predicted a "shocking return" from a dead character ... that then happened. (It still drives me nuts.)
By the eighth season, after each of the first few episodes I said, "Do we actually care?" And we didn't. We stopped watching. I don't even know how the series ended, and don't much care. That's a sad thing, and I wish the show had either not lost its creative spark or ended earlier. If it had, it would have easily been in my top ten. Instead, it's solidly in at #13.
And yeah, I do miss Edgar.
