24 Hour Party Pooper

For some reason, I’m still watching this show 24 every week. It’s easier to understand why I stuck with it through the first two seasons. The first half of each season made the real-time gimmick work like a charm, with the suspense ratcheting up to an almost unbearable level at times. But the powers-that-be could never sustain it, and things fell apart in the second half of both seasons, with increasingly contrived stalling tactics, ludicrous plot twists and endless perils for Kim, the fetching but dimwitted daughter of our hero, Jack Bauer. I complained that the show should have been 12, but no one listened to me except the other critics who stole my line.

Last season ended on a cliffhanger (the President being poisoned), so I tuned in again for round three. As it turned out, the cliffhanger was yet another red herring, as the show picked up three years after the events of the previous season, with the Pres all hunk-dory except for some goo on his hand and occasional lightheadedness. Now dim-bulb Kim Bauer is a computer whiz working in the same CTU office as her father, who has developed a heroin addiction while undercover with terrorist Ramon Salazar. Now Salazar’s brother has threatened to release a deadly virus in Los Angeles blah blah blah twenty-four hours blah blah blah. Meanwhile, President Palmer is still in the picture, but I can’t figure out why. His storyline is complete ass, and I can’t imagine anyone gives a shit what’s going on with him and his boring girlfriend. If there are no plans to integrate him more fully into the main storyline, then they should have just had him die at the end of last season.

Things started to pick up when Jack decided to go all rogue agent and break Salazar out of jail, and I was briefly interested again, but this week’s episode just pissed me off. I’m not a big fan of storylines based entirely on miscommunication (Three’s Company excepted, of course), and this was one of those “if only we could reach Jack, all this could be averted, but oops, he’s turned off his radio” numbers. Meanwhile, after a remarkable five or six hour stretch, Kim is back in peril again, as yet another CTU mole has caught her with her hand in the cookie jar. (I’d like to see an episode devoted to updating the screening process at CTU’s human resources department.) The only bright spot is the return of CTU pain-in-the-ass Ryan Chapelle, played by The Sopranos’ Monsignor Jughead, Paul Schulze. So…yeah, I guess I’ll tune in next week. But I’ll be cranky.

Over the long holiday weekend I rented the first few episodes of Alias on DVD, and now I’m thinking maybe this is the spy show I should have hitched my wagon to back in ought-one. For one thing, with all due respect to Keifer Sutherland, who does a great job of keeping a straight face through all the 24 shenanigans, Jennifer Garner is much more fun to look at. There’s one early episode in particular where she dons a blonde wig and a skintight blue leather dress that really made the steam rise from my collar. As opposed to 24’s rigid real-time structure (actually not all that rigid, since any point in Los Angeles county can be reached from any other point in Los Angeles county in ten minutes or less), Alias has a goofy approach wherein the A-plot might begin 22 minutes into one episode and resolve 37 minutes into the next (always allowing for a cliffhanger at the episode break). I can imagine this might get annoying if you were watching the show week-to-week, but it’s a hoot if you’ve got the DVDs and can watch a chunk of episodes at a time. In fact, the show almost seems designed to be viewed this way, as if the season were one long spy movie.

I also like the way the story plays out like one of those Myst-like computer games, where each spy mission results in another piece to the McGuffin, some kind of Renaissance-era super-techno-clock or something. Like I said, I’ve only seen the first few episodes, and there’s every reason to believe it will get just as irritating as 24 in the long run. And that’s when I’ll move on to Hack.

No.