I watched '24' for the first time over the last week. My friendly neighbourhood DVD store had the box-sets on sale for a nominal fee, so I decided to see what all the fuss was about.
It was tough, but I stuck with it all through season 1. I watched slack-jawed as the story became progressively more bizarre and outrageous. My treacherous imagination distracted me from the antics of Jack Bauer and his crazed crew of well-dressed morons by speculating on the script meetings:
Script robot 1: "Look, we've got 2 hours to fill for this character. What can we do with her?"
Script robot 2: "How about amnesia? It worked in Dallas."
SR1: "2 hours? Who gets amnesia for 2 hours? We're asking the audience to suspend disbelief, not launch it into orbit"
SR2: "Hmmm... ok, how about we do a reveal that she's really a male Serbian agent under heavy disguise posing as Jack's wife who is dead which is good because it means we get to make Jack cry and what the audience was told was her unborn baby is actually an explosive device which she/he will try and detonate when close to Senator Palmer but Palmer's wife throws herself in the path of the explosion redeeming herself but dying in the process until we do another reveal showing that Palmer's wife was actually Palmer himself and the Senator character was in reality a clockwork toy derived from a Burger King kids meal gift under the control of a generic bad guy perhaps from one of those crazy ex-Soviet states who has a grudge against Jack because he looked at him funny fourteen years 8 months and 17 days ago to this very day and wants to replace the whole of congress with wind-up toys to show just how annoyed he is and..."
(pants into a breathless silence)
SR1: "Ok. We'll go with the amnesia line. I've written the script on the back of this cigarette packet. Go get the cocaine and we'll go for lunch."
There was a trailer for the current season of 24 before a film I watched yesterday at the cinema. It consisted of approximately 30 seconds of Jack Bauer sitting in the SUV in which he seems to spend much of his life, crying about something. Doubtless his daughter had got herself into Peril again.
A few too many Long Island Iced Teas in the bar beforehand made yell some lines for Jack: "Oh fuck, not another season. I don't wanna be typecast..."
