TV is the New Reading

‘24’ is off to a great start

OK, so I lied.

I know I said I wasn’t going to. I know I said in this very column that I wasn’t going to reward FOX’s arrogant splashy power play of dominating not one but two evenings of primetime programming with the four-hour sixth season premiere of “24.”

But despite my best intentions, I could not restrain myself.

And after scraping my jaw back up from under the couch where it had actually dropped off and rolled away – no easy feat since by this point my eyes had popped out of my skull – I knew for a fact that I would not be able to just sit back and wait for Jack Bauer’s Sixth Very Bad Day to come out on DVD.

This show is an addiction. From the ominous beeping of the opening sequence – beep. beep. beep. beep – to the whipcut editing highlighting the show’s restless agitation and the high stakes of its storyline, this show demands to be watched.

For those of you who have been able to resist, the show follows Jack Bauer, a superhuman counter-terrorist agent working for the Counter-Terrorist Unit in Los Angeles – hour by hour in an approximation of real time through the longest days of his life.

All sorts of things happen over the course of these days. Presidents face assassination attempts, weaponized viruses are deployed, nuclear weapons are detonated on American soil and generally terrorists unleash their secret evil schemes of world domination.

Really, I’d thought, after five seasons – 120 hours – of this adrenaline-pumping frantic madhouse run of this bulletproof Teutonic juggernaut of a federal agent tracking down terrorists and making them talk and paratrooping into every situation in the last possible second to save the day over and over again, how could they grab my attention? The show is single-handedly responsible for ramping up the in-your-face violence of explosions and evildoers on a dozen other shows over the years, which has increased dramatic tension all over the grid and pushed the envelope of what viewers will accept in primetime programming. At the same time, with so many other shows being as gritty and graphic as a lot of television has become, how could “24” stay fresh and interesting? After all, they’ve already crashed Air Force One and outlined the fall of a treasonous Commander in Chief in past seasons.

What can Jack Bauer do to top his already phenomenal exploits?

Well, within the first four hours of the new season, we learn that America is reeling from suicide bombers in several major cities. Bauer is released from his imprisonment in China – where he was being held in connection with an attack on a Chinese embassy in Season Four – into the hands of a terrorist operation in exchange for bad information.

While shackled, Bauer faked his own death and bit through the neck of one of his captors. Still wiping his mouth, he recovered Assad, a reformed terrorist operative seeking to promote diplomacy and peace. Together with this operative, he saved a commuter train from a suicide bomber in Los Angeles by kicking him through a window, and tracked another bomber to an arsenal. And just as he was convincing his supervisers that Assad was now actively working for peace, Bauer’s friend, Curtis, who’d suffered a major loss tangling with Assad in the past, had Assad at gunpoint, and Bauer had to shoot his friend to save a former terrorist.

And right at the moment when he realizes he just can’t face making those kinds of decisions anymore, a suitcase nuke goes off on the outskirts of L.A., and it is learned that there are four other such devices on U.S. soil.

This season is starting out with an intensity that can be measured in blood pressure and knuckle-whiteness. And dropped jaws. The warning regarding violent content is well-founded, but for those who are up to it, Day Six is not to be missed.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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