24 Episode 6.8 & 6.9, "1:00 PM - 2:00 PM" & "3:00 PM - 3:00 PM"
Airdate: Monday, February 12th, 2007

It's taken a while for it to sink in that with 24, we're basically watching a 20-odd hour action movie unfold every week on our TV screens.

I realized I was watching an action movie show when this week's set of two back-to-back episodes opened with a pretty kick-butt car chase.

It wasn't French Connection great, or even Ronin great (hit iMDB.com if those references soared over your heads, kids), but it was still pretty pulse-pounding. For a weekly TV series, to pull off that level of production value and actually create a sequence that stands up against anything you'd see in a major motion picture (which has a bigger budget and much more time to film), is pretty damn impressive.

So that really blew my mind, and sorta stepped up my appreciation for 24 to a whole new level. We sit down in front of our televisions every week and we watch lots of standard television shows, where expected things happen to the expected people in very expected ways. There is the ever-present Illusion of Change, a term coined by either comics legend Stan Lee or Abraham Lincoln, which demands that though every episode throws the characters and their situation into minor and/or major calamity, the status quo returns after every half-hour or hour-long installment.

(The Illusion of Change, by the way, is today most notoriously abused by Lost, which I may just try to dial into my Lost review this week, a quasi-crossover of sorts that will have Fans of Me over the proverbial MOON.

(And by Fans of Me, yes, I do mean my mother and wife. Not my father, who thinks I'm a blowhard. I can't disagree with the man.)

24 rejects the Illusion of Change, and it rejects the notion that each week we get bite-size installments that we can swallow completely all at one time. Instead, we get a big sprawling mega-movie that exists with its own internal logic, its own rules about character and change, and its own sense of pacing.

24 does NOT offer an easily digested package of content each week that leaves viewers with a reassuring conclusion that wraps proceedings up in a tidy bow. Instead, it relies upon cliffhangers, where everything is far from okay after you turn off the TV set each Monday night.

24 does NOT adhere to the Illusion of Change. In fact, it prefers change, descending in copious amounts from the high precipice of the show's writer's room, where characters are regularly tortured, murdered, and transformed into despicable villains.

And 24 does NOT reflect the pacing we have come to understand from other shows. It is not a tidy three- to five-act structure. Instead, it is big and unseemly. It will follow up a car chase sequence with a quiet reflection sequence back at CTU, then give us Morris getting the crap beat out of him with a baseball bat. From sinister plotting in the President's secure bunker, to tender hints of affection between Jack and his dead brother's wife, to houses and mock UPS trucks exploding into fiery pieces--it's all over the place, and it all tracks and hangs together, and it is uniquely American and Television and not the latter at all.

Sorry. That was a bit of a rambling rant.

Anyway. This week's episodes were pretty great, especially James Cromwell as Daddy Jack, who is SO so great still at being kindly and evil at the same time. Imagine your grandpa pulling a gun on you in a hotel room, and you've got the picture. Tom Lennox decides to jump in with some strange group in the White House who wants to off the president so they can build internment camps for Arab-Americans. And Chloe slaps Morris around because the guy is not only a coward, but a spineless, sniveling one at that.

See? Everything CHANGES. That's why it's FUN.

iTunes Links

24 - Series
24 - Season 6
"1:00 P.M. - 2:00 P.M."
"2:00 P.M. - 3:00 P.M."