Baseball Toaster was unplugged on February 4, 2009.
scott@scottlongonline.com
After a promising start, this season's 24 has become ridiculous over the past couple of episodes. With most of the characters fitting such strong stereotypes and constantly changing from bad to good or vice-versa, I'm starting to think the show is written by the same scribes hired by Vince McMahon for his male soap operas.
If you didn't see the first 2 seasons of 24, there was some far-fetched scenarios, but the series had strong enough acting and twists of plot to keep the quality high.
Actually, the show reminded me of the Die Hard movies, as it had a strong central character, who used his brain as much as his brawn to outsmart the villians and save the world. Echoing each other, the second installment of Die Hard and 24, were even better than their initial offerings, as they both were a little more far-fetched, but the characters had been established so well that it allowed for more freedom to move the plot and not spend as much time on personal backstory. It has been proven out by many sequels that the second offering can be good (see Godfather 2, Terminator 2, Lethal Weapon 2, etc.), but by the time a third is done, most of the tricks have been exposed and there is a sense of formula creeping in. This happened with the third Die Hard (with a Vengeance) and also to 24.
As I mentioned before, the season did start out promising, but it would appear like the time has come to shut down the 24 franchise, as Keifer Sutherland has been relegated to repeating his acting tricks of screaming Dammit(!), every chance he can. This is not to say that Sutherland hasn't been great in the role, (there will never be an actor who works with such intensity every time he talks on his cellphone), but much like Bruce Willis in Moonlighting, there just wasn't much left to do with his character after the first couple of seaons. Let me repeat, it's time to shut 24 down. Of course, quality doesn't determine if a show stays or goes on Television, ratings do, so look for another season. What catastrophe will the country face that Jack Bauer will just happen to be in the middle of? I'm not planning on staying tuned to find out.
i haven't watched 24 since. i found out afterwards that the first 'half' was all that had been comissioned by fox, and after its success, they agreed to run a full season.
having said all that...do i want to watch season 2 and onwards?
thanks.
(and i agree; die hard 1 and die hard 2 are both 'classics' - die hard 3 should never have been made).
Season two is strong - some people prefer it to season one. It bogs down a little mid way, but if watched via dvd in multi-episodes per sitting format, this isn't as noticable. I think the show works best this way anyway.
Season 3 was entertaining, and better than most television, but I didn't think it was up to the standards of the first two seasons. A lot of this is like Scott noted - been there, done that. And even moreso this season - it's still a good show, but it stopped being truly innovative somewhere along the line.
If Seasons 3 or 4 were the first you saw (and there's no real problem doing so, though they spoil some plot developments so it's probably not advised), I think they'd seem really strong - they might even be technically better, but most of the best of them, the long-time viewer has seen in a slightly different form already.
Sure, it's time to move on (or dramatically change the structure.) Probably not going to happen. It's still on my Tivo list, though, at the current 'who is Jack going to torture for information this week?' level.
As for 24, the show died in Season 2 after the bomb went off. Those last half-dozen epsiodes or so afterwards were anti-climactic, and they haven't been able to top it since.
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