24 (2001 - 2017)

Season 1
Watched the first episode. It's so funny how it felt super-slick at the time but now it feels really dated and low-budget. It's still awesome, though. Jack Bauer is already off the reservation within the first 15 minutes, Xander Berkeley has slimeball set to 11, and the big Mandy twist is still great.
The stuff that surprised me most were how flat the lighting is and how small and cheap the sets are, plus it's shot on really grainy film. It's not what I think of as slick telly in 2021, but back in 2001 I remember it feeling like a Michael Mann movie. Also, the painfully millennial haircuts and fashion choices don't help!

I finished 24 S1. I remembered that they have some silly padding towards the end - Terri getting amnesia and Kim endlessly getting into random trouble while on the run - but I'd forgotten how irrelevant almost all of Palmer's storyline is. All the stuff about his financial backers trying to blackmail him etc ends up having zero effect on anything. Even Sherry blowing David's fake death doesn't matter because the mole already told the baddies about it. The only time he has any effect is when he's interacting directly with Jack, otherwise he and his family could have been cut out completely!

Looking forward to S2, though, I think this is where they perfected it. (Oh, except there's more silly padding in one of the storylines - Kim endlessly getting in random trouble again, with cougars and killer hillbillies etc).

Season 2
Three quarters of this season are absolutely masterful. The way they slowly ratchet up the tension and tighten the screws all the way through, how they flip-flop your sympathies for characters etc, it's brilliant. The only issue is the remaining quarter - again, Kim getting into random trouble, except this time she's not even relevant to the plot. You absolutely could lift that entire thing out and it would only leave a couple of small moments in the other plotlines not making sense. It's like a parody someone would have made of 24 at the time. I thought they slapped a macguffin in there to tenuously tie it in, but I guess that must be in S3.

One of the fun things re-watching is realising how many actors from LOST were in this first.

If people are looking for a fun 40 minute show to watch one episode a night (or week if you can bear it), and don't mind a general gung-ho pro-US pro-military outlook, then I recommend it, for at least the first two seasons!

Season 3
From here I don't remember as much stuff, as I've only watched each subsequent season once each. What I remember from S3 (though some of it might be from later seasons):
It's crap. Like, almost as bad as S6. They dump the Max/Mandy/Palmer cliffhanger stuff from the end of S2, which I was really pissed off about. Jack is an addict and has a tattoo (that Sutherland got in real life to save himself days of his life in the make-up chair over the following seasons). The first bit is Mexican druglords, then it switched to a silly Brit baddy. Chloe! There's an action scene with some helicopters (I remember Dan getting annoyed at people misusing the phrase 'jumping the shark' to refer to it!). I think Kim works for CTU now? She's dating some guy called Chase or something, played by James Badge Dale, who is basically a young Jack Bauer and gets his hand chopped off at the end. Jack has a cry in the last (amazing) scene. Palmer's brother shows up, and is a bit annoying and doesn't look anything like him, and Palmer starts making dodgy moral decisions which feels very out of character. There's a CTU guy who seems to be a mole but isn't. Jack is forced to execute Chappelle. I think Tony gets shot in this one, maybe in a shopping mall - I remember Dan saying "oh no, Tony's not a field agent, he's fucked!" as soon as Tony got sent out! Can't remember if the annoying Edgar or Chloe's annoying husband show up., I think they're later. And I think the Shohreh Aghdashloo family are next season, not sure. I think Nina Myers comes back, maybe Sherry does too? And they both get a 'kiss me to prove you're evil now' moment with Jack/David, which is hilarious.

Gahhh, I forgot how bad  Kim's  hair is in this one, it looks like a costume store wig.

Finished S3. It's not quite as bad as I remember it, just a huge comedown from S2. They don't have a silly Kim-gets-in-trouble storyline, which is great, but unfortunately they don't replace it with anything so the season feels a lot less epic than the first two. Also, the David Palmer storyline has returned to being almost completely disposable - outside of its interactions with Jack's story, all it does is have David make a load of bad decisions/moral choices, and decide not to run for a second term. I don't know what they were going with this - maybe Haysbert wanted out, or they were setting up a 'Palmer as baddy' story that got abandoned? Even in the CTU storyline there's pointless wheel-spinning, though, like Tony getting shot and seeming like he's not fit to work but then he just is. The villains are crap too - Mexican druglords are always irritating and boring, and the evil English baddy is too cartoonish. There's some effective stuff though - the virus in the hotel is really scary, the whole Chappelle execution thing is great, and whenever CTU are chasing down a baddy it's always really tense and well done. Plus the last scene with Jack crying is brilliant, I'm still angry at Sky for making a joke out of it in subsequent ads for their service.

Oh, I forgot to say, Chloe is hilarious. Now I know that I'm going to grow to like her, I can enjoy her insanely irritating personality from the get-go. It's like they dropped a character from The Office into 24, it's amazing.

Season 4
I barely remember anything about S4 (maybe spoilers for later seasons too): Arnold Vosloo is the baddy and manages to evade capture a lot, General Grievous style. Uh, is the terrorist family in this one? I can't even remember if the Shohreh Aghdashloo family are the same ones as the Kal Penn family. And I know at some point a bunch of big characters get bumped off but I think that's S5. A nuke goes off in suburbia at some point. I think that's S5 as well, though. It's crazy how little I remember after S3, I guess the dip in quality meant I was putting less mental energy into watching it from that point on so stuff didn't get absorbed as much.

Gahhh, so far they've reused two actors in different roles and it's now really glaring because both actors have since become a lot better known! Was it really so difficult to find new actors in LA?!

Finished S4. As I remembered, this is solid entertainment, but also just 'more of the same'. There's no flab on this one, but enough storylines to stop it feeling anaemic, which is great. But the main issue is that it's getting stale, CTU in particular - the endless powerplays, tech talk, furtive glances over monitors. And this is another season about Muslim extremists with a nuke, more shootouts in LA warehouses, the occasional helicopter etc. They've really honed their craft, they're just not doing anything new with it.

I'm hoping my memory of S5 being really strong is also correct!

Season 5
Finished S5, it's still really good. It is a little samey again at the start before it reveals its true set-up, but once it gets there it's great. (Future season spoilers) Chasing evidence against a corrupt president allows for a bunch of different scenarios than the usual 'terrorists with a WMD', though they have some of those here too. Gregory Itzen and Peter Weller are great, Mike and Aaron get stuff to do, Buchanan and Chloe form a little team, CTU becomes a more hostile place when Homeland Security take it over, and there are a bunch of cool setpieces like the exploding gas refinery and landing a passenger jet on a freeway. It doesn't do anything revolutionary, but it changes it up enough to feel fresh and it just has a bunch of great stuff in there with no filler. The only negatives are that it takes a little while to get into gear, and there's a bit of set-up for the dreadful S6 going on that taints it a little if only by association - Chloe's awful ex-husband (didn't need to be introduced in the last two episodes, Chloe could have done everything herself), Jack Bauer's evil brother (played by Paul "Pull My Crane" McCrane, who looks so little like Kiefer Sutherland that I can only assume the brother thing was invented after he was cast, between seasons), the return of Tzi Ma (I don't remember his story being too bad, though, and they don't just bin this cliffhanger iirc, so it's fine).

Onto the absolutely awful S6 :(

Season 6
Ha ha, okay, I was wrong, it does drop the China prison thing within the first ten minutes. I think Tzi Ma comes back in a later season, not sure, but right now it feels so clunky. Still, I'd forgotten Stephen Merchant was in this season! Also, I swear this show keeps changing its mind as to which of Sutherland's real tattoos Jack has as well - I'm sure they've gone from showing it to putting make up over it or vice versa like 4 times now.

This is also the season that has Kal Penn, a 30 year old Indian man, playing an Arab high school student (who is also a terrorist, of course). Oof.

Just finished. Very bad. The criminal mastermind from last season turning out to be Jack's brother, and then Jack's dad showing up and then also turning out to be bad, is all so silly. Then that gets dropped for most of the season for some run-of-the-mill Muslim terrorist stuff. Most of the season is incredibly repetitive of previous ones, in fact - they even pull out the 'woman has to act normal for five minutes with the man she's found out is a baddy so CTU can get some info and instead she attacks him' gag again, TWICE.

Also turns out Stephen Merchant was just doing a wordless five second cameo :(

Season 7
Almost done with S7. They've now re-used 4 actors, 3 of whom are Middle Eastern, all with relatively prominent roles. It's so shoddy! To be fair, they are at least a season apart and only get a few episodes at most each time, so I wouldn't blame anyone for not noticing (in fact, I doubt I did at the time of the original airings, but then I didn't notice the white guy getting re-used either!). And I know a lot of long-running tv shows re-use actors. But 24 is set in LA, it's not like they're out in Canada running low on local US actors or anything, and it's also a bad look for a show about terrorists to be treating Brown people as interchangeable.

Finished S7. It's okay. There's some great action - better than Falcon & Winter Soldier tbh - and some cool stuff going on, like Evil Tony. But even though they've changed the city and got rid of CTU, replacing it with the FBI, it's mostly all the same stuff. Again it feels pretty linear, it doesn't have that 'three equally awesome storylines' thing that it does when it's at it's best. It pulls the 'okay, this is the real baddy behind all the previous seasons' thing which doesn't really tie together (and yet meanwhile they've got a dangling evil conspiracy from S2 that they could have tied this into but instead that continues to be unresolved while they pull some SPECTRE shit here). And the ending feels weirdly unfinished - I can only assume they were planning to directly pick it all up next season, but they don't have a great track record with doing that...

Season 8

It's pretty bad so far. Really cheesy, like if they handed the show to Donald P Bellisario and he renamed it "CTU 2030". CTU has a drone camera guy and his introduction was him using one of the drones to spy on a woman in a bikini, while saying "Well, that doesn't suck." Just awful. Also, they expositioned away the last season's ending with a couple of lines of dialogue, of course. This particularly cheapens a huge chunk of the previous season where Jack was infected with a nigh-untreatable disease and was dealing with his regrets and conscience and stuff before he went. Don't pull that shit unless you're going to actually kill him or at least give some weight to his recovery, rather than taking ten minutes over it. And they start this season by giving Jack a super-happy ending which is clearly going to get ripped away from him very quickly. Feels a bit cruel.

Finished S8 - it mostly calmed down from the initial silliness into regular rote ol' 24 with all the regular beats. They pulled the 'give Jack a happy ending then tear it away' thing a second time this season, which makes it all feel very soap opera - especially as his true love was someone he'd spent probably a total of 10 hours in the company of in his entire life. The change to New York doesn't really make any difference either. It does some cool stuff - Chloe as head of CTU (though that isn't as big a change-up as it could have been), and bringing Logan back as a serpent pouring poison in the president's ear works great - Itzen is note-perfect throughout, giving 50 different shades of slimeball, and the sequence where Jack abducts him from his motorcade is dynamite. But the ending is rather abrupt again, and no doubt will be cleared away within the first episode of the final season

Onto the final 12-episode season, set in London, with Chloe in her final form as a Lisbeth Salander style emo hacktivist! (Then I'll try that Legacy sequel/spin-off series.)

Die Another Day

Me: I hope that with the move to London, 24 will take the opportunity to do some different stuff!

24: OPENING SHOT - "EAST LONDON MOSQUE". OH AND PUT SOME OF THAT MUSLIM SINGING IN THE SCORE.

Me: groan

Yayyy, the recurring characters 'some of Jack's tattoos' are back!

Best thing about the UK setting is hearing Jack and Chloe say "pub" a lot.

Finished it. Disappointing. Even with only 12 episodes it still waffles on and does all the same stuff again. It's cool to see Jack doing action scenes in London streets, but Chloe's makeover is superficial - she's still just 'running comms' even if she's doing it from the pub - President Heller is bland - even though they give him Alzheimer's it doesn't have a single effect on the story - and even though they're in London, they have a CIA base there which is CTU in all but name. The fridging of Jack's love interests continues and the series is left on a cliffhanger that will never be resolved. The only thing that can be said for it is that the action is still really good, and overall the show is still... fine.

Legacy

First episode was pretty good! Almost all the same old stuff, but done well with some cool action and it's good having a lead who isn't a CTU person (though I'm sure they'll do the post-S1 Jack Bauer thing where within a couple of episodes he's so necessary to foil the villains that CTU give him enough authority and resources that he may as well be a CTU agent).

Finished 24 Legacy! It was okay but very quickly became the same old stuff, as expected. Having a new lead didn't make much difference, he pretty much just turned into Jack Bauer immediately. It was cool having Tony show up as a mercenary with... maybe not an entire heart of gold, but at least a ventricle. Though he doesn't get much to do, and there's no real mention of who broke him out of jail, how he feels about the conspiracy he never got to dismantle etc, so he may as well have been a new character tbh. There was an entire subplot for the first half that could have been reduced to a two minute scene without effecting the rest of the show (the old 'terrorist cell with family drama and a kid having second thoughts' standard), but everything else was pretty well interconnected. It's good to see some Black people on the show, even though they're all either drug dealing gangbangers, ex-drug dealers (the protagonist!) or villains. And there are non-villain queer characters for the first time, they're heroes in fact, and they're not even queer coded or stereotyped (as far as I could tell, anyway)! Bit of an underwhelming way for the franchise to go out, though. Would be cool if they could do a movie or a videogame to tie up all the loose ends, combine the main series with Legacy, and dish out some happy endings.