From: Mitch Berg<\/p>\n
Re: Next Two Seasons<\/p>\n
Joel,<\/p>\n
About this time last year, I started a binge of watching the first four seasons of 24 <\/em>in, essentially, a six-week bender. I just couldn’t stop watching. <\/em>I got reeled in. So while I missed most of Day 5, I made this past season of 24<\/em> my first “appointment TV” in nearly 20 years.<\/p>\n And like most of the rest of the Bauersphere, I was – I’ll exercise my gift for understatement – bored silly with this past season.<\/p>\n I got to thinking about this, since the A’nE network is replaying Day One at 6AM every day.\u00a0 The morning after Day Six sputtered to a scarcely-lamented end, I caught an episode from Day One; Jack was searching the first round of people trying to assassinate David Palmer; Teri Bauer was searching for Kim, along with the infamous Mr. York, ostensibly the father of Kim’s friend but really an agent of Serbian assassins out to kidnap the Bauer family for what Bauer had done to Viktor Drezen’s brother, and so on, and so forth.\u00a0 Bauer was arguing with CTU, in a life-or-death battle, and arguing with his estranged wife while simultaneously defending his nation and his family.<\/p>\n You know – the kind of stuff we can all <\/em>identify with.\u00a0 Because what made Jack Bauer (and the show built around him) compelling was that for the first four Days, he dealt – on a big, life-or-death, hyper-dramatic, caffeine-stoked level – with things that matter to all of us;\u00a0 loyalty to friends, to family,<\/a> to something bigger; the shortcomings we all have in exercising that loyalty; the twists and turns that life (or huge shadowy terrorist conspiracies) throw in the way of that ideal.<\/p>\n On the other hand, after the first four hours (which were as good as anything in the first five Days), Day Six felt like West Wing<\/em> with the occasional shootout – except West Wing<\/em> wrote about the canoodling and cavorting about the corridors of the innermost inner circles well.\u00a0 24 <\/em>has never been about “watching the machinery work”; the only way the show ever made the inner circle of the White House remotely compelling was to wrap it up in a character, David Palmer, who was having the same crises Bauer was; right and wrong, good and evil, and the many very gray shades he – everyone – navigates between them.<\/p>\n The big problem?\u00a0 Day Six had no big moral crises; no choices between family and duty; no “to execute Ryan Chappelle or not to execute Ryan Chappelle”; no hotels full of plague victims to isolate, with the moral consequences beating everyone involved over the heads.\u00a0 Day Six was just…too easy.<\/p>\n Oh, a lot more popped up, too – a lot of comparisons where Day Six came up wanting:<\/p>\n