By Dan Jewel

   If there were an award for potential squandered, “24” would’ve won last season, hands down.
   It began as one of the most thrilling shows on television. Its much-hyped gimmick was perfectly executed: 24 episodes, played out in real time, spanned 24 hours in the life of Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), agent extraordinaire for the L.A. branch of the Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU). His assignment was to stop the assassination of presidential candidate David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert), a task complicated when his own wife and daughter were kidnapped.
   The first half of the season was tense, suspenseful entertainment—and then the show collapsed. Seemingly out of fresh ideas, the writers began borrowing from the worst of soap opera cliché. By the time Jack’s wife was stumbling around with amnesia, “24” resembled “Melrose Place” in its final years.
   And then came the finale: Nina (Sarah Clarke), Jack’s former lover and most trusted ally, revealed as the mole, murdered Jack’s wife. After all the writers had put the poor sap through—kidnapping, rape, a newly discovered pregnancy, not to mention that bout of amnesia—they had the chutzpah to kill her off. It was a move so breathtakingly shocking that it reinvigorated the show.
   This season, the writers have written every episode with that same sort of go-for-broke bravado. Ten episodes in, “24” is without question the best show on TV.
   The ante was enormously upped with this season’s premise: Jack Bauer is called back to work by now-President David Palmer to find and stop a nuclear bomb set to be detonated by terrorists in LA within 24 hours.
   In the post-Sept. 11 universe, this is an awfully touchy subject to tackle. But not a single second of “24” (airing Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on Fox) has played it safe.
   Jack, still half mad with grief and guilt, is operating with a severely compromised sense of morality. On the season premiere, he coolly killed a man to boost his undercover credibility with some thugs. George Mason (played by a wonderfully oily Xander Berkeley), head of the CTU branch, was exposed to lethal doses of radiation early in the season and has been given only a matter of hours to live. It’s given him the same brash damn-the-rules attitude that Jack has — and, for that matter, that the writers seem to have.
   Every single episode this season has contained some genuine shock.
    Characters are killed off right and left (the biggest name to join the cast, Sara Gilbert from “Roseanne,” was dispatched a few episodes ago). Characters we trust turn out to be villains, and everyone’s motives seem suspect.
    Some of this is deliciously far-fetched. But if anything, much of what’s happened has an alarmingly real feel to it.
   Suspects are treated with a complete disregard for rights and protocol, the sort of things that really don’t matter when there’s a nuclear weapon about to go off. 
   (In one case, the action got a little too real — CTU was bombed, treating us to scenes of bloodied, battered people trapped under rubble, the only scene that seemed to push the envelope a bit too far.) 
   And Jack and his fellow agents haven’t gotten any closer to figuring out where the bomb is or who’s behind the plot. The clock’s ticking, literally.
   Not that “24” is perfect. The show still doesn’t seem to know what to do with Jack’s daughter, Kim (Elisha Cuthbert, greatly improved from last year but still the weakest link), who seems doomed to spend her life running and hiding and running and hiding.
   But in nearly every other way, “24” has been absolutely brilliant, the most viscerally exciting show in years.
   In recent weeks, a connection was discovered between Nina and the terrorists, forcing Jack to turn to his wife’s murderer for help. He’s made it clear that he intends to kill her once their job is done.
    On any other show, we’d be absolutely certain that would never come to pass. On “24,” you never know.

January 24, 2003© 2003 Media Life

-Dan Jewel is a senior editor at Biography Magazine in New York and a frequent contributor to Media Life.

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