24: Time to Call It a Day

It pains me to say it, but 24, one of the most influential shows of the past decade, has lost its mojo, to the point where last night I gave serious thought to never watching it again. Really, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. By the time a show gets to season eight, it’s usually on its last legs creatively anyway, a fact that is even more understandable with a show like 24, so structured yet so narrow in its storytelling capabilities.

This season, in an attempt to breathe new life into the series, it’s changed locations again (to New York from D.C. last year) and has added some familiar faces to the cast (Freddie Prinze, Jr., Mykelti Williamson, Battlestar Galactica’s Katee Sackhoff). None of this has done much to energize the show, though. Prinze, Jr. and Williamson have made virtually no impression on me yet, while Sackhoff is saddled with this season’s obligatory ridiculous subplot. It seems her character, Dana, isn’t who her CTU co-workers think she is. A fresh-out-of-prison ex is threatening to expose her secret, all the while leaving viewers rolling their eyes and waiting for the next scene featuring our hero, Jack Bauer. (With so many moles in CTU over the years, you'd think someone would do a better job vetting these people.)

Jack himself, played with all the right fits and starts by the reliable Kiefer Sutherland, is given far too little screen time this year. Sucked into a plot wherein a visiting foreign president (he’s from a fictional Middle Eastern country whose name I can’t recall, but I know it ends in “stan”) is being targeted for death in the middle of a peace accord with the U.S., Jack just can’t so no when he thinks the world needs him. Of course, in typical 24 fashion, it turns out that the president (Anil Kapoor, the game show host from Slumdog Millionaire) is being set up by his own nefarious brother. And it doesn’t end there: there’s a nuclear weapons trade involving some Russian baddies, leading to a whole subset of characters we don’t care about, despite their bad accents.

There’s just too much inconsequential filler in this season of 24 to keep me interested. The scenes without Jack seem, more than ever, blatantly designed to kill time so that he can travel from one location to another. At least in past seasons, the subplots were generally interesting, Kim’s infamous run-in with a cougar notwithstanding. No such luck this time around. (On a side note: can someone please explain the appeal of Mary Lynn Rajskub's eternally peeved Chloe? After so many seasons, her one-note act has gone from tiresome to intolerable, yet she continues to be popluar among fans.)

Aside from a few nifty explosions in the opening hours and the shock of seeing Renee (Annie Wersching), undercover with the Russians, saw off a man’s thumb, this season has been nothing but lackluster, no longer delivering the intensity that used to be innate. The writers have obviously grown complacent and I, unfortunately, have grown bored.