FOX's 24

[djgeneral]

Also talks the name could be changed to simply "Jack Bauer" since the entire show is planned on being rebooted.

Another big question is whether or not any of the cast (mainly Chloe) will return.

[Samus Aran]

Originally Posted by McCrutchy

I'm excited to hear that 24 could be coming back, but it really does need to be a full 24-episode series. Part of what made the show so unique and interesting was the real-time format AND also the fact that it took course over a single day, which meant you had to experience all the changes of a day along with the season. The commercial breaks allowed enough time to slip by in between that you didn't feel things were totally ludicrous, but at the same time, with so many narrative threads, you really felt the pressure/excitement of knowing things were always happening, and not just happening because the narrative says so.

But so much of what was happening was just padding and/or them running out of ideas to cover a full season. With a 12-episode season, you wouldn't have a CTU director's psycho daughter taking up all her time and then finding a way to commit suicide despite being the only patient at the CTU medical center, or bad guys escaping perimeters a half dozen times, or all the presidential personal nonsense.

[metaridley]

Edgar and President Hassan's deaths were the hardest for me to stomach. Hassan's especially was just heartbreaking and really gruesome.

I don't care how many new episodes there are, as long as Kim is kept to a bare minimum like in seasons 5 and 8. Or hell, her complete absence in 4 and 6.

[Samus Aran]

Originally Posted by metaridley

Edgar and President Hassan's deaths were the hardest for me to stomach. Hassan's especially was just heartbreaking and really gruesome.

I don't care how many new episodes there are, as long as Kim is kept to a bare minimum like in seasons 5 and 8. Or hell, her complete absence in 4 and 6.

I was glad Edgar died. I thought he was one of the worst characters to ever be listed in the main cast credits on 24. What was especially comical was how people behind him were dying left and right, but the stars were only sad when he bit it.

As for Kim, well ABC just canceled her show, so...

[blu-mike]

24 already has a thread but this deserves its own! I am shaking now!!

Dammit. Jack Bauer is coming back.

Everyone's favorite bad-ass TV show 24 looks like it may be getting a reboot for a ninth season if murmurings from the show's former home Fox are to believed



After Fox decided to cut short Kiefer Sutherland's not-so-impressive supernatural drama Touch, it appears Sutherland and Fox have done the sensible thing and agreed to revive Bauer and the espionage drama for one final outing.

Rumors of a 24 movie have swirled around constantly since the TV series originally ended in 2010, but it's never managed to get off the ground. Perhaps this new limited series will work from the movie scripts that never made it to the big screen.

Sutherland proved in Touch that he still had the charisma and star power to lead a show, dragging a tedious and underwhelming series and making it into something adequate and reasonably enjoyable through his sheer presence. And if Kiefer doesn't come back to Jack Bauer soon, it may be too late. Nobody wants to see the 24 hours where Jack is doing a crossword and searching for his reading glasses.

24 showrunner and Homeland exec Howard Gordon is believed to have pitched the idea for the new 24 series, so it looks like we're in safe hands and that the return of Bauer isn't purely for the sake of cash and/or because of a lack of new show ideas.

If anything, after an extended break and a time to recharge, series nine of 24 could potentially *whisper it* be one of the best yet.

[Tony208]

best news all year

[metaridley]

Originally Posted by Samus Aran

I was glad Edgar died. I thought he was one of the worst characters to ever be listed in the main cast credits on 24.

[LucasEatWorld]

Originally Posted by metaridley

Edgar and President Hassan's deaths were the hardest for me to stomach. Hassan's especially was just heartbreaking and really gruesome.

I don't care how many new episodes there are, as long as Kim is kept to a bare minimum like in seasons 5 and 8. Or hell, her complete absence in 4 and 6.

I agree with Edgar, but Hassan? Really? Idk that I would put that in my top 5, even top 10 saddest deaths in the series. For me, Mason's death was hard. That whole episode when you thought Jack was going to die (not really because the show obviously continued ) was just really sad, especially the phone call between Jack and Kim before Mason took over the plane.

[metaridley]

Originally Posted by LucasEatWorld

I agree with Edgar, but Hassan? Really? Idk that I would put that in my top 5, even top 10 saddest deaths in the series. For me, Mason's death was hard. That whole episode when you thought Jack was going to die (not really because the show obviously continued ) was just really sad, especially the phone call between Jack and Kim before Mason took over the plane.

What was wrong with Hassan's death?

George is one of my favorite characters, played by one of my favorite actors, so I'm in total agreement with you on that one.

[blu-mike]

I hope they clear up the prion variant cabal storyline from season 7.

[LucasEatWorld]

Originally Posted by metaridley

What was wrong with Hassan's death?

Nothing really. But that's the thing. It didn't really feel all that special for me to care or feel too sad. I just didn't seem as attached to him as I did other characters that died in the series.

[chris_sc77]

If its 13 episodes the premiere and finale should cover 1 hour of the day each and the remaining 11 eps should cover 2 hours each.

[Monolithium]

Originally Posted by SquidPuppet

24 was always ahead of the curve with the President, trying to be brave and new. We had an African American President before there really was one, and we had a Female President too.

So what will they do next in an attempt to be bold and slightly shocking?

Gay or Athiest?

President Akbar; an Arab-American Gaythiest

[Toptube]

Originally Posted by Canada

I hate that they killed Renne Walker (Anne Werching), yes Jack went on the warpath but seeing a love of his die happened in Season 1.... 7 didn't really add anything new or I thought....

I would actually argue that Season 7 feels like one of the most fresh seasons and has some strong character work. It's amazilng what a fresh coat of paint (location swap) and a few new characters can do for a show that is trapped by a gimmick and a long running formula.

Not only was the FBI better than CTU had been in a long time, But Renee Walker practically stole the show from Jack. She becomes this sort of reluctant reflection of Jack Bauer. Annie's performance as Renee is really good and she really fills out what the writers were going for. And even better about the whole thing, it really pries back Jack's lid on his feelings. He really does not want to see someone get caught up in the things he has had to do for so long. It was powerful stuff for 24 and would be on any show, really.

I really like Season 7 a lot. I mean it just did a lot of stuff right for 24. Havilng a second main character was great. Adding some new minor characters was great. Bringing back a fan favorite had me fist pumping and screaming at my TV. I mean GAWD, seeing Jack and

[Show spoiler]Tony running around together again, It

was great.

Originally Posted by R3P0

Yes because bringing someone back from the dead is so plausible...

BTW guys the article I read said NOTHING of a 24 Reboot



Where in these stories does it say Reboot, it would be Season 9

The info I have seen on this, it reads to me like they are looking to change a lot of stuff and sort of start fresh. Like an alternate universe. If that's the case, it doesn't matter what happened before.

I mean, yeah, directly transplanting an old character is a pipe dream (although I'm sure we will see chloe). But hell, bring back well liked characters, get back to the good aspects. It's not about plausiblity, not to me. A lot of bad moves were made with the writing of 24. They often would kill characters or skip straight to something SHOCKING, to try and artificially create an exclamation point on the page. Because doing stuff in real time should actually be boring. It was often stupid and frustrating. Why spend all this time building up something pretty great and then jump the shark and tear it all down because WHOA THIS SHOW IS CRAZY YEAH WE WRITE BASED ON INTERNET COMMENTS WHAAAAA. I know they killed Renee because some whiners on the internet said 24 was getting too sappy and didn't have enough gunshots per minute.

Originally Posted by Krethgar

Yeah but I did not like or care about most of the deaths in 24 either. I never saw character deaths as holy grails of writing as people try to make them out to be, they more looked like desperate attempts to milk plots or admission from writers of not being able to develop the characters properly.

I agree. I mean, not all of the deaths were bad. But many of them were used as a crutch to force the story in a different direction. Because as you said, they either weren't able to maintain it (likely due to compressed writing schedules) or they were just used as pure attempts for a ratings spike.ok we got what we wanted from that character now let's just kill them because viewers will love to see them hurt or freak out over their death. Either way, we like noise about 24.

Originally Posted by rockin

There's lots of little things really. In Season 6 when he came back from the Chinese prison, he seemed quite broken and at several times was unable to do his job properly. I liked that aspect, but it was like he got over it almost immediately and all was forgotten. I felt they should've carried it further. It reminded me how Jack was a bit broken in Season 2 after what happened in Season 1 and he was also struggling to deal with his drug habit in Season 3. It made him more human. I like to see Jack Bauer be Jack Bauer as much as everyone, but there were times where it just got a bit too far fetched.

Jack has nearly always had some extra thing occupying his headspace, to varying degrees of success. A lot of times it's women (wife, daughter, various girlfriends), there was

[Show spoiler]drugs

, partners (Chase, Renee),

[Show spoiler]PTSD from being tortured by the Chinese

, in Season 7

[Show spoiler] he get's radiation poisoning and starts periodically injecting to fend it off. He may as well have been Old Snake fighting off Fox Die (MGS series)

...there was always something.

Originally Posted by djgeneral

Yes, just checked. Tonight is the final episode.

Also:

7.55 million - season 1 average (12 episodes, excludes Bonus Fall 2013 episode)

2.68 million - season 2 average (12 episodes, finale not counted)

very alarming drop lol. but expected with the day change and no American Idol to help it

for a couple of years now, it has been both absolutely hilarious and upsetting to me that these well connected, subsidized, rich, resourceful media companies apparently cannot float a show on 1 million viewers. I mean it is just mind boggling to me that it is this way. 1 million viewers is. a. ton. of. people.
It's all about advertising revenue. The problem isn't that shows don't get ad dollars, it's that the companies publishing the shows have an all or nothing attitude. They want tons of money for ad rights on their shows, not just a lot of money.

But I really really think that most of the problem lies with the extremely antiquated Nielsen ratings system.

A. it only covers content watched via TV. Think about all the ways there are now, to view multimedia content.

B. there are 114 million households paying for TV. Only 25,000 are counted for ratings. That is insanely disproportionate. On top of that, they claim to be able to segment out demographics with that teeny sample. and then they try to weight the demographics, so that points from young adults and 20 somethings are worth more in ad dollars than all the other points. It's just insane. Millions of dollars ride on ratings that don't really mean anything. There is no way they can actually reflect what is actually happening with viewers. I would bet money that if most of the 114 million were counted, every single show ever, would have higher ratings recorded than what they pull out of their asses with the current system. And the companies buying ads refuse to pay for ratings recorded from shows that aren't watched during their air times, but are otherwise legally DVRed and watched later. And this is because the viewer has the option to skip the ads. To explain, in 2005 Nielsen started recording at least some amount of views/ratings from DVRed shows. But the data is not allowed to count towards ad costs.

Originally Posted by McCrutchy

I'm excited to hear that 24 could be coming back, but it really does need to be a full 24-episode series. Part of what made the show so unique and interesting was the real-time format AND also the fact that it took course over a single day, which meant you had to experience all the changes of a day along with the season.

For the first 3 seasons, I agree with you. 24 was new or relatively new, during these seasons. As such, its gimmick and formula/presentation felt fresh enough and different. Also, it was new enough for writers, they weren't struggling to write good stuff. The show instead just kept getting better.

But it needs to be remembered that 24 was on TV for a very long time. Long enough that A. its gimmick and formula/format wore out its welcome. Writers just couldn't always keep it together. Even most of the good seasons have some clear flaws. The "real time" and "24 hours" gimmicks really ended up as writing traps.

B. As 24 aged, other TV shows were coming out and doing other new stuff. Some of these shows didn't have as many trappings as 24 and were able to do some really great stuff. It makes 24 seem a bit antiquated. 24 was one of the first of the new age hour long TV dramas. But since then, It has been tough for it to stay relevant or be taken seriously, in the company of some other less restricted shows. I wanted really badly for them to get rid of the real time aspect and maybe even the 24 hour season. It really would have allowed the show and its writers more room to work. Starting with season four, 24 got stuck on a hit and miss streak. 4 was mostly a miss. 5 was a hit. 6 was a complete and utter miss. 7 was a hit. 8 was another horrible miss.

Originally Posted by Samus Aran

But so much of what was happening was just padding and/or them running out of ideas to cover a full season. With a 12-episode season, you wouldn't have a CTU director's psycho daughter taking up all her time and then finding a way to commit suicide despite being the only patient at the CTU medical center, or bad guys escaping perimeters a half dozen times, or all the presidential personal nonsense.

I really don't think that 24 episodes was too much for the writers to handle. I think the trappings of the 24 hour and real time gimmicks were the first problem.
Generally speaking, the base story threads of any given season of 24 are threads of a pretty high level. I mean that the basic story and archs for most of the seasons are quite good. And the sort of "three act" format often worked really well in the overall scheme of handling story threads and archs. I mean it's basically a way to build-in an assurance that the base story will be well paced enough to stretch for 24 episodes. It's pretty ingenious.

The problem is that the episode to episode pacing was restricted by it all needing to be fed to the viewer in real time. and really, it didn't even matter in later seasons that it was all happening in one day. Just that it was all playing out in front of you the whole time. Which makes it very tough to feed the viewer back story, context, setting, etc. It also makes it incredibly difficult to direct. You have to be very careful anytime you leave a scene and come back to it. You have to account for what might have/did happen, while we were away watching something else. It's improbable to maintain directorial poise with such a format.

Real time pacing also means that inevitably, at some point, a certain scenario will have way more screen time than it needs (which happened often.) There's a balance. You can't show the viewer something for a long time, unless it's incredibly interesting or it is something stimulating. usually "action". You also can't barely ever show things to a viewer. That creates a disconnect and neutralizes a lot of importance that a thing should otherwise have (Game of Thrones has huge problems with this in Season 2 and 3). The real time pacing is also responsible for a lot of forced action or shocker moments. Because watching stuff in "real time" really should be kind of boring or feel drawn out. So to gloss over the that, the easy route is to just starting shooting.

[metaridley]

I enjoyed reading everything you wrote Toptube but I loved season 8, while too many things in season 7 bothered me to the point where the only aspect of it I consistently enjoyed was Jon Voight hamming it up as a total Bond villain. He ended up being my favorite 24 baddie and SHOULD have stayed the Big Bad, instead of that terrible "everyone and their canary were behind David Palmer's assassination, including David Palmer himself (probably)" uber-conspiracy that just wouldn't die. So glad they jettisoned that shit with the last season and just shifted focus to the best non-Jack character 24's ever had, Charles Logan.

Oh and season 3 was a complete mess. The show was getting really stale by that point, like reheated leftovers. As an obsessive viewer since the pilot aired back in November of 2001, I almost stopped watching around the show's 80th Kimnapping early in S3. It got a little better for awhile but man, that season is saved only by a handful of truly great eps (the hotel virus arc), while the rest is just crap. Season 4 had its problems as well but overall I liked it a lot more and by the end it had recaptured the ol' 24 magic, going out with the best finale ever and setting up a truly epic fifth season.

I find it funny though that NOBODY likes season 6.

[Samus Aran]

I think even the least-liked seasons of 24 had something to offer.

Season 4 was interesting until the first bad guy plan of "remote controlling every nuclear power plant in America yet somehow people actually at these power plants can't do anything about it," which just turned out to be one part of a giant Rube Goldberg master plan by Houdini Marwan (who escaped from CTU perimeters like every fourth episode), especially when the endgame was just to shoot one nuclear missile at Los Angeles.

Season 6 was interesting until the nuke did go off. Unfortunately that was the fourth episode. Palmer No. 2 sucked as a president, Palmer sister sucked as a main character, a former regular was killed off for pure shock value, then suddenly Jack has an evil brother and father.

Season 8 hit every single 24 cliche in the book, even making a mole out of a character who was obviously never intended to be a mole. The only interesting part of this season was near the end when Jack turned into The Terminator and went after Logan.

[metaridley]

Originally Posted by Samus Aran

Season 8 hit every single 24 cliche in the book, even making a mole out of a character who was obviously never intended to be a mole. The only interesting part of this season was near the end when Jack turned into The Terminator and went after Logan.

What you wrote about seasons 4 and 6 is pretty accurate but 8 had plenty of interesting, extremely intense parts. The Dana Walsh character is easily the weakest aspect however and seemed like pure filler. At least she was much better utilized after the reveal.

I think season 8 did a great job of using those 24 cliches and putting a new spin or twist on familiar tropes. For example, it's the only season where nearly all the villains actually kept their word (well, maybe not Dana but she's a snake) and/or grew a conscience and tried to help stop the terror threat they were involved in.

Ultimately, the IRK terrorists only wanted to kill Hassan, and the dirty bomb (utilizing the last of the 4 types of WMDs: nuclear, biological, chemical and radiological) was just a means to that end. This is also the only season where the bad guys WIN. They killed the peace treaty and chose not to detonate the bomb, even though they totally could have.

24 had established itself WELL BEFORE its last season as one of the most repetitive shows on television, which I didn't mind since I'm such a huge Bond fan and I likened the series to the 007 franchise: take the formula and plug in new variables every iteration. Sometimes it'll work, sometimes it won't.

[kemcha]

The problem, also, was that 24 suffered from too much of the same thing. While I have no doubt that "terrorism" is a major pplot thread for any TV series, 24 needed to concentrate on other threats that didn't just deal with terrorism. There's only so much you can do with "terrorism" as the running threat before it becomes too monotonous.

I think the reason that NCIS and NCIS: LA does so well is that they don't ma9inly focus on just anti-terrorism. First and foremost, these shows are basically criminal procedure law shows like Criminal Minds, where they deal with solving a crime, rather than dealing with the "courtroom" antics of said crimes.

I do think that Fox needs to spruce up the series a little more and concentrate on more than just the running "terrorist" threat because, after eight seasons of the same crap, you really need to spruce up the series with other threats, as well. Maybe even have several ongoing threats going on throughout the season/series.

[Moefiz]

Originally Posted by kemcha

The problem, also, was that 24 suffered from too much of the same thing. While I have no doubt that "terrorism" is a major pplot thread for any TV series, 24 needed to concentrate on other threats that didn't just deal with terrorism. There's only so much you can do with "terrorism" as the running threat before it becomes too monotonous.

I think the reason that NCIS and NCIS: LA does so well is that they don't ma9inly focus on just anti-terrorism. First and foremost, these shows are basically criminal procedure law shows like Criminal Minds, where they deal with solving a crime, rather than dealing with the "courtroom" antics of said crimes.

I do think that Fox needs to spruce up the series a little more and concentrate on more than just the running "terrorist" threat because, after eight seasons of the same crap, you really need to spruce up the series with other threats, as well. Maybe even have several ongoing threats going on throughout the season/series.

Totally agree with you on this...I don't mind the "terrorist" threat but it would be nice if they could do something different with the storyline...also what got played out rather quickly in the past seasons for me was the "traitor" aspect, has a regular viewer you know someone within Jack's surrounding is going to betray him or the team, or that Jack would be running from the same government that he is working for...once again for me it got tiresome season after season ..give me a season where Jack does his thing and doesn't end up running while doing his job and I am happy..

[Roonan]

Originally Posted by kemcha

The problem, also, was that 24 suffered from too much of the same thing. While I have no doubt that "terrorism" is a major pplot thread for any TV series, 24 needed to concentrate on other threats that didn't just deal with terrorism. There's only so much you can do with "terrorism" as the running threat before it becomes too monotonous.

24 is about a counter terrorism agent working for a counter terrorism unit. How exactly are they supposed to avoid terrorism? It's against the basic premise of the series.

Originally Posted by kemcha

I think the reason that NCIS and NCIS: LA does so well is that they don't ma9inly focus on just anti-terrorism.

NCIS is a "case of the week" crime investigation series (not anti-terrorism, although that can be part of the crime), which is all they do on almost every episode. Not comparable. Part of the appeal of 24 is that it's not another series which uses that mold...