24: What Happened?

We're at the halfway point of the eighth "day" of 24, so I thought it was time to check in and assess the damage, so to speak. Curiously, this week's episode was perhaps the best of this season so far, with more of the sort of action we expect from the show. But at the same time, there were still so many of the now-too-common moments of "Huh?" and "WTF?" that make me shake my head in disbelief. It pains me to say it, but 24 has become mostly a bore, even when the action cranks up.

The show has always suffered, even when it was at its best, from the need to fill out its real-time story lines by introducing subplots and secondary characters. This season this device has hit a new low with the story of CTU analyst Dana Walsh's sordid past coming back to haunt her, right in the middle of the pesky national terrorist crisis. Besides being groan-inducing week after week, this subplot wastes the actress Katee Sackhoff.

But I think it's been even worse to Freddie Prinze Jr., who plays her fiance Cole Ortiz, as he became an unwilling accomplice to Dana's misadventure. Prinze delivers his lines with all the enthusiasm of a fourth-grader giving an oral report in front of the class. He's like a talking piece of driftwood. I'm not familiar with the rest of his acting career, so I'm not sure if he's really this bad an actor, he just can't get a proper grip on this particular role, or if he's merely as bored as the rest of us.

There's more, but the more I think about it, the more depressing it becomes to contemplate writing about it. I don't even care anymore about the treaty negotiations going on between the presidents of the United States and the fictitious Middle Eastern country the terrorists are from. And the main plot, involving nuclear rods stolen by terrorists, feels like a retread of previous seasons' stories.

The one bright spot (for me, anyway) has been seeing the psychological unraveling of FBI agent Renee Walker after her involvement in last season's events and her eye-opening regarding the steps that sometimes have to be taken to protect the country from its enemies. But Renee has been out of the action for the past couple of weeks (another annoying habit that 24's writers have).

Jack Bauer, of course, is still Jack Bauer, and we are still treated to the occasional Jack moments that fans of the series love so much. But they seem fewer and farther between this season, which may just be caused by the overall sense of lassitude that now pervades the show. The rumors suggest that this season will indeed be the end of the line for Jack and his cohorts, and the show has wanted to establish itself on the big screen for a few years now anyway, which makes more sense to me at this point.

If you enjoy this type of show and would like to watch something more satisfying, I can't recommend the British series MI-5 highly enough. The show has aired in the UK (where it's called Spooks) since 2002, and series (the British term for seasons) one through four aired in the US on the A&E network before they were seized with reality-show fever. I would have thought that BBC America would show it, but we didn't have that channel until a couple of years ago, so perhaps they did at some point.

MI-5 is orders of magnitude more realistic than 24 (sometimes disturbingly so), and it's a lot less predictable. Our local PBS station started showing MI-5 weekly some time last year, but the way they schedule the airings is frustratingly inconsistent. For the month of March, they have replaced the Saturday night high-definition showings of MI-5 (perfect for DVR capture) with "viewers' favorites," presumably in conjunction with fundraising.

The better idea, then, is probably to go with Netflix. British shows tend to be produced in smaller batches of episodes; the first series of MI-5 was six episodes, and all subsequent series have been ten, so it won't take as long to watch as some American shows. And Netflix even has the first four series available to watch via their streaming feature, so you don't even have to wait for a DVD to arrive to sample the show and see if you like it.