It boggles the mind to imagine what the front page of the LosAngeles Times would have looked like on the day after the remarkablyeventful 24 hours detailed from midnight to midnight, ostensibly inreal time, over the 24 one-hour episodes of Fox's "24" last season.
They don't make headlines big enough for a day like this.
You had a major plane crash in the desert, a decisive presidentialprimary, a political assassination attempt, gunplay and deaths allover the city nearly every hour and assorted other crimes as KieferSutherland's special agent Jack Bauer tried to thwart a conspiracythat had penetrated even his own government agency.
The death toll alone was "probably in triple figures, even minusthe plane crash," executive producer Howard Gordon said.
And now we get to watch it as it would have unfolded, with cable'sFX rerunning all 24 episodes in succession, beginning at 11 p.m.Sunday. Even newcomers will marvel at how it all holds up, as a TVseries if not a real-life journalistic endeavor.
Things moved so smoothly that, apart from a few dubious bouts ofamnesia, this daring ***1/2 experiment in suspenseful storytellingkept all its plates in the air and spinning, holding viewers rapt atnearly every turn and never once allowing the tension to slacken.
So get comfortable, synchronize your watch and get ready thisweekend to relive a day like no other as the drumbeat begins for theSept. 17 release of the series on DVD, a few possible Emmy wins onSept. 23 and the debut of the show's second season on Oct. 29.
"[The second season] is daunting to me because people weresatisfied on so many different levels from the first season," saidSutherland, who fronts the best drama series Emmy nominee and is upfor a best actor award himself.
"Even though the ending upset a lot of people, I think they werevery satisfied that the show kept true to what it promised, thatyou're not going to walk away from this clean, that it's not going tobe tidy. So there's a real challenge is to make this season better."
Sutherland, a veteran of at least 11 feature films that haveopened No. 1 at the box office, calls this "the most important yearof my career, and my career has been 15 years." He points out thatthe typical theatrical movie "doesn't come close to what we pull downon a Tuesday night in terms of viewers."
The controversial ending to which he refers is the death of amajor character in the final episode, which Gordon said "was up fordebate until the very end" among the show's staff, the studio and thenetwork. Endings with and without the death were both shot, but inthe end, as with the abrupt plane crash in the opening hour, theyopted for the outcome that would shock viewers most.
"That's one of the things about '24.' It's that anything canhappen," Gordon said.
"There are a lot of aspects of the show that are very soap opera-ish," Sutherland said, promising there will be no cases of amnesiathis coming season, which is set on East Coast a year later withDennis Haysbert's candidate David Palmer now in the White House.
(Alert to editors at the Washington Post: Brace yourself for aremarkably eventful news day.)
But if "24" has soap opera elements, so too does it have a soap-opera-like following, fans who watch the program and track its everytwist with unusual intensity.
"Sometimes it's frightening when you're trying to have dinner andthey sit down at your table and go, 'I can't believe this happened,'and it's like they've known you for 20 years," Sutherland said. "Youwatch their hands, and if their hands are on the table, you go 'Well,yeah, I can't believe they wrote that either' and you kind of remindthem it's a show.
"The fact is to have someone really excited about a show thatyou're doing is a lot better than some other experiences I've had,which is, 'I can't believe you did that film. That film sucked.' Icertainly prefer this to that."
To save the free world and get good reviews? Who wouldn't?
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