24: Season One DVD Collection [DVD]

I never understood the hype around 24. I never got to see the first episode on TV of any series, and couldn't dedicate the time to it, so never gave it a chance.

Someone recently said it was like the Bourne Identity, which I loved and the box set was very reasonably priced on amazon at the time, so I thought I would give it a go.

WOW!!!!!!!!!!!! By the second episode I was hooked. The pace keeps on going through each episode, with more twists and turns than a roller coaster. OK so some of them are a little contrived, but you forgive the show, cos it is so clever. It sucks you in, to thinking you have worked out what is going on, then it twists the other way and you have to rethink everything.

Be warned though. It will take over your life, and you will not be able to turn it off

A short while ago, I was sat watching 24 on DVD. It was about twelve midnight and I was on disc four of the set. I went to sleep at 9am the next morning, having fed all the discs into my player one after the other. That's the power of this brilliant drama series.

24 begins straightforward enough: someone is plotting to assassinate an African - American senator who's on the doorstep to becoming President of the U.S. By the time the series ends, this is long forgotten...

The acting of the main players is flawless without exception, with Kiefer Sutherland being particularly brilliant in this series which was notoriously difficult to shoot. The 24 of the title refers to the fact that every event of the series occurs inside a day. I was constantly trying to grasp this concept while watching, but it is merely a device used to accelerate the action to warp speed; there is literally no dead space on the screen since every act, no matter how innocuous it may seem, is drenched in tension.

The plot rapidly becomes simply serpentine, with traitors being exposed and then replaced by other traitors, villains die and are replaced by even more insane and clever villains, bluff follows bluff, counter bluff follows counter bluff, and the series is capped by a shocking and yet somehow sickeningly "on the cards" ending.

Being on DVD has the sole advantage of making use of the 16:9 aspect ratio for those with widescreen TVs. There are no real "extras" to speak of, except for a lovely little spot with Sutherland explaining how the show was conceived and produced, and an alternate ending (although it's a good job they didn't use it). Be Warned: inside the DVD cover you'll find a small booklet. FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE, DON'T READ IT UNTIL YOU'VE WATCHED THE SERIES, AS IT CONTAINS EACH HOUR'S EVENTS.

You will not be disappointed.

For those unfamiliar with the format, 24's "gimmick" is that each hour-long episode follows, in more or less real time, an hour in the life of Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), a Government agent working at the Counter-Terrorist Unit (CTU), in Los Angeles, as he races to avert a national crisis.

In this first series, Jack's wife and daughter are held hostage and he is blackmailed into helping a group of terrorists assassinate U.S. Presidential candidate Senator David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) on election day. The supporting characters have their own subplots as well, with Jack's daughter Kim (Elisha Cuthbert) trying to escape her captors and Senator Palmer dealing with a family crisis.

The series has become known for its outlandish leaps of logic and plot twists which defy belief, and there are many, but all of these add to the drama and tension, and are handled in such a way that the viewer readily accepts them and at the end of each episode is left screaming for more.

24 has the uncanny power to grab your attention and not let go until that iconic clock ticks down to the end of another day. If you have the series on DVD, you will quite happily sit and watch four, five or even six episodes in succession because you just will not want to wait to find out how Jack gets himself out of ever more absurd and life threatening cliffhanger situations at the end of each episode. This show instantly became my favourite TV programme when I first watched it in 2001, and has remained so over the four subsequent series, right up to the gripping series 5 currently airing on Sky One.

For the first series, the writers kept to a fairly safe and familiar situation and set about telling it in a fresh and new way, saving the edgier stories for later series when the show had become a hit. The basic plot is as outlined above, with an important political figure under threat, the kidnapping of a government agent's family in order to force him to help the terrorists, a personal vendetta and a mole inside the agency feeding terrorists information. Oh, and a major twist right at the end, but you'll have to watch it to find out what it is.

The series, while brilliant, is not without its faults. The writers of the series never wrote more than four or five episodes ahead, so even they did not know how the show was going to end, which does show as the pacing is off in places, with some slow, lumbering episodes with not much happening sandwiched between high-drama shows with way too much going on. And of course the ubiquitous plot twists, which stretch the realms of belief to the limits but as I say are accepted because they enhance the drama.

This show is unmissable.