Lukewarm on "24"

The Oriental Wife and I have finished the first four episodes of "24". It's pretty good but has yet to totally suck us in like "Lost" or "Alias" did.

One gripe I have is that the various plotlines are lurching to ever-more improbable scenarios. It's as if they wrote the scripts by playing that grade school game where someone starts a story with a sentence, then the next person adds a sentence and the next person builds on that, etc.

In "24", it works like this:

"Okay, so Jack's daughter sneaks out to go party..."

"Only the guys she meets kidnap her and her friend..."

"And they break her friend's arm so they have to give her heroin for the pain..."

"But then they run away while parked at an airport..."

"But get lost in a bad part of town populated exclusively with male whores, pimps and homeless people..."

"Then her friend gets hit by a car and is left for dead..."

And here's the plotline for the presidential candidate whose assassination Jack is trying to prevent:

"Senator Palmer gets an assassination threat..."

"But he gets a phone call from a journalist with a mysterious allegation, and sneaks out..."

"And parks in a seedy garage in the bad part of town..."

"Where he faces down a couple of thugs who are smashing cars..."

"And meets a shady character to talk about the phone call..."

"Which turns out to be an allegation that his son might have murdered a man..."

"Who raped his daughter..."

"And then was thought to have committed suicide!"

"Yeah, this plotline rocks!"

See what I mean? It's just a little farfetched for what I thought was supposed to be a hyper-realistic show.

That's not to say it's crap. In fact, it's just starting to get engrossing now. And there are other details that do make it more interesting. For instance, while Jack is supposed to be this kick-ass agent, he does fuck up and make mistakes, in one case getting a cop killed. He's not infallible. We'll see how the next 18 hours play out.