It’s easy to forget how groundbreaking “24” was when it premiered in November 2001 in the wake of 9/11. I need to rewatch that first season (I see that Amazon Prime has it) to get back in the headspace of its turn-of-the-century ingenuity. Although the terrorist-themed plots were fairly fresh for a TV drama, the real-time aspect is what really hooked me. I enjoyed seeing if the writers could stay true to that premise.
After the first “day,” I hoped subsequent seasons would latch onto the real-time premise – maybe with new actors and entirely new workplaces and plots. But the opposite happened: Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer became an icon, with his predictably gruff line deliveries turning into drinking games. And outside of sitcoms, there hasn’t been another show that’s so much the same from season to season as “24.”
As the years went by, “24’s” Middle Eastern terrorists went from stereotypes to cliches, many of the show’s go-to plot points became so obvious that they functioned as unintentional jokes, and it took place in real time only in the sense that there was a ticking clock on the screen, not in the sense that it remotely resembled the flow of time — or the flow of L.A. traffic. (By comparison, the earliest episodes of “24” have a slow-burn suspense to them that I adored. That was mostly gone by the end of Season 1, though.)
Now, three years removed from the mini-season “24: Live Another Day” (which should’ve been “12: Live Another Day”) and seven years removed from the last full season, we have “24: Legacy”(8 p.m. Eastern, Mondays, Fox). (Again, it technically should be called “12: Legacy,” as only a dozen episodes are planned.)
“Legacy” stars a new lead – former military hero Eric Carter (Corey Hawkins) — but otherwise will be fresh only to people who’ve never seen “24.” Even after three years for creators Robert Cochran and Manny Coto to replenish their creative juices, almost everything is STILL an internal cliché, right down to the double agent inside CTU. When Director Rebecca Ingram (Miranda Otto) tells her husband, Senator John Donovan (Jimmy Smits), that she’ll miss a banquet because “there’s a situation at CTU,” I bet I’m not the only one who wanted to say “No sh–!”
The laziness of the plotting is inexcusable, but that having been said, the material is executed professionally. Action-scene aficionados will enjoy the sequence of Carter fighting terrorists in a junkyard; one bad guy gets smushed by a giant rolling conduit pipe, then Carter stabs the last guy to death with a stray piece of rebar. I also enjoyed seeing Eric’s wife Nicole (Anna Diop) chip in to repel the home invasion.
With the CTU HQ sequences being yawn-inducing (there is no Chloe or Edgar to be found, although one employee is the cousin of the latter), the best part of the post-Super Bowl pilot – which takes place from noon to 1 p.m. in Washington, D.C. in a vague near-future — is the high school sequence. Amira Dubayev (Kathryn Prescott) appears to be fighting off a lovestruck classmate in the halls, but it turns out he’s actually concerned about her suspicious terrorist-sounding communications, which he oversaw. He tells a teacher about it, but we learn the teacher is in on it, too — and he’s the girl’s lover. The actress is a young-looking 25, so it’s presently unclear whether Amira is an adult posing as a student, or whether this is a true student-teacher tryst. Either way, it’s the most entertaining plot so far.
If the showrunners can serve up more outside-of-CTU threads like this one, “24: Legacy” could be fun. But every “mole inside CTU” or “CTU coworkers clashing” scene takes the spark out of the show and makes a viewer wonder if this is supposed to be a self-parody. (I’m not the only one who isn’t hooked; “Legacy” rates a 5.4 on IMDB, compared to 8.4 for the entire run of the parent series.) In the later seasons of “24,” I didn’t trust the writers to deliver anything unexpected. Now, even with the dawn of a new day that “Legacy” offers, a steady supply of original ideas seems like too much to hope for.