A highly-skilled, resourceful agent, blond and attractive, works for a shadowy agency whose headquarters is a split-level operation, unfinished concrete walls and task lighting. The director looks down on countless operatives either glued to workstations or carrying clipboards and the most tech-savvy of lot, officially and unofficially, aids the agent because the people running things cannot always be trusted…If you're thinking 24, you'd be half right.In 1990, French producer/director/writer Luc Besson introduced us to Nikita, a drug-abuser sentenced to death for killing a police officer during a botched drugstore robbery. She is "rescued" by a shadowy agency where she is detoxed and trained to be a sophisticated assassin. The plot was wildly improbable but so slickly executed that you didn't care. (At the time, the film was hailed as "the end of French cinema." Since then Besson has produced the highly successful Transporter series.)Nikita came to American television in 1997 via the USA Network's La Femme Nikita. The plot was basically the same except this time Nikita was not a substance abuser and (we find out eventually) she was "framed" for her crime so she could be brought into the family business, becoming the director of "Section One, a clandestine anti-terrorist organization" in the last episode. The series ended its five-year run in March of 2001; two of the show's developers, Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran, had been working on a series of their own, 24, which debuted on Fox in November 2001. Essentially it was just Nikita with a male lead and the novel innovation of each hour of the show representing one hour in "real time," the entire season playing out in the course of a single "day."
To date, Jack Bauer has saved the world (or at least the US, or at the very least, LA) a half dozen times. He has kicked heroin addiction (cold turkey) in a single day, been clinically dead (twice) and survived any number of gunshots, collisions, explosions, beatings and various methods of torture. And for at least one day, he does not seem to need to eat, sleep or use the bathroom.The seasons have been uneven with (in order) the best being Seasons 5 (terrorist plot facilitated by the president) and 4 (terrorists simultaneously melt down all US nuclear reactors); Seasons 1 (plot to assassinate a presidential candidate) and 2 (the first US nuclear bomb threat) were pretty good. Seasons 6 (another nuclear bomb threat) and 3 (bioterrorism by a drug cartel) were rather lackluster. Season 7 begins this Sunday with a change of locations (DC instead of LA) and more topicality (US interrogation policies, US indifference to African politics “not serving our interests” and the international entities that take advantage of this turmoil). It looks promising, but for fans of the show, even "bad" 24 is still pretty good.
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