Press: The Season of Second Chances - NYT [Media: TV - 24]

The Season of Second Chances - New York Times: "Fox's '24' worked in the opposite direction: the characters grew less and less interesting as Day 4 progressed. The fourth season began with a fresh slate. Jack Bauer's annoying daughter was gone, a new president was in the Oval Office, Jack had a new job working for the Secretary of Defense and a new girlfriend who happened to be his boss's daughter. But soon enough, the series began to strain under its self-imposed limitations: 24 hours in a day are too many to sustain the series' conceit of real-time action, and the same plot twists that weighed down previous seasons kept coming back. Audrey was kidnapped and rescued by Jack, then Tony was kidnapped and rescued by Jack. Last time Tony jeopardized national security to save his wife Michelle's life; this time Michelle jeopardized Tony's life to save national security. President Palmer returned to the White House when the sitting president realized he didn't have the right stuff to lead the country through a nuclear attack by terrorists.

"And even that peril palled. Chekhov's rule about a gun in the first act should also apply to nuclear warheads. After raising the threat level so high so early, it would have been better if at least one terrorist missile could have hit its target. The season's only innovation was the Ann Coulterish sensibility veining the plot: that nice middle-class Muslim family turned out to be a sleeper cell of terrorist moles, and torture was a post-Sept. 11 necessity that only pantywaist Washington bureaucrats found objectionable."