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24 - Season One Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 44 Reviews)

First Season good but the series gets better
I just started watching 24 this past season (5) and then watched seasons 1, 2, and 3. Because I did this backwards, I knew how the first season would end, which ruined the surprise ending. However, this is one of my favorite shows and I still have season 4 to watch. FYI - I was able to get this new from Amazon at a lower price than used on Ebay.

24 Season One
I received my DVD's in very good shape. It came very quickly. I was very pleased with it.

Almost perfection

Is this the best series of 24? Probably, if only because of the skill and effort needed to devise the plot and the characters for the first time. But this is a magnificent story with so many different plot lines going on simultaneously. There's even some fantastic tension among the senator's family who spend almost the entire 24 hours hanging around in a hotel.

-- SPOILER WARNING: do not read on if you haven't already seen the series.

You can get a 100% accurate idea of who survives this series simply by looking at the DVD box covers of the subsequent series. There are a large number of deaths in this story, and many of them are incredibly callous in their execution. The one at the very end is almost unbelievable, because the victim just wanders into the wrong place at the wrong time. I wonder if the producers were certain right at the very start of the production that this particular murder was going to happen.

The construction of deceit throughout this series is fantastically well done. You have to watch the series through a second time, once you know who the CTU traitors are, to see how subtly their second-thoughts reactions are portrayed. For example: the only clue you get that the (first) dead girl's father isn't who he says he is comes when he and Terry Bauer arrive at the furniture shop and he fails to recognise his own daughter's car. Miss that -- and nearly everyone does, first time through -- and you get a nasty surprise a couple of hours later.

On a more philosophical level, the thing I dislike about 24 is the implication that some lives are worth a lot more than others. An enormous number of people lose their lives in this story to protect the senator's family and Jack Bauer's family. I question whether it was really worth it.

But Jack Bauer is America's James Bond (same initials, too), and you just have to accept a huge death toll with both.

The only other thing I dislike about this series is that the split down the middle, when the second production team takes over at 14.00, is rather visible. Jack has just rescued his family, they're sitting together exhausted in the helicopter, and it all feels rather the end of Jurassic Park. It could have ended there. The second story doesn't quite have the impact of the first half.

Finally, in case anyone was wondering, the Andrea Newman who wrote and/or produced several of these episodes is not the same Andrea Newman who wrote UK TV's 'Bouquet of Barbed Wire' in the 1970s.

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