Date of airing: November 6, 2001 (FOX)
Nielsen ratings information: 11.64 million viewers, 7.5/11 in Households, 5.4/13 with Adults 18-49
The television series that started a revolution of TV in 2001 – or something like that. The show defied quite a few rules and in the process changed them and wrote an entire book of new ones. Television that brought FOX back to a status they were probably missing after losing it somewhere at the end of the 1990s, suffering one flop after another. With the end of MARRIED WITH CHILDREN and the BEVERLY HILLS, 90210 franchise, there weren’t a lot of shows that won new fans and viewers. DARK ANGEL wasn’t interested in success or longevity, MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE lost traction after being in Nielsen’s Top 20 during its first season, THE X-FILES was in the middle of ending its run, and most of the new shows couldn’t get a footing with the audience. Sure, TWENTY-FOUR wasn’t FOX’s savior ratings-wise between the Fall of 2001 and Spring of 2002, but at least the network managed to create a huge critical success before losing footing as one of the big six networks and maybe even falling below the ratings standards of UPN and WB – and here it didn’t even matter whether the animation block on Sunday was the only thing that made FOX an interesting network for the audience.
So, TWENTY-FOUR didn’t just change television in 2001, it also somewhat changed FOX as a broadcast network. They were a little careful with new shows after the premiere of TWENTY-FOUR – they didn’t just create new stuff and put it on the air right away because of the names involved (HARSH REALM or TIME OF YOUR LIFE – both shows centered around their one big name in the center: Chris Carter in the former, Jennifer Love Hewitt in the latter, and after a few weeks they were judged by the audience to be bad shows), or because they sounded interesting enough to be edgy (ACTION, which aired on the wrong network at the wrong time), they instead were trying to develop real shows. Shows that still flopped after only one season (FASTLANE, JOHN DOE, TRU CALLING, although the latter was lucky enough to even know what it tastes like to get a second season), but at least they tried. Which you can’t say more than 20 years after the premiere of TWENTY-FOUR. FOX wanted to know something, and they put some risk on their schedule, realizing they would make a bit of a joke of themselves if the risk didn’t pan out.
 |
| Jack is not interested in breaking news coverage right now. |
The pilot for this revolutionary show was quite solid. Of course, back in 2001, it was a (critical) hit because nothing like this has ever been on television before, but looking a little deeper into the pilot, there were a few faults and a couple of problems. Beginning with the cliches used for the conspiracy plots (there’s a mole, they don’t know the identity of the shooter, “don’t trust anyone”), going over to a cliched teenage character and how annoying she was already during the first hour by making wrong choices and behaving like true teenage Angelenos ready to get drunk with a boy and smoke a few joints, and the usual way of stalling time just so the writers don’t need to rush into a story and instead use everything in their magic screenwriting book to make clear that this is a show for the long haul. I don’t mind the latter, and I like backstories and all, but especially the little arc with Jack Bauer and George Mason during the second half could have been trimmed down a lot, so the Palmer family could have had a much better entrance into the show.
For about 20 in-show minutes, Jack tried to get information out of Mason and used blackmailing to do so. And this was pretty much unnecessary, especially since all this episode needed to do was establish the premise of an enemy element inside the government and maybe even inside the trusted circle Jack inhabits – enough to create tension between Jack and the characters, and enough to create a thrilling plot that could be carried through a few episodes. The writers could have saved ten minutes by having Mason spill the beans immediately and giving all the time saved to David Palmer and give him some of the character depth necessary to signal that he is a major player in this show and not just a future victim of an assassination attempt. Because really, Jack didn’t need to be a hardcore person breaking the rules (and he did so twice: by darting Mason in the leg, and by cracking his phone number’s passwords without a warrant) during the first episode. That could have been neatly established throughout the first part of the season.
When it comes to the story arc though, the pilot did extremely well. The assassination attempt on David Palmer’s life was quickly established (though there was an unanswerable question in how that one very sweaty undercover guy in Kuala Lumpur knew of the impending attack), the disappearance of Kim is a problem for Jack and Teri, and might even hinder him in doing his job properly (hello, emotional conflict), and Jack already built a lot of mistrust within his agency by listening maybe a little too much to Richard Walsh and being reminded of his own recent actions to sow mistrust among his colleagues. For a premiere episode, the writers certainly created a lot of conflict and back story around Jack, which might have been necessary for a highly serialized show like TWENTY-FOUR, especially in its infant stages. Who knew what the writers were thinking about their show back then, and how far they’ve planned ahead – by creating multiple points of conflict, they made it a little easier for themselves to carry the storylines through the first few episodes and focus on the conflicts instead of the assassination plot.
But yeah, due to the real-time premise, not much happened in this episode. The assassination attempt was revealed, Kim disappeared and might be in trouble, Jack shot a district director in the leg, a plane exploded in mid-air, and there might be a mole within the agency – pretty stacked for a first episode, but not without the sacrificing of some depth. But the writers needed to keep their horses in check and not blow up absolutely everything in the first hour. I guess the explosion of the plane at the end was all the writers were able to do for the first episode, otherwise, everything else might have been a little too much (and I probably would have said so). Then again, I have no idea how the pilot captured the viewers in November 2001, only two months after 9/11. I watched this episode for the first time when the series premiered in Germany (September 2003 – RTL2 aired six episodes a week: Tuesday nights, Friday nights, and Sunday nights, to get it over with and to annoy everyone watching this show, including myself), so I knew already what American viewers and critics were thinking of the show, and I was able to prepare myself. And it would have been a certainty that I would have been one of the people loving the hell out of this show because up to that point it was something unique on American television. But as it stands, being unique doesn’t quite help your story choices, which still have to attack the norm of television – something TWENTY-FOUR was about to do after its first season.
 |
| Mandy is preparing for an early exit. |
By the way, as I was rewatching this episode, I found out why I always hated Tony Almeida. First impressions matter, and his little hairdo under the lip looked ridiculous, while his comment to Nina that she might still be sleeping with Jack, and therefore showing jealousy, was beyond stupid. It almost looked like he was the third wheel in a romance storyline that had Nina in the center. That sort of makes TWENTY-FOUR a soap opera, if the writers were hoping to focus on that little story, besides having created another conflict arc between Jack and one of his subordinates. I’m not sure if that was the right choice for a story in a show like this, but what it certainly did was give the writers another plot to work with and focus on when the assassination attempt wasn’t supposed to continue. Here, let’s have all these different storylines just so we don’t have to deal with the actual thing viewers tuned in for in the first place.
