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The following will no longer take place this year - because thank God, the show is over!

To say that the final two hours of 24 was disappointing would be a phenomenal understatement - to say that the show’s finale sucked would be more apropos and accurate. I’m not going to waste your time or mine describing to you what happened - if you’re really interested, go to the 24 page and look for yourself.

I’m pissed because I just spent 24 hours of my life glued to the television set expecting something that never came. As the weeks passed, it became more and more evident that Jack Bauer, CTU, the United States and anything else portrayed on the FOX program had completely lost its way. And like a member of the Jonestown cult, I just kept drinking the KoolAid (both proverbial and literal) waiting for something that never came.

This season’s show failed on so many levels… I wouldn’t know where to begin, but I’ll give you one clue - Phillip Bauer as the ultimate bad guy - puleeaazze….

Joel Surnow - GIVE ME BACK MY DAY!

I did my part, sat through the ever lengthening commercial breaks (except when I occasionally made use of the DVR

), but you did not do yours. This season stunk. As I said a while back, you could have condensed this season into the two hour movie that remains the fodder of rumor mills and been successful. Instead you took something that would have supported two hours of decent entertainment and stretched it out into a 24 hour Bataan-like death march. Tell you what Joel, I’ll make a deal with you - since I found (by a review of all of my show recap posts) about six hours worth of entertainment in this season’s run of 24, you can give me back 18 hours and we’ll call it even.

To add insult to injury after the show ended, a brief trailer ran for next season… coming in January it’s a whole new day! I would suggest that FOX reconsider - I think that the folks at 24 may have jumped the shark way back in this season’s third and fourth hours. If the show is to recover they’ve got to find a way to fill the space with something that keeps viewers involved.

A couple of suggestions:

• Get rid of some of the dead-end story threads. It may be more realistic that few terrorism suspects and potential leads pan out to be anything, but on TV it helps to have a more defined storyline.
• It’s time to shake-up the actor stock. Chloe O’Brian may be a staple of the program, but the actress that portrays her (Mary Lynn Rajskub) should be able to do a better acting job after six seasons on the program. I would keep Morris (Carlo Rota), but get rid of Chloe.
• Consider breaking up the program into four parallel storylines that all come together in the show’s final hours. This will allow you to provide a couple of suspected bad guys that all point to one definitive ending, but keep the viewers in the dark as to who is really the bad guy.
• GET SOME NEW WRITERS!

Maybe, maybe if you do all of that… I’ll consider wasting some DVR space on next season (because if there is anything else to do during the same time slot, I’ll be doing it).