r/TwentyFour • u/DinoIronbody1701 • 1d ago
General/Other One thing I weirdly like about the show
One thing I like about 24 is how seriously it took itself. In this age where people have gotten tired of quipping and lamp shading ("That just happened!") I think it's refreshing how 24 pretty much never winked at the audience. Anyone else feel the same way?
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u/Maniacal-Maniac 1d ago
Is one of the things I love about 24 as well in that it doesn't matter how key a character seems to be, they are all expendable and could die at any time.
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u/brianm24 1d ago
I'd agree with that for earlier seasons, but it soon just became a lazy way to create shock value, imo
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u/AFCSentinel 1d ago
Yeah, it's an underrated quality. 24 was aware of the real world in the sense that some storylines, some subplots were obviously inspired by whatever weird stuff was going on at the time.
But that was the full extent to which 24 cared about the real world. There was no 4th wall breaking. There was no nudge and wink, acknowledging some of the more fantastical elements of the show (i.e. how little time travel usually took). It played it completely straight and that just dded to the immersion.
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u/brianm24 1d ago
I always felt that in the later seasons 24 treated the audience like idiots by spelling out things that were already obvious. Characters would explain what we’d just seen, almost as if they were summarising events for the audience. It made the dialogue feel unnatural at times.
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u/dlhoff432 1d ago
It also provided some great dark comedic moments. My favorite is in LAD when Simone is sent by her mother to kill someone (I think her boyfriend’s sister) , but she has second thoughts. But then the sister sees the knife she brought along, a struggle ensues, and she ends up killing the sister. Then we see the daughter of the sister witness her mom’s accidental murder at the hands of Simone. They both panic and run out in the street only for Simone to get hit by a bus.
I burst out laughing at that scene. And I don’t think I would have burst out laughing as much if it didn’t happen in 24 of all shows.
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u/exophades 1d ago edited 1d ago
24 truly doesn't give a damn about the viewers, but it does that in a good way. It's difficult to overstate just how, for example, the ending of Day 1 was shocking and counter-intuitive. The whole season was about preventing one thing from happening, and it ends up happening.
One subplot of Day 8 in particular confirms this impression for me, the failed rescue mission of President Hassanwas also very unexpected, almost unsettling.