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Dead Time

There's a moment in Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise when the main character, Jesse (played by Ethan Hawke), talks about an idea he has for a TV show where cameras are given to 365 different people to document their daily lives in real time, to be aired one day at a time, over a one year period. He wants to show how people really live, how time really runs down, minute to minute. The one problem with his idea, at least from a television executive's perspective, is that he's not interested in having things happen. Jesse is gripped by the routine, monotonously lived minutes of a day; any action that occurs along the way is beside the point.

Jesse would be horrified by Fox's new television drama, 24, for no other reason than things happen. Like Jesse's ideal TV show, it takes place in real time, but 24 is more concerned with the action. Its plot is so involved that we never have to worry about the mundane moments, when someone makes a pot of coffee, waits in his car at a red light, or suffers through the awkward silence that hits when a high school girl who has snuck out of the house to meet her blind date, a college sophomore. Whenever any of these potentially boring moments loom, the show simply switches to a different character. And we can be assured that someone in this contrived universe is doing something that carries the plot -- the involved plot -- along.

Still, as television goes, 24 is the most interesting concept of the season. Set on the day of the California presidential primary election, each episode takes an hour in what is turning out to be a really bad day for Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland). Just as he discovers that his daughter, Kimberly (Elisha Cuthbert), has snuck out her window at 12:04:23 a.m. (my time estimate), he is called into the office -- the Counter Terrorism Unit -- to deal with a possible assassination threat against African American presidential candidate, Senator Palmer (Dennis Haysbert).

On top of this, at 12:14:36 a.m., he discovers that the assassination plot may be coming from inside the CIA and there is no one he can trust. And then, at 12:38:54 a.m., his somewhat estranged wife, Teri (Leslie Hope), accidentally breaks what looks to be a really nice coffee cup. If things keep playing out this way, I'm guessing he's going to need some Advil and possibly a Jolt cola by about 4:37:42 a.m.

If the success of The X-Files is any indication, 24's "trust no one" storyline is its strongest suit. The plot isn't particularly original but, as The Day of the Jackal (Fred Zinneman's 1973 original, not the Bruce Willis knockoff) and half of Alfred Hitchcock's films suggest, the assassination attempt is the perfect plot device by which to crank up suspense.

By the same token, the subplot I could do without is the one involving Jack's AWOL daughter. I know that it has been included to distract Jack, in order to make his day even more challenging. What it ends up doing, however, is distracting us from the building conspiracy. We don't know Jack, his wife, or his kid well enough to be invested in their melodrama, and the broken family thing seems a cheap way of humanizing Jack. (Then again, the scenes from next week's episode make it look like Kimberly gets kidnapped at 1:54:56 a.m., so maybe I'll feel differently then.)

What is most disappointing about the show for me is its use of time. 24 spends so few minutes on any given scene that it occasionally feels less real to me than an episode of Will & Grace. At least on a sitcom, you get to know the characters as they deal with situations. Here, the constant cutting from one character and scene to another makes it seem as if the writers and directors are trying to fill up each moment with images and action, so we'll never be tempted to change the channel. Rather than show us Jack's car ride from home to the office, which could have been a moment to play up the his anxiety over Kimberly's disappearance, we cut to Teri, then Kimberly, and then back to Jack making a phone call to Teri as he pulls into the parking lot (which means that, either he lives way too close to work, or the editing is cheating a bit).

In fact, the show only uses "real time" as a gimmick; it's less interested in seconds ticking away than in seconds ticking down. When Linklater's Jesse pitches his idea, a show about ordinary people's days, he wants to show what happens (or doesn't) with each passing second. 24 is more concerned with showing what happens before the seconds run out. In Linklater's concept, time is liberating, as each minute brings something new. For Jack Bauer, time is a limit, an hourglass bringing him (and us) ever closer to the inevitable -- in this case, the eventual assassination attempt.

Even if 24's use of real time has mostly to do with creating a season-long red digital readout on a bomb about to explode, I wish the writers had used the device a bit more creatively. Filmmakers have been using the idea of real time for years, and I'm surprised that it has taken TV this long to get around to it. While it is true that plenty of filmic real time experiments have been as disinterested in time as 24, some films really do think cleverly about how to show time passing, rather than filling it with more and more stuff. Hitchcock's Rope is one example of how real time in a movie does not always have to be action-packed. As Hitchcock is constantly intensifying the suspense, the "dead moments" are often more exciting and intriguing than when plot is unfolding.