Dear 24,

You can go to hell.
I wasn't going to watch you this year. I had decided that I had personal goals I wanted to achieve this year, and sitting and watching you wasn't going to help me do that. I've sat through your semi-seasonal offerings enough to know what's on order with you. I've seen it all before, and you never seem to change it up. I know if I turned you on, I'd get what I always got from our relationship:

1. A great and exciting first three hours, making me think that this time, this time, things are going to be different between us.

2. This will be followed by 19 hours where you will do your best to kill that dream in its sleep. You're like that great first date who spends the second date farting and confessing to liking monster trucks. Your plot--seemingly so sharp in those early, optimistic hours, will begin to meander,as if it too was affected by the same blunthead trauma Jack Bauer always suffers.

3. You will offer up cougars, just to distract me. And you'll also throw in Elisha Cuthbert. Possibly being pursued by those cougars, or variants thereof. All so I don't notice things, like how Jack can get across all of Los Angeles in six minutes.

4. There will be grimace inducing torture, guns will fire, things will explode, and camera lenses will do their best to convince us that 5:13 p.m in my Los Angeles is actually 8:00 a.m in a future L.A.--where maybe this is how early morning will look, all orange tinted skies and washed out landscapes. And Jack Bauer fucking everywhere.

5. And finally, you will triumphantly bring it all to an end, quickly throwing more lime on the plotline that you shot in the head somewhere around Hour Seven. If I ask about the many things that don't make sense, you will pound me into submission with lots and lots of explosions, grimaces, and Jack shouting at someone that it doesn't have to end this way, even as he pulls the trigger.

Like I said, seen it, done that, read the recaps. No more.

But then you have to pull this.



You cast Katee Sackhoff. Not only that, but you outfit her in a black muscle shirt. Which--and you goddamn know this--I have no resistance to. That same woman, that same outfit--albeit more green and Space Marine-y--dragged me through some of the more turgid episodes of Battlestar Galatica.

So now I'm watching you, 24. And yes, four hours in, we've had two torture scenes, explosions, and men looking like they need to really pull their shoulders down from around the top of their ears. And okay, maybe Jack has a man purse now, but....no. I can't start being critical now. My higher brain function shuts down whenever Katee Sackhoff appears on screen.

You knew this would shut me up. You knew you had me at Starbuck Redux.

You complete and utter bastards.


Yours,

Sean