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Okay, someone obviously taught Havrilesky in one of her writing classses (which aren't worth a damned thing in improving writing, Q.E.D.) to have a "unifying theme" in whatever she wrote. Thus her navel-staring essay on time, her bitch of a teacher and how traumatized she was. Well, that might work for a Steven Wright monologue (which can only be delivered when the person delivering it is smacked up on heroin, to produce Wright's slow, brain-damaged delivery). But it's egotistical and clunky as an essay.
Is it surprising that a techno-thriller like 24 is based on time and panic? On anal-retentiveness and viciousness? Especially when it's been often reported that this show is Dick Cheney's wet dream? (Or maybe his blueprint for the whole administration's behavior?)
What IS remarkable is that those first four episodes were available almost immediately on DVD at Best Buy. And that people were actually buying them. And that some people who were internet-savvy got them all before the first one aired. (Perhaps NBC "leaked" the episodes to build some word of mouth.)
The important question is, having provided such a slam-bang opening, how will they finish off the rest of the season? Will it all be Bauer and company running around the viaducts and abandoned warehouse districts of Los Angeles, barking into their cell phones, trying to keep up the sense of panic? It might be better to take a step back from the panic, and show what would happen to America sociologically. Showing America's latent racism boiling over, having street shootings of anyone looking even vaguely Middle Eastern, and having the voices of sanity and reason drowned out by screaming loons. (Very much like this letter column when anyone calls Saint Havrilesky on the carpet.)
This is a turning point for 24. Five seasons is a long time for such a program to last. It can't keep repeating the nail-biter format. It will have to evolve into something else, hopefully something with more meaning than Syd Field's ticking clock. That's the real issue over which nails should be bitten.
