24: Legacy Pilot

So I didn't watch 24 from the very beginning. I came into the show around Season 4, went back and watched the rest of it, then finished the show until it completed it's 8th season and its 9th sort of season.  I have been a die hard 24 fan for a long time and while I recognize that the later seasons of the show got a little bit stale especially since they tried to keep alive a political climate that had been outdated when Obama came into office in 2008, I still consider it one of my favorite shows of all time.

I personally think the ending of the 8th season of 24 was fine how it was. It wasn't anything spectacular but it was a good way to close off the final season. And then Live Another Day happened... now I personally don't love the ending to Live Another Day because it didn't feel like a real ending. It felt like a cliff hanger to a future season with Jack Bauer that I don't think is going to happen. But I also said in my review of that ending that I would not support anything 24 related that didn't have Jack Bauer in it... and yet here we are.

24 Legacy takes place three years after Live Another Day and is set in DC. The story centers around a former Army Ranger by the name of Eric Carter (played by Corey Hawkins). Carter was apart of a special forces unit that worked in tandem with Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) that led to the assassination of a high value terrorist by the name of Ibrahim Ben-Khalid. The operation was headed up by the former director of CTU named Rebecca Ingram (played by Miranda Otto). At the start of the show, it is apparent that Eric is having difficulty adjusting to civilian life with his wife Nicole (played by Anna Diop).

The pilot starts with terrorists finding and killing the other members of the Ranger team that killed Bin-Khalid. Soon it comes down to just Eric and another former Ranger by the name of Ben Grimes (played by Charlie Hofheimer). After terrorists come after him and his family, Eric must reach out to CTU find the people trying to hurt him and his wife and prevent a terrorist attack from occurring on US soil.

To start off, I will say that there really isn't any other show that is quite like 24 and it was really good to return to that form and that feel. Maybe it's the real time element, maybe it's just the music of Sean Callery, but whatever it is, it's good to return to this universe and to the high stakes counter terrorist world that was very specific to 24.

I know that everyone is asking how Corey Hawkins compares Kiefer Sutherland as the leading man. Now I'm not going to sit here and pretend like Eric Carter is the hero of 24 we've been waiting for. I don't know how you make a show like this with such an iconic hero and expect to create another hero to match someone like Jack Bauer. You can't. Instead you create as compelling of a character as you can and hope that people still might enjoy him and the rest of the cast.

Now I'm only a few episodes in and it's still very early to figure out who Eric Carter is and if he's a compelling character and it's kind of hard to determine.

Corey Hawkins is by no means a bad actor. Despite the minute fact that he's incredibly skinny, I could believe that he was an Army Ranger and that fact alone is kind of a cool angle. I'm currently re-watching the first season of 24 and Jack Bauer's backstory was pretty generic and definitely not the main purpose of the story. Instead the focus was on his job and his mission to hunt down terrorists and make America safe again. If you didn't know Jack Bauer's backstory from the few hints that they give you in the first season, I would almost say that Eric Carter actually has a more interesting story that Jack Bauer in some regards.

And I will say that the show does give him a couple of genuine moments, as few as they are. There is a pretty good scene where he and his former teammate, Ben are sitting on a train and they're talking about the meaning of duty and what the country owes them or whatnot. It's actually a pretty well done scene.

24 has a knack for reflecting the times we live in and the political climate and outlook towards the War on Terror. Back in 2001 when the show first aired, it reflected the midst of the battle we face against terrorism and the fear we had towards it with the attacks on 9/11 still very fresh in our minds. In 2008 when the Obama administration was coming into office, the background of the season was Jack Bauer testifying in Washington DC and almost being brought to task for the things he did in the name of national security.  And now, Eric Carter is a Soldier who has fought long and hard in a war that has gone on for longer than he expected it and he's trying to figure out what his role is in new conflicts even though he believed the conflict to be over... hmmm ring any bells? America!

I definitely like the rest of the cast. You have Miranda Otto who I really only know from Lord of the Rings, but still enjoy in this show. Then you have Jimmy Smits playing her husband who is a Senator running for President. I'm not totally certain how well he fits in with the rest of the show but I'm willing to give him a shot. Those are the big names of people you see in the show. There's a lot of other characters but none of them are really that interesting if I'm being 100% honest. Perhaps they will be developed in later episodes but they don't really pop out. Instead they more seem like they're there just to fill a role that was vacant from previous seasons.

And that's something that I think 24 suffers from and it's the reason the show was cancelled in the first place. It's how predictable the show can get.

24 gained acclaim when they had a lot of twists and turns and a lot of characters who we thought were good people who turned out to be moles and traitors. In the first few episodes, it seems like the same motifs are still being utilized, and it's not just the idea of traitors and moles.

A couple things you can always count on in 24 is the Jack Bauer character having to work outside the confines of the institutions for a little bit in order to get the job done. Another thing is that behind every stereotypical muslim character, there is a traitorous white character who you perhaps didn't expect because 24 does this weird thing where they think you expect the terrorist to be the middle eastern character when its not, which I guess when it first happened was interesting and perhaps a way to combat islamaphobia but instead just seems predictable now. There are a lot of other examples that I've already seen in the first three episodes, but you understand how this show can be difficult at times. The reason the show got cancelled is because of this predictability. You can only go so many seasons before a terrorist plot to destroy the American way of life is thwarted by a Jack Bauer type.

I'm enjoying the show, but the biggest issue I've seen is that the characters beyond Eric Carter and Rebecca Ingram (and even them to a certain extent) really only seem to be there to fill a character spot that they wiped clean. Jimmy Smits is supposed to be taking over the Presidential role like David Palmer did back in the day. Eric Carter is obviously taking over the Jack Bauer type. You've got David Bucatinsky playing the nerdy computer analyst with glasses. You've got Bailey Chase playing your hard head of operations at CTU. The list goes on and on. None of these characters are over the top interesting (besides Carter and Ingram) and none of them are really compelling enough to say that this is any better than 24 ever was, even in its later seasons. At least in Season 8 you cared about Jack Bauer.

He hasn't shown up yet in the episodes I've seen, but apparently Tony Almeida (played by Carlos Bernard) is supposed to make an appearance in this season and that is something I am actually really interested in. And it's telling that the main appeal of the show is to see how it connects with the earlier seasons.

I'm going to keep watching for now because I do want to see where this show goes. Usually it takes about 4 episodes to really get a feel for the plot of the season and to see where it's all going. There are four episodes that have aired so I think right after this I'm going to watch that 4th episode and that will determine if I'm going to continue watching this season of 24.

Overall, I haven't hated 24 Legacy. I think it's trying to recapture the magic of 24 and in a way it does... just not in a way that I think will be lasting. It's great to have that 24 feeling of a guy single handedly fighting terrorism. It's like Homeland but with more gun play and more fast paced action. There obviously is an audience based on the numbers the show has been pulling in.

Here's the biggest problem I have. The nostalgia factor.

It's kind of strange that in the same year, two shows that I used to watch regularly on Fox are being brought back to continue what seemed to be a pretty concise ending. And it's not just these shows. You have shows like Minority Report, Lethal Weapon, and Taken that really just blows my mind that they bank so much on people's nostalgias that they either continue a show that definitely had an ending and was cancelled for a reason, or they create a show based on a movie that had no business being a TV show in the first place.

I can't speak for all of these shows because I haven't seen all of them. Apparently Lethal Weapon is doing alright as far as viewership goes and who knows, maybe Minority Report, Taken, and Prison Break all have really good premises that they needed to be turned into TV shows.

But when the show is focused more on banking on people's nostalgia for the ratings instead of just creating something with a good story, that's when I get a little bit angry. In all reality, there was not reason they couldn't just create a show around Corey Hawkins doing basically the same thing he's doing in 24 Legacy and call it something different. 24 does not have the patent on going off and fighting terrorists. Sure it might not be in real time, but that's almost a constraint rather than something absolutely essential to the structure of the show. From what I have seen, besides one of the characters being a cousin of one of the previously deceased characters of 24, there hasn't been any connections to the previous seasons of 24 and there didn't need to be a reason to have this set in that universe besides the nostalgic factor of it being called 24.

At the end of the day, I hope 24 Legacy does well. I hope it finds its footing and makes something successful. As of right now, I haven't seen anything that has blown my mind, but I'm open to seeing more. I'm hoping that the characters stick out a little more in the future, I'm hoping that they move away from the conventions that made the original stale, and I hope they utilize the new cast to do something different this time around.

But those are my thoughts on the pilot (and first couple episodes of 24 Legacy. What have you thought? Are you going to continue watching? What're your thoughts? Comment and Discuss Below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your requests for movies and shows I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.

I'll leave you with this. I wanted to get this out so I could just watch some more episodes... so here's Kiefer Sutherland on Fallon. Enjoy!