As the clock struck 10 Monday night -- 4 p.m. in a fictional New York City -- Jack Bauer was a wanted man, about to flee the country in the 24 series finale.
One hour later, Law & Order ended its 20th and final season, with an episode that broke with the show's normal format, in that the actual crime didn't happen until the final minutes.
Two very different shows, both influential. Both of which have been, at times, very, very good. Both ending on the same night, yet it feels hard to mourn either of them.
Jack Bauer will likely be back in a 24 movie. But even if this was the last we'll ever see of him, the show's last few seasons have been so uneven -- a huge dip in quality in year six, an improved season seven, and a lackluster final year -- that it was time for it to end.
In its best seasons -- the fifth, first and third -- 24 was something I looked forward to each week.
Each day's threat would shift -- that was a 24 hallmark; Jack would start the day dealing with a Mexican drug cartel, and end it hunting down a rogue MI5 operative -- but it would rarely get boring. There was always a new crisis -- now matter how ridiculous -- for Jack and CTU to solve.
This year's threat died out two thirds of the way through the season, leaving Jack to spend the series' final hours on a brutal revenge quest. As an agent of order, committed to doing right no matter the cost and constantly forced to make horrible choices, Jack was a compelling character. This season, he talked about bringing evil-doers to justice, but his actions were so consistently over-the-top that his mission got lost in a cloud of blood.
And in the end, it just wasn't very exciting. The big issue in the final hour was whether the president would sign a peace treaty, while Jack spent most of the hour in custody, needing to be rescued. Hopefully, the eventual movie will find him, and the story he's involved in, in better shape.
Law & Order won't be back next year, but it will live on in endless, endless reruns, many of which I've still never seen. It's a luxury 24 doesn't really have; it's hard to imagine just sitting down and watching a random episode from, say, season 4 one day, then watching a season 3 episode a few weeks later. (Even Lost, which was a highly serialized show, told good self-contained stories. You can't flick on 24 and say "Oh, it's the one where Jack...")
That's much easier with Law & Order, which has had some great years and some bad ones (something I talked about a few weeks ago).
The last few years have featured one of the show's more solid casts -- Alan Sepinwall says this one might be the second best in the show's history; he and I have the same favorite cast -- and this season featured a rare character-based story arc, Lt. Van Buren's battle with cancer. In the final moments of the finale, we learned that Van Buren was cancer free (and newly engaged). It was a nice send off for the lieutenant, the longest-running character in the show's history.
It wasn't necessarily meant to be the show's final hour, so we didn't get a lot of fireworks. But that's OK. Law & Order was never that kind of drama. Had NBC not cancelled it, it might have gone on and on, with new detectives and lawyers arriving every few years. With that system in place, it seemed harder to kill than Jack Bauer.
Tom Coombe
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