I meant to mention this last week, but for awhile now, Fox has been promoting the “two night, four hour premiere” of the new season of 24, which started last night. For some reason, this annoyed the hell out of me. Here’s a show that progresses in what’s supposed to be real time. If you want to claim you’re showing a two hour premiere — the first two hour’s of this season’s new “day” — fine, but once last night’s telecast was over, tonight’s not part of the premiere. The damn thing has already been on. Tonight is just two more hours.
Yeah, this isn’t the biggest deal in the world, but it’s exactly how these network marketing departments keep bullshitting the audience into thinking something special is going on. Why don’t they just say, “join us for 24’s 12-week premiere, right before the stunning 12-week conclusion!” I mean, it really is the same thing. When you’re second, you simply aren’t first.
Meanwhile, I’m so behind. Not only have I not watched the first two hours of 24, but I still need to see last week’s Alias season premiere. The one thing I am happy about — assuming neither pisses me off in the early hours, enough to stop watching — is that both shows will run this season virtually every week with no repeats. The whole purpose of starting in January was to have virtually no gaps in episodes. I have a feeling this will benefit 24 greatly since one of the problems with the series is due to the entire program’s basic gimmick: sure the characters may have only been up around for 24 hours by the end, but when you’re watching something in May that started 9 months earlier, no matter what the show is telling you, it becomes harder to believe that all this action was simply “yesterday.”
Out of Focus 