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We didn't start watching 24 until about the third season, after hearing Rush rave about it so much (we don't even have cable -- TV has a VERY minor role in our lives). We LOVED 24 -- loved it so much that we went out and rented all the previous seasons, watched them and enjoyed them tremendously. And it kept getting better -- last season (2008) was even better than the one before. We just marveled at how well done it was.

Then came this year's show.

I thought this season was just garbage.

Man, you ain't kiddin', Brother FReeper! I kept waiting ... and waiting ... and waiting ... for it to redeem itself. But the plot, the more it went on, kept feeling like something that was out of control, as if its writers had written themselves into corners each week, and overall seemed desperate rather than designed. For the first time, it felt amateurish on that count. It was like the writers were in over their heads; in previous seasons, the plots were wild and insane, but always by design. You always knew that as a viewer, you were in the hands of professionals. This season it felt like you were in the hands of novices.

I kept waiting for a character I could care about, fall in love with, empathize and sympathize with, grieve for, hate, despise ... Jon Voight and the gal who played the Pres's daughter were the only ones that got an emotional grip on me, and surprisingly, Kim, Jack's daughter, became likeable (she was mostly a silly stupid-female stereotype in the others). And speaking of stupid females, the plot first started to get really beyond stupid when the president appointed her estranged daughter (!!!) as Chief of Staff. I mean, come on! How unprofessional and stupid would that be? So it made me immediately lose any kind of respect for the President's character because only a singularly stupid woman would do such a thing, and as such, one coudln't watch the rest of the show and take her at all seriously as a president.

And even though in the end she did the "right" thing by opting not to cover up her daughter's hit-man scandal, it hardly spoke well of her because the truth was, if she hadn't been so stupid as to appoint her daughter in the first place, then it woudln't have happened. So it was pretty near impossible to admire the president even for making the morally right call. It was sort of like having somebody throw a baby off a pier and then be hailed as a hero for jumping into the waves and cold water to rescue it.

The political correctness in this season was simply stifling. The only bad guys were hawkish American businessmen. Muslims were only portrayed as victims of wicked Americans. When the death bed "confessor" turned out the be the Islamic cleric, it was so saccharine and corny, so deliberate a slap at Christianity as to be shameful. It struck me that the mercy and compassion extended by the Muslim cleric was misrepresentative of reality, but the screenwriters seem to think the only dif between Jesus and Mohammed is the letters in their names. That really did it, pushed it over the edge. I may or may not give 24 a chance next year, but if it starts out as badly as this year's season, I'll just quit while I'm ahead.

I love many despicably liberal actors -- Ed Harris comes to mind. Had 24 cast Ed Harris, I could sure as hell understand why and I'm certain that I'd have enjoyed whatever role he played. They cast Janneane Garafolo, and she brought zero, zilch, null, nada, to the mix. I cannot understand why they cast her -- unless it was to thumb its nose at the show's conservative fan base built on praise of the show by Rush. In fact, it's the ONLY reason I can think of why Garafolo was cast, and I'd bet good, hard cash that it's the REAL reason she was cast. Had they ended up making her a bad guy, that would have at least been gratifying and redeemed the show. But her bland, vaguely unpleasant charater had zero intrigue, and so clearly her choice was completely political. That makes this season even more disgusting.

I agree that there's a bone to pick with Rush for raving over the show at the start of the season. To paraphrase a classic line from Aliens, one of my top ten favorite movies:

"It was a bad call, Rush. It was a bad call."