24: Live Another Day

The story is sweaty with provocative, post--al-Qaeda, post-Snowden security anxieties--drone warfare, abused surveillance, and secrecy--but the treatment so far is superficial and sensationalistic.

Fox made the first two episodes available for review. They’re watchable but also sadly a little comical, with Jack again all clenched up while speaking in a gasping-for-air rasp or silently clenching his jaw.

Yet despite the spiffy new London locale and the four-year hiatus, 24: Live Another Day is--at least in its first two hours--more reminiscent of the run-of-the-mill later seasons as opposed to its revelatory, exhilarating heyday.

Other than the shorter season and London setting, the story beats and types of twists are nearly identical. This sameness highlights how the show's format, revolutionary when it premiered more than a decade ago, has become formulaic and a little stale.

By the second hour (both of Monday’s episodes adhere to the minute-by-minute chronology; the fast-forwarding will happen later), it’s clear that Live Another Day is not much interested in broadening the show’s scope, feeling or characters. It does, however, have an abiding interest in the latest news about spying, vis-a-vis its own version of notorious document-leaker Edward Snowden: Chloe O’Brian.

The opening two episodes are characteristically entertaining, and snap along pretty briskly (the first is in real time), but it’s hard to escape a sense of creative malaise around all this.

In the new miniseries’ opening installments, 24 makes some half-hearted efforts to contend with its own legacy.

The setting, London, is new, but not much else.