24

Even when 24 went off the rails, Sutherland somehow kept Jack in balance. And now that his show seems back on track, he's rolling at top form.

All the new characters are wonderfully drawn, including FBI agent Walker (Annie Wersching); bad, bad guy Jonas Hodges (Jon Voight); a new Chloe-type nerd (Janeane Garofalo). Especially good are Jones and her husband (Colm Feore), who is more consumed with solving his son's death than in being First Man. Whew! Thank God there is Jack Bauer--unchanging, unflinching.

Let's just say that after the two-night, four-hour season premiere, Jack will have threatened to jab a Bic pen into a bad guy's eardrum, and you'll feel the warm glow of sadistic glee that signals a jolly good start for vintage 24 mayhem.

The show's long break seems to have rejuvenated its story lines, in which intense, rapid-fire action plays out against the backdrop of a complex, methodical geopolitical chess game.

Fortunately for the audience, the show on which he struggles to save the republic is back on track after a season of misdirection followed by a year away.

Jack is the glue that holds the show together, and Sutherland, with his pained, superhuman skill set, makes him a physical statement about the toll violence takes, even violence committed in an attempt to save the world.

Whatever its flaws, this edition of 24 features smart, crisp and densely woven storytelling whose subplots look to be on a well-orchestrated collision course.

Ms. Jones's president is compelling--a force to contend with. Much the same can be said of the new 24 itself--a force now returned in strength and, once again, highly addictive.

Treachery and action still abound on 24--its brand is crisis, after all--but the nail-biting, espionage-like first four hours erect a scenario that promises a recharged season built on smarter suspense gambits than the tiresome 24 (and, by extension, Bushian) tropes of outlandish risk, torture and Armageddon-mongering.

Yes, CTU's still dead, but the market for its most out-there operative's very special interrogation methods hasn't dried up altogether, it seems.

This season doesn't really kick into gear until night two, when Bill Buchanan (James Morrison) and Chloe (Marylynn Rajskub) return, operating outside the bounds of the government.

There is a distinctly 2002 feel to this season of 24....But you know what? It all manages to hold together.

It is returning to its own past, that most effective masculine melodrama. Two, it is making that return meta, arranging plot points to emphasize official repetitions and narrative redundancies. And three, it is yet again making torture its most salient focus.

There are, maybe, some hopeful signs. The series seems to have given up on trying to create a bigger WMD for every season, which it needed to do. The political subplot—new president Cherry Jones wants a humanitarian invasion of a Darfur-like African country but is being undermined—is intriguing and a bit different for the show.

The seventh season of the Fox thriller starts with four hours and some compelling plots....Then the plot twists pile up, and the action scenes can turn preposterous.

After watching the first four episodes, it's clear that despite the familiar adrenaline rush and a (temporarily) tighter rein on the ridiculous, 24 hasn't changed much at all.

The novelty of the hour-by-hour conceit wore off long ago, and the various plot devices and characters are all familiar. The fun, at least at the beginning of a new season, is in seeing how the creators will rejigger the pieces this time around.

The biggest problem is that by now some elements of 24 are distressingly predictable.

24 makes a feint toward change, before getting back on the same old mechanical cowboy ride.