I never missed an episode of 24 or Prison Break, at least not once I’d got started; as so often I had to be alerted to their existence by others (which generally means “my children”) and had to binge-watch in order to keep up. I strongly recommend the experience to others in the lockdown era, though I shan’t be repeating it myself. Unlike the best cable series, these two network shows don’t invite a second viewing.  The Sopranos and its descendants are all about character, both individual and collective. 24 and Prison Break are all about story. Every episode ended with a cliff-hanger, making them compulsive at the time  and disposable thereafter.

Ironically, though, it may be in the matter of storytelling that these “commercial’ shows are most indebted to their cable counterparts. Time was when a TV drama series meant assembling the same core group of characters to tell a fresh story every week. The HBO shows brought the idea of long-form narrative to American TV (it was already long established in the UK) and showed that pursuing a particular narrative across weeks actually produced results less formulaic than the old mode. It let characters develop rather than making them go, week after week, through the same routines in marginally different circumstances. It also freed them – most notably in The Wire - to investigate whole societies. 24 and Prison Break made at least token gestures in this direction.

They also took up the notion of the conflicted protagonist. Jack Bauer and, to a lesser extent, Michael Scofield were offered up as tragic heroes. I’ve tried in my reviews of the shows to explain why I don’t think this worked. Interestingly Prison Break (though not 24) did go in for character development, at least on the level of turning some of its villains into heroes: always a heart-warming thing to see. In the character of T-Bag, sleaziest of the prison-breakers, it actually achieved something quite haunting; it flashed back to show how an abused childhood had made him what he was and it also, in the present-tense action, hinted at his wasted potential. It was a shame, really, that at the end he was allowed to lapse back into villainy and to be punished accordingly.  Sticking to the old conventions, the network shows seemed, at the final count, arbitrary;  adhering to their own new conventions –  actually ancient ones made fresh - the cable shows reached the real tragic goal; they seemed inevitable.

The Collected Reviews of
24 (with a smattering of Prison Break)

in chronological order