24 "Pilot" - Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran
So, my trip through TV scripts continues. It's really amazing how fast this pilot moves. You find out everything you need to know about Jack Bauer in this hour of TV. It's start off at home - he's family man trying to put his family back together. Next CTU - he may have had an affair with a woman he works with. He turned in coworkers, even though he knew it would hurt his career. He tranq'd a superior in order to buy time to get information to blackmail him with.
We learn that JAck Bauer is willing to bend the rules for the right reasons, but will not countenance someone breaking them for the wrong reasons.
The other thing is that they don't have the big clock at the act breaks, instead are forced shots showing clocks in a room, or phone recordings stating the time. I think this would have felt forced, whereas the clock at the commercial breaks with the split screen works well, and reminds us that other things are going on while this is happening.
This may actually be why this series has survived so well. When one story waxes, the other wane. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Jack still has to deal with family stuff, while he's trying to prevent an assassination. In the later seasons, we even see the villains family lives, giving us a much more well rounded story then if we just saw Jack, and he didn't have a family or friends and he just was solving the mystery.
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