KEY POINTS:
Busy Jack Bauer is a hard man to keep in a holding pattern. Last night's 24: Redemption special (C4, 8.30pm), a "prequel" to the new season, had to keep America's most-wanted secret agent occupied for a full telemovie.
The solution was to have the exiled Jack skulking around a bogus African country, a beacon of democracy on the "dark continent" about to have its light snuffed out by a bunch of rebels toting big guns and equally awkward dialogue.
The bad guys, lacking manpower for their cache of US-supplied weapons (yes, there are always wheels within wheels), were also recruiting kids into their army.
So there we had all the elements of a typical 24: an evil, Third World foreign enemy; an internal conspiracy in Washington as a woman president was being inaugurated; and for the ever more haggard Jack, a terrible choice between personal freedom and saving the lives of innocents.
For all its hyperactivity, this real-time telemovie was a plodder, trotting out the same old formula the series used to do so well when it seemed to be the prescient voice of paranoid America.
For 24 now seems so out of step with the supposedly gentler times, with the country's first African-American President the figurehead of a national change in mood from the belligerent Bush years.
Perhaps that's why 24 has been shuffled off mainstream TV3 into the more obscure and cultish C4, like an embarrassing family member put into the corner.
The minute-by-minute action series once seemed ground-breaking, with its first black president and fixation on terrorism.
Now, as Jack stumbles about the African countryside, he reminds you of an old soldier who's not been told the Kaiser's long dead.
This telemovie also felt as if it had been penned when Hillary Clinton looked a front-runner for president. Forget the first woman, surely this show should be up to America's first gay president by now.
It also wheeled in a couple of stellar actors guaranteed to add grit and menace, Jon Voigt and Robert Carlyle, whose look of dismay could equally have been at the banality of the lines he had to utter as for the plight of the orphans in his care. Unfortunately, the heavyweight factor was undermined by also trucking in a couple of former Ally McBealers, Gil Bellows and Peter McNichol.
There's also something wearying about the real-time show's frenetic pace these days - you watch with a sense of fear that at any moment it might collapse like an eclipsed marathon runner on the roadside.
The only thing that keeps it going is Jack's sheer indestructibility. America's most-wanted secret agent is also America's most bullet-proof - the shootouts are pure video-game fantasy - and all that torture never seems to leave more than a scratch.
Or perhaps it will be revealed in the new season that Jack does indeed have a super power like those Heroes.
Rather than being an intriguing taster, 24: Redemption posed the question, can the new season overcome the farce factor and the format's insatiable need for plot twists? It might be time to give the 24/7 all-action hero a hard-earned rest.
