Release Date:
Tuesday, September 9, 2003
24 is the crack cocaine of DVD collections—you can’t watch just one episode. Before you know it, it’s four in the morning, your organs are failing, and you can’t help but throw in one more. After spending 18 hours watching this entire set over the course of a weekend, we are convinced this is the greatest TV-to-DVD transition yet. If you’re lucky, you didn’t watch this show when it aired, as 24 was made for DVD, and this season’s unrelenting intensity blows the first season (sans the finale) to chunky bits. The day starts a year and a half later with Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) still a basket case over his wife’s murder, the new president, David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert), managing inner-administration dissent, and a nuclear bomb set to detonate in Los Angeles at some point during the day. Save for the Lifetime-movie-of-the-week story line involving Jack’s daughter, Kim (not that we’ll ever complain about added screen time for Elisha Cuthbert), this show is as perfect as network TV gets and is loaded with one heart-stopping torture sequence after another.
This season’s DVD was done up right, especially since last year’s offered virtually nothing extra. Aside from the three in-depth documentaries, the coolest extras are the 44 deleted/extended scenes, which you can enable during episodes (a little 24 icon appears where they were excised), or watch separately on the bonus disc with director and writer commentary. Overall, everyone on 24 deserves serious praise for stringing two-dozen episodes together to create a deep and unrelenting story that will have you watching this set at least twice. Buy it now and thank us later.
This season’s DVD was done up right, especially since last year’s offered virtually nothing extra. Aside from the three in-depth documentaries, the coolest extras are the 44 deleted/extended scenes, which you can enable during episodes (a little 24 icon appears where they were excised), or watch separately on the bonus disc with director and writer commentary. Overall, everyone on 24 deserves serious praise for stringing two-dozen episodes together to create a deep and unrelenting story that will have you watching this set at least twice. Buy it now and thank us later.