Product Details

• Actors: Kiefer Sutherland, Dennis Haysbert
• Format: Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround)
• Subtitles: English, Spanish
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Studio: Fox Network
• DVD Release Date: September 17, 2002
• Run Time: 1152 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (906 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00005JLF2
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #8,618 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

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  #14 in	Movies & TV > Action & Adventure > Series & Sequels > 24
  #68 in	Movies & TV > Mystery & Suspense > Series & Sequels
  #73 in	Movies & TV > Mystery & Suspense > Detectives

• For more information about "24 - Season One" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

• This is item 1 in The 24 Series.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Such a simple idea--yet so fiendishly complex in the execution. 24, as surely everyone knows by now, is a thriller that takes places over 24 hours, midnight to midnight, in 24 one-hour episodes (well, 45-minute episodes if you subtract the commercials). Everything takes place in real time, which means no flashbacks, no flash-forwards, no handy time-dissolves. Every strand of the plot has to be dovetailed and interlocked so things happen just when they should, in the right amount of time. Not that easy.

Creator Robert Cochran and his team of writers and directors have done an impressive job of putting the jigsaw together and keeping the tension ratcheted up high, as federal agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) runs around L.A. trying to stall an assassination attempt on an African American presidential candidate and rescue his wife and daughter from the clutches of the Balkan baddies. Twists, turns, revelations, and cliffhangers are tossed at us with satisfying regularity. It's not perfect: we get some hokey plot devices (instant amnesia, anybody?); the final twist makes no sense whatsoever; there are altogether too many huggy family moments; and as for Dennis Hopper's "Serbian" accent....

Even so, this is undeniably mold-breaking TV. Sutherland, rescuing his career from the doldrums in one heroic leap, fully deserves his Golden Globe. Sets and locations are artfully deployed, and Sean Callery's score is a powerful, brooding presence. Like Murder One and The Sopranos, 24 is one of those series that future TV thrillers will be measured against. --Philip Kemp

Product Description

Twenty-four hours of a counter-terrorist agent's attempt to prevent the assassination of a presidential candidate.
Genre: Television
Rating: NR
Release Date: 17-SEP-2002
Media Type: DVD

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

233 of 255 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great show - but with missing scenes!., August 22, 2002

By	Rayanne Graff (London, UK) - See all my reviews

The show itself is of course magnificent for the most part. Innovative, exciting and very well acted. A landmark in modern TV drama, despite a brief drop -off in quality in some of the late afternoon episodes. The DVD picture quality is wonderfully sharp, and the sound is nicely crisp.

Important to note if you are buying this package having not seen the show before (having heard about it from others but too late to join in watching it on TV) that there are spoilers all over the presentation. the enclosed booklet includes short summaries of every episode and not much else, so don't look at it until you've seen the whole show. Similarly the menus feature clips from the show which is nice to watch if you aren't worried about information being given away, as the clips on the menu for each disc tend to reveal major plot points.

Also, the DVD extras are actually pretty poor. The alternative ending is dull and obviously only shot to keep the true ending secret. The teaser for season 2 comprises only Kiefer Sutherland talking in very vague terms about the general concept of 24, with no real information about the second series.

Worst of all is the fact that the footage on the discs is only the footage that was originally broadcast IN THE US. In the UK the broadcast footage included an extra couple of minutes for each of the episodes 7pm - 12pm. This footage contained scenes that was cut from the US broadcast for adverts, whereas in the UK 24 was shown on the BBC where there are no adverts.

These scenes ranged from nice additions to important points: one cut scene had a major impact on the crucial events in the final episode and another even greatly improved the climactic battle between Jack and the bad guys.

Fox haven't included this footage on the DVD versions in either the UK or the US, meaning that us poor Brits have scenes that we miss and this has led to calls for a recall and replacement with the full footage. For the US viewer, this is actually worse, in that you are never going to see these great scenes. There are no running time issues on DVD, unlike on TV, so why not let those fans willing to pay for the box set have bonus footage integrated into their box sets?

Bizarrely, this doesn't affect the VHS British release of 24, only the DVD, so if you want those extra scenes you'll need a PAL compatible TV and VCR.

Why not drop Fox an email congratulating them on making such a great show and asking for them to include the full footage as was broadcast on the BBC?

104 of 114 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bet You Can't Watch Just One, January 23, 2003

By	Mark Baker (Santa Clarita, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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It's just after midnight at the Bauer home. They're getting ready for bed when Jack gets a phone call asking him to report to work at the Counter Terrorism Unit in Los Angeles. There he's briefed on a plot to assassinate Presidential candidate David Palmer. Meanwhile, his daughter Kim has snuck out of the house to meet some guys who are bad news. His wife Terri is finding trouble searching for Kim. And Palmer is facing a crisis of his own concerning something in his family's past he didn't even know about. It's going to be a long day for everyone.

This thriller series is innovative. Each episode represents just one hour in the day. I wasn't sure they could pull if off, but the writers managed to keep all the plots going and make the gaps between seeing characters believable. It quickly turned into a weekly addiction that had me glued to my seat and dreading commercials more then normal. Some of the plots loose steam in the afternoon, but it builds up tension again for the climax, which was the best hour of television last season, period.

Unfortunately, this set wasn't all it could have been. They removed the "previously on 24" recaps, which are very useful if you just want to pop a random disc into the machine. Ironically, they also don't have a play all feature, which would go well with no recaps. The worst thing, in my opinion, is the lack of chapter breaks in each episode. The season 1 intro (on the last disc) is ok and includes a mention of this season. Of course, at this point, we're far beyond anything they would have told us in the set. The best feature is the alternate ending. While (to my surprise) I prefer the original, it's nice to see what might have been. As you would expect, the picture and audio quality are top notch.

It's a shame this great show didn't get the DVD treatment it deserved. I'm willing to overlook the lack of extras because of timing, but the lack of the recap & chapter breaks really bothers me. Even so, it's a good set of a great show worth using to catch up or remember this innovative program.

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tale of Three Families, June 19, 2003

By	Alex Diaz-Granados "fardreaming writer" (Miami, FL United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I have to admit that when I heard about 24's format -- the entire season's output focusing on the events of one day -- I was skeptical. No matter how intricate or exciting the storyline was, surely television audiences would not be patient enough to watch the hour-by-hour account of one federal agent's mission to prevent the assasination of a presidential candidate on the day of the California Democratic primary.

Unsure about this concept, I tuned in to the first episode in the fall of 2001...and became an instant fan of 24. I watched about 22 episodes on first run...missing only a couple due to outside obligations or cable TV outages. Now that I own the boxed set of Season One, I have seen the entire series and can now write a few words about it.

Although it is very much an action-suspense thriller (closer to Tom Clancy than to Ian Fleming), 24's tale of vendetta-driven terrorists plotting to kill Sen. David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert)on the day of the California primary is also the intimate story of the implosion of three families.

First, the Bauer family. When we first see Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), the setting is almost dully domestic -- he's playing a game of chess with his teenage daughter Kim (Elisha Cuthbert). But shortly before he gets a call from one of his fellow agents in the Counter Terrorist Unit, we see the domestic tranquility is belied by some tension. Kim is openly rude to her mother, Teri (Leslie Hope) and will soon sneak out to go partying with her friend Janet....which will be one of the worst choices she's ever made. And as we watch the series unfold, we'll learn about the straining effects of Jack's job on the marriage and of Jack's affair with fellow CTU agent Nina Myers (Sarah Clarke).

The second family implosion involves the Palmer family. Just as it seems everything is going perfectly for Sen. Palmer and his picture perfect family, we see as 24 unfolds that all is not well here, either. Skeletons from the Palmer children's past are surfacing on the very day that David Palmer seems poised to win his party's nomination for the Presidency, and he is forced to see how far his ambitious wife Sherry (Penny Jerald Johnson) will go to keep ugly family secrets out of the public eye.

And finally, there is the Drazen clan. Serb nationalists who supported Milosevic's iron-fisted rule, they were targeted by American forces and lost several family members as a result of a covert operation to take out the Drazen patriarch. Now they are bent on revenge and will do anything and kill anyone to get it.

Yes, 24 does have its flaws (the travails of wayward Kim and Teri's amnesia are a bit over-the-top for some viewers), but overall this is a fine piece of television drama.