I don’t understand 24. It’s odd that I find myself confessing this fact, what with having watched every episode of every season and all, but there’s something inherently flawed in the design of the series. I dare say that 24 pioneered prime time television dramas that require a vested time and emotional commitment since viewing every episode of every season is absolutely necessary in order to understand the whole experience. Comparing 24 and Cheers seems stupid for a lot of well founded reasons, but there is one key difference that I would like to illustrate: you can drop in and out of Cheers as you wish, but never feel out of the loop because the way the show is designed accommodates a viewer who might not be able to set aside the same hour the same day of the week for six months straight. Frankly, you miss one episode of 24 and you might as well not bother anymore.

If you’re unfamiliar with 24, here are the core details: every season (or “day”) contains 24 episodes (or “hours”) chronicling a very bad day for former Counter Terrorist Unit agent Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland). The series started in 2001 and is currently in its seventh year (this season was pushed back due to last year’s WGA strike). The show is grounded in realism, but the current season usually occurs a few years in the future to adjust for its own continuity’s sake.

Day 7 begins with a bang: a computer security expert is kidnapped by a group of terrorists who are interested in gaining control of America’s technological networks for their own dastardly schemes. They require the man’s talents in order to create a device that will allow them to hack into the highly secured networks, and he’s the only one who knows how to build it (presumably). Meanwhile, Jack Bauer is put on trial for his “crimes” at the US Senate when the FBI interrupts the proceedings in order to enlist his help. Why does the FBI need Jack? Because the terrorist mastermind is none other than Tony Almeida, a former colleague of Jack’s who everyone thought died during Day 5.

If you find the above paragraph confusing, then perhaps 24 isn’t the show for you. This is only the core thread of Day 7. There are also the lesser threads including the mysterious suicide of the President’s son, an international conflict in Sangala, a supposedly widely spread corruption in the White House, and a host of other far less interesting plot points that would occupy a modest novel if I were to write them out for you.

I suppose 24 has always been a relatively exclusive thrill ride. There are people who have absolutely no idea what the hell all the hubbub is about, and there are people who swear by the series as if Jack Bauer will lead us to the Promised Land of primetime action/dramas. If you are completely new to the series, then Day 7 isn’t the best jumping off point for you. I’d recommend devoting a couple of months to watching the first six days in order to catch up, or at the very least Day 1 and Day 5 in order to appreciate the humble beginnings of the series, and since the context of Tony’s “death” is fairly necessary.

What’s most appreciable of 24 (and this is indeed the strongest and most endearing aspect of the series) is how addictive it is. Hunkering down with a box set and watching an entire season over a weekend is far and away the best way to enjoy the show. Every episode ties into the next so well that you need to be able to watch them consecutively without interruption. This is why airing a single episode in weekly intervals is such a failure: the anticipation that one episode builds up is strong enough to hold the attention of the viewer overnight, but not strong enough to last an entire week. This is somewhat alleviated when most networks rerun the previous episode before the new one, but the momentum is far too stilted and your attention begins to waver as the year drifts on.

I watched the first five seasons of 24 on DVD, usually plowing through a season a week. This was in time for the four hour premiere of Day 6 in January 2007 with my intention being to watch that season as it airs. I watched the first nine episodes, became disinterested waiting for the next one to air, and dropped it altogether in favour of waiting for the Day 6 DVD set. This will probably be what happens with Day 7 as well.

24, especially in recent years, has always been about a tight narrative with a twitchy air of urgency about it. While this keeps things brisk, it often raises questions of continuity as you begin to tear under the surface. Watching Jack Bauer drive 20 miles from an office space to a terrorist hideout isn’t exactly pulse-pounding action, but in previous seasons a long drive actually felt like a long drive. If a character had to make that kind of journey in season 1, the character would drop out for however long it takes them to make the trip. In recent seasons, locations and timings are deliberately vague to disguise these persistent little errors. Instead of a character saying, “The destination is 20 miles away,” they would say, “ETA is three minutes” in order to keep things moving. While this is more tolerable it does little to hide the fact that in the world of 24, everywhere in Washington or California is within five minutes drive of each other.

Another peculiar bit of continuity is the way commercial breaks are inserted into the episodes. An episode of 24 occupies one hour of the story, but really provides ~40 minutes of actual screen time for the audience. To compensate, a commercial usually eats up ~5 minutes of time, and there are time jumps of between 20 to 60 seconds during the programme in order to even everything out. This wouldn’t be a problem if station breaks were intelligently spaced. Most people understand commercials are used to increase tension before a conflict takes place, but this presents a problem for a show like 24 when you consider that events in real time rely on the sort of immediacy commercials often destroy. A great example is a scene in the third episode of the four episode premiere on Monday night: Jack Bauer and an accomplice (spoiler omitted) are in a perilous position pinned down in the stairwell of the FBI headquarters with security combing the building searching for them. Just as they might or might not be discovered, an advertisement rears its ugly head. We return after five minutes in the show’s world have elapsed, and they’re still sitting in the stairwell playing checkers waiting for instructions while security is hot on their tail. So much for a plausible and streamlined narrative…

The new characters in the show also seem to have been dumbed down a bit. In the second episode of the premiere, Jack Bauer and FBI agent Renee Walker are off to interrogate a suspect in the terrorist plot. Before the suspect can be of any use, a rooftop sniper takes him out. If you watched the premiere, you might have found yourself thinking that there’s no way a sniper could be activated and set up so quickly. This turns out to be exactly the case, but would you believe that absolutely no one in the FBI is able to arrive at that conclusion? An FBI special agent also has the sort of zealous audacity to scoff at the idea that there might just be a mole inside the FBI or White House. 24 characters aren’t likable, but they at least they use to be smart. Thankfully, a few familiar faces return in the fourth episode, so it might not all be bad news.

Day 7 is off to a rocky start so far. Four episodes in and there’s very little semblance of a cohesive story coming together through the thick mud of boring plot threads. It feels ambitious, but it’s a low-key ambition that’s hard for newcomers to appreciate and difficult for veterans to understand. Day 6′s four episode premiere ended with a nuclear explosion in Los Angeles, so perhaps it’s for the better that Day 7 hasn’t tried to wage war on the moon or something similar in a bid to top it.

Loathe as I am to admit it, I tend to watch an anomalous amount of reality television. Not the brand of reality television that involves washed up celebrities living in a mansion or sexy young folk living large on an island in the sun. No, my taste in reality television is a bit more admirable, if you can believe that. I’m quite fond of shows like Canada’s Worst Driver/Handyman, Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, and Dirty Jobs. I’d wager that the only questionable such show I watch is Survivor, but the sheer malevolence of condemning normal folk to a month on an island with people deliberately picked to clash with their personalities is more than enough for me to enjoy it. But lately, I’ve found myself enjoying a little programme called “Dragon’s Den,” the third season of which CBC has been re-airing on Wednesday evenings for the summer. It’s a show that has business hopefuls display their ideas to five of Canada’s top financers for either funding or ridicule, depending on how good the product is. Naturally, something so good could never have originated from the grey cultural mush that is my fatherland’s culture, and indeed Dragon’s Den is a show Japanese in origin, with various countries, from Finland to the Israel, having had a crack at the venture-capitalist genre over the years (or so says Wikipedia). Now it’s America’s turn to give the concept a shot, their version of which is called “Shark Tank” and had premiered last Sunday. Being a fan of my country’s spin on the genre and piqued by the inclusion of Kevin O’Leary and Robert Herjavec on the programme, both men having been members of Dragon’s Den since it premiered in Canada three years ago, I gave it a look. Should you?

In Shark Tank, prospective builders, inventors, marketers, and entrepreneurs, come before five powerful business executives from a variety of industries in the hopes of securing money and connections in order to bring their idea to the next level. These people decide how much of their company they are willing to sell and for what price (a rudimentary valuation) and do whatever they think is necessary to generate interest among their potential investors, generally consisting of a product demonstration and the recital of some financial figures. The typical pitch usually begins with the formalities of the presenter’s name and origin, followed by the phrase “I’m willing to sell my company for __% for $_______.” The percent offered and the cost are multiplied for a rough valuation model, which is then weighed against other figures the Sharks ask for, such as current profit and projected profit, in order to better understand what the business is worth. Inquiries and negotiations soon follow in the hopes of better understanding what both parties are getting themselves into. It’s not uncommon for additional stipulations (royalties, licensing, etc.) to be laid out and neither businessman nor entrepreneur is obliged to strike a deal. If a deal is made, investor and inventor become business partners. However if no deal is struck, the inventor leaves with nothing.

So far, the major problem with Shark Tank is the lack of chemistry between the sharks themselves. Admittedly only the first episode of the first season has aired, but it’s hard to imagine all five of them interacting with each other in a way that engages the audience at large. Only Kevin and Robert deal with serious business playfully, but when one considers their work as Dragons on the (superior) Canadian iteration, this is their fourth year together on the project and one should expect nothing less. Perhaps it will take a few episodes for all five Sharks to become acclimatized to each other, but they’re off to a cold start. As it stands, it’s difficult to see where they all fit in with the grand scheme of things. Barbara Corcoran is a Manhattan real estate mogul, which is of little help on the panel since the majority of entrepreneurs seek either retail or industrial success. Kevin Harrington is an infomercial pioneer, which means he should come to function as the marketing guru (like Arlene Dickinson from Dragon’s Den), and Daymond John could possibly turn into the group’s risk-taker/philanthropist (again, like Brett Wilson from Dragon’s Den). Still, the American sharks are all too stiff and bland being primarily interested in the big money. Granted that this is the whole point of the show, but dealing with nothing but cold, hard numbers can turn off the average viewer. The success of reality TV lies in the emotional response, however synthetic it may be. Being polite and waiting patiently to have your say is a total betrayal of the concept. Constant interjections and bickering are necessary for enjoyment, and indeed it is the fearlessness of both entrepreneur and expert that makes for a great concept.

As is the tendency for North American reality television, cliff-hanger commercial breaks and prolonged cuts that anticipate a simple “yes” or “no” response are either substituted for or placed ahead of actual drama. I can’t imagine why this should be the case for Shark Tank, though, since there’s hardly anything more exciting than the complete annihilation of a person’s beloved and ambitious pet project by a ruthless executive. For whatever reason, almost all reality programmes have this terrible habit of setting up the hapless for extreme humiliation in front of millions before deciding to alter radically the end result by refusing to pull the trigger. In order to illustrate my point, I feel compelled to bring up The WB’s Superstar USA show that aired around five years ago. A quick synopsis would be that the programme was about finding America’s most obliviously terrible singers in the typical American Idol fashion. In short, the final episode had the dreadful vocalists perform in front of millions before being told the truth that it was all a hoax and that they were actually singing abominations. Yet instead of using the ugly truth to destroy them, the bad news was delivered as politely as possible to the moral of “talent doesn’t matter as long as you believe in yourself blah blah blah… here’s $50, 000 for your troubles.” This is neither a good payoff nor a satisfactory conclusion. This is tantamount to placing a thumbtack on your teacher’s chair only to fill her in on the joke as you whisk away the trap for a cushy massaging velour throne. While the producers might think they’re being upright for sparing the victim’s feelings, they neglect to consider that they might have betrayed the expectations of the viewer.

Now I must recognize that my sentiments are in all likelihood a minority opinion and that it’s safer for executives to water down the animosity of an insult than to follow through on the slight, but my main point is that such reversals have no place in a programme ostensibly about business. Kevin O’Leary often says that his upfront honesty and his willingness to nip a bad idea in the bud at the expense of the originator’s feelings is a kindness that goes unacknowledged. His notion is shared amongst his colleagues on both Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank where it’s mutually understood that nothing is more financially dangerous than an idiot with a bad idea, but both shows depict Kevin and his philosophy in different lights. In Dragon’s Den, the audience understands that the harsh criticism is common among all successful businessmen and that Kevin merely becomes a mouthpiece for it, yet Shark Tank presents Kevin as an adversary to overcome and not as source of wisdom. Come to think of it, this bothered me for most of the programme. So far it seems as is Shark Tank wants the audience to be on the side of the entrepreneur, regardless of how harebrained they are. To be honest, such a claim is currently tricky to assert since the worst idea presented tonight, a panel for post-it notes that attaches to the side of a laptop, might be considered a lucrative investment compared to, say, a bicycle pump powered paint roller (an invention from a Canadian inventor featured in the third season of Dragon’s Den), but Shark Tank makes it quite clear that you’re supposed to feel bad for the salesperson when their pitch falls through. Actually, Shark Time dove for the heartstrings right with the very first presenter who tried to sell his mixed martial arts approved clothing line on a sappy broken jaw story. “Money has no soul and does not care,” quips cruel king Kevin, and our plucky young clothing designer leaves the Tank to burn more money on his fruitless endeavour.

Really though, these are all issues that have the potential to be resolved. If Shark Tank ever manages to come to grips with the cold reality of the business world, with hosts that play off each other and the entrepreneurs at their mercy, Shark Tank could very well become a good show. Good enough, in fact, that I might be willing to overlook the hideous set and presentation in favour of its novel fun. My recommendation would be to watch a few episodes of what other countries have done with the idea (all of Dragon’s Den Canada season three is posted online here), discover exactly what Shark Tank lacks, and pray that it gets better soon.