24 Season 1 (R2) (1 Viewer)

[Christopher D]

I'm surprised that there doesn't appear to be an active thread on this title in this area.

A couple of quick impressions:

Excellent picture, excellent sound -- both much better than broadcast. The menus are very stylish but not overdone, and the packaging looks *much* better than the R1. A really great deal for around $45, even though more in the way of supplements would have been desirable.

As most are probably already aware, an issue has arisen with respect to "cuts" from the version broadcast on the BBC. I'm not immediately stressed out about it given that the DVDs contain the full original US broadcast version. However, I hope that Fox UK will allow those outside R2 to exchange for the corrected discs 5 and 6 -- which I hope to attempt after I also have an R1 copy!

 

[Simon Massey]

I think the main problem with these cuts is that they completely change the context of the ending of the series. The UK broadcast contained scenes which weren't shown in the US due to advert breaks, and these scenes are quite important

 

[Christopher D]

I suspect that there are going to be wildly differing points of view on the "missing" footage, but mine is that these discs contain the original version of the program, which is what US viewers saw in the first run. So, while I would like to see the additional material, I'm not losing a lot of sleep over it because everything I originally saw was here.

Moreover, it's important to remember that the absence of this stuff in the original broadcast was an editorial decision. I doubt that there's anything there that the director/producer thought was truly integral to the story --if it had been, it would have been included for the first run. As a matter of fact, from my limited understanding of the additional material, it seems like some of it is *not* consistent with the rest of the story we saw and may well have been removed for that reason. For example, one of the most controversial items is the apparent omission of a scene where Teri Bauer tells Nina that she is pregnant.

But think about this for a second -- there was a lot of tension between these characters. I find it much more likely that this piece of information was *not* told than that it was. The US (original) version seems a lot more internally consistent on that score, so I'm heavily willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the editors here. It is just as likely that the "missing" material is stuff that was added as time-filler that had originally been edited out -- perhaps for story reasons as much as time.

Lots of folks will probably disagree with this, and I think this ultimately has to be a "to each his own" issue. I do agree, though, that Fox should have released what was shown on the BBC to the UK, which I certainly would have liked to have as a curioristy since I'm buying both R1 and R2 anyway.

 

[Simon Massey]

Well the scene your talking about plays perfectly well in the context of the episode itself, and does not seem internally consistent at all. I was disappointed this was missing, but I suppose if you had never seen it first time round, it wouldn't make much difference.

 

[barryfrench]

Hi,
I just bought this set purely because it got such good reviews. I haven't seen any of it yet. I did wonder how
24 x 60 min episodes equals 1041 mins. I therefore concluded that it had something to do with ad breaks and as I haven't seen it I guess i won't know what i'm missing!!