It's only recently that I started watching "24" when a German TV station announced a rerun of the first season. I was amazed about the many soap-opera elements found in this series, the mostly boring plot, and the unbelievable technical goodies. Just to give you one example: The whole story about Palmer's son is completely uninteresting. In fact, characters in this series behave amazingly stupid (i.e. Jamie when interrogated by Nina and Tony), and Jack's wife after calling the CTU about Alan.<br /><br />It seems like that Robert Cochran took a soap-opera style family story and just mixed it up with technical terms (like "formatting files") and electronic equipment even the NSA would be proud of. Numerous times the story reaches a point where you can even feel that the story writers got stuck. Then they just invent a new technical device which Jack happens to have in his car/wallet/trousers/jacket/..., have somebdoy say something freaky, and afterwards the world has changed. Now that's an easy way of constructing stories!<br /><br />All this makes "24" definitely a show that is not worth viewing. However, it is strange that Robert Cochran produced such a bad thing after being very good at "The Commish". There we had believable characters, funny stories, and sometimes even a bit suspense. None of these can be found in "24".