I liked this series when it first aired on TV. But as a watched it one week after the other I began to dislike more and more. The writing was OK. The concept can seem to be ideal of television. Eventually I find myself thinking that this is the worst type of fiction television, where a viewer has to watch every single episode of a series for the show at all to make any sense. I love the well written television series that deal with a story on its own each week and get to know the characters that way. You don't have to watch every single episode to understand the last couple of episodes. This is what I don't like at about shows like 24. <br /><br />The first three seasons weren't badly written. I won't say that it was well written. This is not, after all, Robert Ludlum or Ken Follett. But the writing on the last two seasons were so dismal. The characters were supposed to be professionals, the best of their field in the world. Why then did they do many almost criminally bad mistakes, one after another, the last ten or so episodes? The stories were dragged to the extreme just to fit it in 24 episodes. There is also another matter. With the main characters being awake all night, fighting, hacking networks, and other stuff that they do, none seemed to even remotely tired after doing that for 10, 14, 17, even 20 hours. <br /><br />It is an interesting concept about real time stories being put into action, but I think that it would be much better, both story wise and credibly wise, that the stories was 12 hours or something like that. The storied didn't have to drag and could be more tightly written, and the characters didn't have to look like they didn't know what they were doing. <br /><br />I guess with this commentary I haven't joined the praise of this show and am therefore in the minority, but I felt that I had to disagree with the majority when I feel this way about it.