When the series 24 first premiered a few seasons back, I thought it was the most brilliant thing that’d been on television in a long, long time — the conceit that each hour-long episode represented an hour of “real time” was clever and fresh, the suspenseful tone was pretty consistent, and even the plot of that first season was relatively realistic (if somewhat burdened with the “one damn thing after another” flavor of old cliffhanger serials, which, in a sense, is exactly what 24 is). It was also great to see Kiefer Sutherland, an actor I’ve enjoyed since his early roles in the 1980s, land a steady job and some critical respect.

However, I decided early on that show was something of a one-trick pony; after all, how many incredibly intense 24-hour crises in which the fate of the nation hangs in the balance could a single counter-terrorism agent realistically find himself in? One, maybe two in a single lifetime, but after that it would start getting harder and harder to accept that what we’re watching is “real.” Disbelief will only allow itself to be suspended so far. Call it the Die Hard 2 effect.

Don’t get the reference? Recall if you will the film Die Hard. The first one, I mean, not either of the sequels. Back in 1988, Die Hard took the country by storm, reinvigorating the action genre by combining what was then a fresh concept — a single good guy locked in some kind of isolated setting with a whole bunch of bad guys — with some genuine human emotions and just a touch more realism than most films of this type. I personally think the first Die Hard is one of the best action films ever made, and it’s pretty high up on my list of just plain good movies, too.

But when it was over, it was over, as far as I was concerned. John and Holly McLane’s story arc was complete and, if we were talking about real people, their Christmas Eve adventure inside the Nakatomi Tower would be the highpoint (or lowpoint, depending on how you look at it) of their entire lives. Realistically, there just couldn’t be any other event that would begin to measure up.

However, realism has very little to do with box office receipts. Die Hard made a boatload of money, so it was a foregone conclusion that there would be a Die Hard 2, even if another such adventure was pretty far-fetched.

The very first trailer I ever saw for this sequel actually played on the unlikeliness of its premise. The trailer was short, consisting entirely of Bruce Willis as McLane, running down a service corridor filled with pipes, steam, flashing lights, and urgent-sounding music. He’s carrying a gun; this all looks vaguely familiar to us. The trailer ends with Willis/McLane dodging some bullets, taking cover behind a corner, then saying to the camera, “How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?”

Answer: it can’t, not in the universe in which I live. Die Hard 2: Die Harder had a big strike against it in my book before I ever saw a single frame of the actual movie, because it was just too difficult for me to buy that the same guy would once again get himself into a “die hard” situation. I couldn’t suspend my disbelief enough to really enjoy the sequel — not to mention the fact that the sequel was just plain bad, but that’s another rant. My point is, the same shit can’t happen to the same guy twice.

And 24, now in its fifth or sixth season (I can’t remember for sure), is suffering from the same problem. It has been ever since the second season, to be honest — if the show’s producers had been really brave and visionary, they would’ve given a single, perfect year of episodes and then vanished into the ether, but, of course, the show was a success, so they had to keep going. The second season surprised me by being a more-or-less satisfying continuation of the story. Since then, however, it’s been a case of diminishing returns, and now it’s become all too obvious that the writers of this series are tapped out. They’ve gone to the well one too many times and the only way they can think of to generate some water-cooler discussions is to kill some beloved regulars. Not that they haven’t whacked characters we’ve liked before, but tonight’s premiere — in which two “untouchable” characters died and a third was maimed, all within the first fifteen minutes — really smacked of desperation, like they were trying to grab hold of our collars, shake us around a little, and prove to us that the show is still taking risks. Except that it’s not. Once those initial assassinations were over, it was back to business-as-usual for Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer, driving around LA and arguing over the cell phone with the suits back at CTU (that’s the Counter-Terrorism Unit, for you uninitiated types) about his methods. It is, if you’ll forgive me, the same old shit. At this point, a better option for a new season would’ve been to completely shake up the show’s format, force Jack to learn new methods, leave him working without the support of CTU at all — if you’re a fan of the show, you’ll understand how and why this would be possible — but that’s not what I see developing for this season.

I’ll keep watching, of course. I’m a good little fanboy, after all, and it takes a lot to alienate me once I get into something. But the pointless and unnecessary assassinations tonight may have come close. Dammit, those characters deserved to live after all the crap they went through in the previous seasons. If only the producers of this series had remembered the lesson of Die Hard 2: the same shit can’t happen to the same guy twice. Or three, four, or five times, either…