If you missed 24, you missed a lot!
I watched 24 last night, and all I can say is WOW. Two major characters killed, another seriously wounded in the first 10 minutes. Jack is definitely back, and this season already promises to kick the other four seasons ass!
I need to start buying the other seasons of 24 so I can enjoy them again. And along with Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica, my off-line TV watching is taking up way too much time.
If you have never heard of 24 before, it's a season wrapped up in 24 one hour increments. All events occur in "real time," which means that you are frequently switching back and forth between characters and sets as things happen. Each show contains one hour of the day, and you need to be up to speed with each prior episode in order to understand what is going on. You can't watch this as independent episodes, you'll get confused.
FOX has an excellent franchise here, and you don't know how you can top the prior years. You've had the attempted assassination of a Presidential candidate, a nuclear weapon exploded on US soil, a bioweapon attack, a coordinated terrorist attack that did a nuclear reactor meltdown and almost nuked Los Angeles, and now bringing Jack back from the dead. Even the writers don't know where these story arcs go, they write the episodes as they go along. This method has painted the writers into a corner on more than one occasion.
Watch it tonight. I command it.