Bollywood is seeing one of the greatest revolutions of all time as a recreation of American thriller series 24, hits TV. The show casts as Anil Kapoor as super-crime fighter Jack Bauer. Indian Express reviewed the first 2 episodes that aired this weekend and called t instant show-stoppers. Like the show’s agile energetic anti-terror hero, there is not an ounce of flab in the hour-long playing time of ’24′‘. ’24′ simply grabs your attention and refuses to let it go. First things first. The production value seen on the show are of a caliber unknown to Indian television. Metropolitan night-life was never meant to be like this.

 

Mumbai is caught in a feverish flourish of night-time bustle turning it into a city of pulsating activity as the serial kick-started with some of the coolest crispest fiction writing witnessed on the medium of tedium. Rensil D’Silva and Bhavani Iyer’s writing is topnotch. While retaining the looming suspense and the breakneck narrative speed of the original American series, the writers have created space for the very peculiar cultural compulsions of urban India where the householder must balance the demands of his posh job with family obligations. Milap Zaveri’s dialogues capture the wry cynicism and the split-second immediacy of anti-terrorists working against the clock. But Zaveri doesn’t slavishly copy the original dialogues from the American series. None of the ‘Kya tum sach mein ho?’ (Literal translation of “Are you for real?’) incongruities.