Like a superhero comic, '24' thrives in a two-dimensional world

''24" is flat.

Fox's Chicken Little suspense series has no depth of character, no visual dimensionality, and the silvery, monochromatic lighting of a damp basement. The acting is so shallow and garish you almost want to tummy-tickle Mary Lynn Rajskub's Chloe, or give her a noogie, or stun-gun her -- anything to snap her out of that eternal glower. And the message of ''24" -- something about ends justifying means and the American triumph of good over evil -- is simplistic, to say the least.

And that's what makes the show so cool, almost brilliant. ''24" is flat because it is a TV-ized comic book, an electronic re-creation of a drawn superhero adventure. It is a TV series that operates by so many of the aesthetic rules of comics and graphic novels, you can almost see thought and speech balloons above the characters.

Once you think about the series from that perspective, its weaknesses and excesses are forgivable. Indeed, they make good sense. The Monday night show, building to a two-hour crescendo on May 22, is using film instead of paper to create a prime-time storyboard.

In visual terms, ''24" mimics comic-book panels, most obviously when the show breaks into its signature split screens. Showing multiple images in one TV frame has its parallel in print, with many panels on a single page. The camera movements, too, evoke a sequential-art effect.

In one shot recently, we saw bad guy Henderson say of a tape implicating President Logan, ''Jack knows there's no point in going public until he has proof." Then, quickly, the camera zoomed a step closer to his creepy face to hold for his second nefarious comment -- as if moving to the next box on the page: ''He won't make any accusations until he has that evidence in his hand."

And the camerawork combines with the actors to simulate the frozen-image effect of a comic. The actors hold their expressions a few beats too long, while the camera hangs on them a few beats too long. When Jack Bauer is enraged, the camera frames Kiefer Sutherland's emanating fury for a good moment. When Vice President Gardner is suspicious of the president, the camera slowly hands us actor Ray Wise's eyebrows -- two thick lines with a blunt pencil -- oddly awry.

And when Chloe is doing anything, the camera fixes on Rajskub and her bratty scowls. She can keep her scowl in place seemingly forever, shifting only her eyes to follow words on her computer screen.

The actors (except, perhaps, Jean Smart as the first lady) don't dig much into the nuances of their characters. In a way, subtlety is contra-indicated by the comic-book approach. Instead, the actors stay strictly on the surface, in order to look the way they feel. They adopt exaggerated and static facial and vocal signals that could fairly be called cartoonish.

Sutherland surely works hard; he's in every episode of the series and in so very many scenes. But as the Batman figure, he mostly employs one voice and one attitude: gruff but with hints of compassion. And he has used the same characterization throughout the show's previous four seasons; superheroes don't change much through the years.

And anyway, the actors would look silly creating inner life when the dialogue is as wooden as it is. The lines are built to fit into speech balloons, which is why Jack is such a concise hero. He's always muttering, ''Right now, we can't trust anyone," or ''It's our only out," or, to a little girl, ''Sweetheart, you can see your mom now," rather than having full-length revelatory conversations. He's a hero, and that's all you need to know. Very few of the ''24" characters are meant to be morally gray; they're either good or bad, or pretending to be good but really bad.

The perils of Jack Bauer and America are fodder for ''24" season after season. The anti-terrorism themes are a sign of the times, replacing earlier comic-book demons including Nazism, communism, dictators, and atomic accidents. But they represent only the enemy du jour, a force against which our hero will prevail.

That's why so many fans of the show -- and it has its rabid fanboys and fangirls as much as any superhero comic does -- accept Jack's methods so readily. While Jack tortures for information and he and Chloe spy without permission (which seems to be the primary purpose of CTU), everyone roots for him. Even viewers who deplore the same tactics when they perceive them in our government root for Jack. They know he's not meant to be real. No comic-book character is. Jack is a growling Batman, with trusty Chloe as his Robin, and happily without a pair of tights and a cape.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.