TELEVISION REVIEW; Countering Terrorists, And a Dense Daughter

One of the best series on television is ''24,'' and it could be even better if there were less of it -- if, say, the world had adopted the time-keeping system of the ancient Sumerians. The show would then be called ''12'' and its hero, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), could save the country from an apocalyptic terrorist attack in a 12-hour day -- eliminating the need for some of the sillier side plots delaying the denouement. (How many times can a daughter be kidnapped, found, then captured again?)

Tonight's premiere episode of Day 3 starts three years after last season's finale. Viewers are not immediately told what Bauer has been doing in the 26,280 hours that elapsed since the latest assassination attempt against President David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert). By the time Bauer enters a Federal prison to get names of terrorist cells from a Latin American drug lord he helped capture only to watch him stab his own lawyer in the neck with the lawyer's gold-nib fountain pen, it is pretty clear that once again, nothing is as it seems and nobody can be trusted. Bauer appears to have spent some time undercover in the cocaine smuggling world, and for some reason, winces and sweats a lot (ulcers?).

By 1:20 p.m. the series's third season is already as tightly coiled, clever and suspenseful as the first two. The first hour establishes a Mexico-based drug cartel as the enemy plotting a terrorist attack on the United States, but past experience suggests that high-placed Americans may also play a treacherous role. One of the fun things about ''24'' is that external threats lead back to an original sin at home. In Season 2, the nuclear attack on Los Angeles was not actually ordered by Muslim terrorists. It was set off by greedy oil industry tycoons trying to start a Middle East war.

The bad news is that Kim (Elisha Cuthbert), Bauer's impossibly dense daughter, is not only alive but working for her father at the counterterrorism unit as a junior analyst. Even though she now has her own security-clearance pass, she never seems to understand when national security is at stake. She has picked this day, of all days, to tell her father about her clandestine office romance with his handsome young protégé, Chase Edmunds (James Badge Dale). But Chase is a field officer who works directly under Bauer.