‘24’ at 25 - The Series That Redefined the Action Thriller
“I’m federal agent Jack Bauer, and today is the longest day of my life.”
25 years ago today, on November 6, 2001, 24 premiered on Fox. The creators, Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran, had one idea, and it was a daring one. Every episode would cover an hour in real time, with the full 24-episode season spanning an entire day. Split screens let the camera follow several characters at once, so that the same ticking clock hung over every scene. Before 24, the pair had been best known for adapting Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita into a five-season television series of the same name from 1997 to 2001, but nothing they did afterward would ever eclipse 24.
Kiefer Sutherland plays series protagonist Jack Bauer, a counterterrorist agent who must constantly sacrifice any semblance of a normal life so the rest of us can keep ours, while Carlos Bernard played his close ally Tony Almeida, and in the final season, Corey Hawkins took on a central role as ex-Army Ranger Eric Carter. The supporting cast rotated constantly, and it was consistently excellent. Presidents came and went, as did the bureaucrats who locked down the Counter Terrorist Unit amid its ever-shifting ‘protocols’.
The series ran for ten seasons. The first eight (including the television film 24: Redemption which fell between the sixth and seventh) aired from 2001 to 2010. The ninth season, 24: Live Another Day, followed in 2014, and the final season 24: Legacy ended the franchise in 2017.
The show’s early power came partly from its timing. The first season was shot in the shadow of 9/11, and the people who made it and the people who watched it shared the same anxieties. Few shows have ever been so thoroughly of their moment. It is a formulaic show, and that was never a flaw. Instead, that repetition added something. The New York Times made this point during the show’s fifth season, writing:
“Like all good genre entertainment -- like mystery novels, for example, or screwball comedies -- “24” offers both surprise and an even more deeply satisfying element of predictability. You know what you’re going to get. In this case the show may even work as a kind of inoculation, jolting us with a little dose of manageable terrorism or nuclear threat or biological warfare as a balm to our deeper, unspoken anxieties.”
I think that is exactly right. We knew Jack would avert the worst, and that knowledge was the comfort. That fifth season was universally considered the peak of the series. It earned 24 the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series after four earlier nominations for the award. It was also the season in which the show’s politics sharpened, with a duplicitous president slinking to new depths of corruption each week and one of the best fictional presidents ever portrayed on screen, David Palmer, tragically removed from the story.
But the series was not without its controversies, and an honest account of it must acknowledge them. 24 presented a troubling ‘ideal’ of the American government agent who finds justifications to violate civil liberties and invade the privacy of citizens, including his own family, and who resorts to torture whenever he decides it is necessary. The narrative was typically built so that the ends justified the means. It also frequently portrayed Muslim characters in a vastly disproportionate negative light in the years after 9/11, when such portrayals did real harm. These are not small objections, and I do not think they should be waved away just because the show was fun to watch.
Still, the show had its own reckoning in miniature. Jack’s dilemma was always how to save the people he loved while defusing the larger threat, and when forced to choose, he always chose people, even if it meant disregarding protocol. That made him different from everyone else in the government on screen, a government that was a projection of our own worst fears. A show that so clearly understood its hero as toxic to those near him was at least aware of the price of what it was depicting.
What cannot be denied is the effect the show had on popular culture. The real-time structure, with its ever-present threats and its single, preposterously competent protagonist, produced one of the most tense and thrilling action series of the early 2000s. It inspired countless shows that followed, notably including current Emmy darling The Pitt, with its split screens and ticking clock having become a frequent tool for modern television storytellers.
24 is available for purchase on DVD and is currently streaming on Disney+ and Hulu, and 25 years later to the day, the clock is still ticking in the memory of anyone who watched it. It was a show you could not stop watching, even if you wanted to, and that is the best that can be said of any thriller.