For ‘24,’ Terror Fight (and Series) Nears End
If any one show has represented the post-9/11 era on television, it is “24,” the Fox drama that has offered counterterrorism as entertainment for nine years.
For Fox, the show’s trademark clock is about to stop ticking. Nearly a decade after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that so heavily influenced people’s perceptions of the show, Fox is planning to cancel it. The current season, its eighth, will be its last.
In an interview early this month, the Fox network’s entertainment president, Kevin Reilly, said, “It’s a hard decision for all involved.”
“24” first captured America’s attention in late 2001. The first season, which involved the explosion of a passenger plane and an assassination attempt on the president, entered production well before the 9/11 attacks, but had its premiere eight weeks afterward. At the time, a review in The New York Times noted the “deadly convergence between real life and Hollywood fantasy.”
After this season’s finale in May, “24” will live on, possibly as a feature film, and surely in classrooms and in textbooks. The series enlivened the country’s political discourse in a way few others have, partly because it brought to life the ticking time-bomb threat that haunted the Cheney faction of the American government in the years after 9/11.
Walter Gary Sharp, an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University who taught the course “The Law of 24” in 2007-8, said “24” acted as “a tool to foster public debate to help the public and the government of all nations to consider the proper limits on democracies in their efforts to combat terrorism.”
The character of Bauer, a secret agent played by Kiefer Sutherland, became a stand-in for a stop-at-nothing approach to counterterrorism, and his tactics were evoked by Bush administration officials, Republican presidential candidates and even a justice of the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia.
John Yoo, who helped shape the Bush administration’s interrogation techniques as a Justice Department lawyer, asked in a 2006 book, “What if, as the popular Fox television program ‘24’ recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon in an American city. Should it be illegal for the president to use harsh interrogation short of torture to elicit this information?”
But for the same reasons the show found fans in Bush-era Washington, it has also faced severe scrutiny for its depictions of torture.
“On some level ‘24’ is just a big ole’ ad for torture,” David Danzig, a deputy program director of Human Rights First, a nonprofit group, wrote in an e-mail message. “Those of us who watch the show a lot — and there are tens of millions of us who do — know exactly what is going to happen as soon as Bauer starts to beat a suspect up. He is going to talk.”
The torture sequences were misleading, Mr. Danzig said, because they contributed to a “pervasive myth” that torture was effective. He recalled that Gary Solis, the former director of West Point’s law of war program, once called “24” “one of the biggest problems” in his classroom.
In an e-mail message earlier this month, Mr. Solis wrote that when he would preach battlefield restraint in class, a “not infrequent cadet response” would be something to the effect of “Yeah? Well, did you see Jack Bauer last night? He shot a prisoner right in the knee, and that dude talked.”
The cadets knew right from wrong, and the comments were usually made with a grin, Mr. Solis said. Still, “24” presented a conundrum for the law of war professors, some of whom personally enjoyed the show but wished the torture scenes could be toned down if not eliminated altogether.
Similarly, other officials have said that “24” and other shows influenced the behavior of interrogators at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer at Guantánamo, told a fellow lawyer that Mr. Bauer “gave people lots of ideas,” according to Jane Mayer’s 2008 book, “The Dark Side.”
Mr. Danzig’s group, Human Rights First, met with the “24” producers in 2006 and introduced them to real-life interrogators in 2009. He noted that the series did evolve over time — Mr. Bauer stood trial in Season 7 for his torturous actions — and said that “there is now a little more sensitivity toward the portrayal of torture.”
Still, he added, “the take-home message” has not changed.
While speaking to television writers in January, Mr. Sutherland said of the torture sequences: “It’s a television show. We’re not telling you to try this at home.”
He also refuted claims of a political slant to “24.” “One of the things that I was always so unbelievably proud of our show is that you could have it being discussed by former President Bill Clinton and Rush Limbaugh at the same time, both using it and citing it to justify their points of view,” he said. “That, to me, was incredibly balanced.”
For years, “24” regularly drew 10 million to 14 million viewers, and it became a bona fide hit on DVD, partly thanks to its groundbreaking real-time format. As the first serious serialized show of the decade, “24” reaffirmed that viewers would follow a complex plot for an entire season, setting the stage for dramas like “Lost.”
Much of the credit can be given to Mr. Bauer’s character, the archetypal hero of the counterterrorism age.
“Everyone loves a man of action, someone larger than life, like John Wayne, a hero that saves the day regardless of the personal sacrifice,” said Mr. Sharp, the law professor, “and Jack Bauer saves the day every season, if not every episode.”
Like many mature series, though, “24” has had an erosion in its ratings. So far this season it has averaged 11.5 million viewers. Its impending cancellation, which was first reported in early March by television trade publications, will be announced in the coming days, according to a person associated with the show who requested anonymity because Fox and its studio were declining to comment. Although NBC reportedly contemplated picking up the show, it has opted not to.
A “24” movie script is in development, although a film is not guaranteed. Mr. Sutherland said in a recent interview that the movie would be a “two-hour representation of a 24-hour day.” For Jack Bauer, there is always a ticking time bomb to defuse.
At End of the Day, a Show and a Superhero Had to Retire
It arrives near the end of every season of “24.” Call it the moment: the unmarked but discernible instant at which you know you can relax.
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Keifer Sutherland in “24.” The Fox drama will end after this season, its eighth.
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For ‘24,’ Terror Fight (and Series) Nears End (March 27, 2010)
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Not that there’s been any chance that Jack Bauer won’t save the day. But each season’s plot leads to the moment when all the turncoats have been exposed, all the innocent hostages rescued and we can be confident that no one else we care about will be killed. The music takes on a more triumphant tone and Kiefer Sutherland, as the superagent and chief worrywart Jack, starts to shed the death-mask expression he’s worn for the previous 22 hours or so.
That moment hasn’t yet arrived this season, the show’s eighth — at the end of Hour 13 on Monday, the strangely dithering federal agent played by Katee Sackhoff had just been revealed as a traitor (and if you didn’t see that coming, go wait in the interrogation room). When it does, it will be the last one, with Fox expected to announce within days that the show won’t return for a ninth season.
Most of the talk about “24” over the years has concerned its politics (perceived as being well to the right of most television dramas), its choices of villains and its forthright depictions of torture. None of those had anything to do with why I watched the show or how I responded to it, and as inescapable as those topics have been post-9/11, focusing on them in “24” always seemed a little beside the point.
That’s because it isn’t a show about ideas expressed through action-thriller mechanics. It’s essentially a superhero cartoon with a topical overlay, a cartoon that was well done from the start but was so rigidly formatted that it had no way to grow. Season 8, routine as it is, has not been the show’s worst — it would have to slip significantly in its last 11 hours to fall behind Seasons 7 or 3.
The great virtue of “24,” as with any traditional cartoon, is certainty — the knowledge that in moments of crisis, Jack Bauer will always come to the right conclusion and do the right thing (even if doing the right thing can sometimes lead to anguished second thoughts). The show may have been defined by its 24-hour real-time format, but at its heart has always been Jack’s comic-book rectitude, that fantastical but deeply satisfying combination of supercompetence and incorruptibility, and Mr. Sutherland’s performance in a role that easily could have become a winking caricature.
It was the demands of the format that doomed the show (though eight seasons is nothing to cry about). Repetition set in early, there was a limited stock of villains and it was impossible to up the ante on destructive threats, or absurdly byzantine conspiracies, year after year.
Maintaining a single central narrative across 24 hours required the invention of subplots that became famous for their implausibility — Jack’s daughter, Kim Bauer, versus the cougar in Season 2 has been matched by Dana Walsh (Ms. Sackhoff) versus her old boyfriend from her criminal past in the current season. Facing nuclear annihilation or biological attack, characters would wander away from their posts for the most mundane reasons.
Another problem has been turnover, as members of the counterterrorism team and their allies have been killed off or sent away. The Secret Service agent Aaron Pierce (Glenn Morshower), almost as dependable as Jack, has been missed this season, and the show has felt diminished since the decision to do away with the stalwart Bill Buchanan (James Morrison) in Season 7.
We’re left with Jack, and his mostly office-bound sidekick Chloe (Mary Lynn Rajskub). He’ll deliver the goods one more time — the moment should arrive in Hour 22 or 23, in May — and then, we can hope, retire to California, to repair his relationship with Kim (Elisa Cuthbert), and dandle his granddaughter on his aching knee. He’s earned it, eight times over.
