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By Anthony Mandler, Fox
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| Real-time adventures: CTU agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland, center) puts his life in danger to help find the terrorists in the episode that covered Day 4, 8-9 p.m. By Isabella Vosmikova, Fox | ||
On Monday, the insistent ticking clock of 24will beat no more. Fox's real-time thriller, covering a single bad day in each of its eight seasons, ends its run, a victim of high costs, lower ratings and burnout among its writing staff.
But the show, which made a bona fide action hero out of Kiefer Sutherland's terrorism-battling Jack Bauer, was groundbreaking in several ways. It set a new visual style and pace that kept viewers on edge.
It proved that a densely serialized thriller — demanding viewers tune in each week to follow labyrinthine plots — could work in prime time and was among the first network series to reap huge rewards in DVD sales. That paved the way forLost,Heroes,Prison Break and like-minded series to reward loyal fans' obsessions in later years.
And, in an odd confluence of drama and policy, it helped frame the public debate on the use of torture in interrogations.
"The overall theme of the show, which was reflected in Bauer's character, was how far can you go in fighting evil without becoming evil?" says co-creator Robert Cochran. "That was always the moral knife edge the show walked."
Cochran's collaborator Joel Surnow came up with the idea to do a real-time series, though he didn't have a specific concept in mind. Cochran was initially skeptical of the radical departure from conventional TV drama: "You couldn't go to a scene five minutes later or five hours later; it had to be the next second."
They briefly discussed a show about a single wedding day. Then, inspired by conspiracy thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal, they settled on a counterterrorism agent who was trying to stop the assassination of a presidential candidate.
But that wasn't enough. "We've got to give this guy some kind of personal life," Cochran remembers saying. "Otherwise you've got nothing but shoe leather and car chases. We said, 'What if his teenage daughter ran away from home that night?' "
Gail Berman, then Fox's programming chief, saw in new reality smash Survivor's success a chance to tap into a different audience with an ongoing story line. "There was nothing scripted that was designed as a male soap," she says. "It didn't exist. And telling a story in a single day was so revolutionary, even though it seems so obvious now. Everything about it was extraordinary."
Shattering the mold
Conventional wisdom was that serialized thrillers wouldn't last. "You can't syndicate it, and you can't ask audiences to watch all 24 episodes," Surnow says. "But people got so connected to the show, they watched all 24 episodes of the season. And if they didn't, they bought the DVD, which was even better news."
"I thought it was an instant classic," says Dennis Haysbert, who played David Palmer, 24's president, with a calm, steely resolve, reassuring as the country grappled with its own dire crisis. The chance "for an African-American actor to play a role that had political significance" was irresistible. "This man was above reproach; it was the people around him that kept him from being the pure soul that he was."
The show was eerily prescient in other ways: The pilot episode, shot in April 2001, included a scene of a terrorist blowing up a plane. Real life caught up five months later, just weeks before its scheduled premiere. After much hand-wringing, an explicit shot of the explosion was cut, but the plotline remained.
"We realized after 9/11 that it just can't be a fictional story that doesn't have any resonance to the real world," Surnow says.
The show was "born out of the imagination of these writers: What was the worst circumstance we could create that would force someone to stay up for 24 hours?" Sutherland says. "All of a sudden, halfway through, the world caught up."
24 was far from a breakout hit. Early ratings were modest, and as the first season ended, Fox considered turning it into a more conventional series, with each episode covering an entire day.
The plan was mercifully abandoned, and the show's ratings built in the fourth season, when it began airing, uninterrupted, from January to May. Strong sales to foreign broadcasters — and later, DVD revenue — cemented the show's profits and future.
But not the future of its cast members: Most shows give actors multiyear contracts, but 24 had an itchy trigger finger.
Leslie Hope, who played Jack's wife, Teri Bauer, recalls that "just as I was starting to get cozy around the 22nd episode, going, 'Gosh, surely they can't kill me, I'm the hero's pregnant wife!' " she learned Teri would be shot dead by CTU's first turncoat "mole," Nina Myers, with whom Jack had been having an affair.
Though it meant losing her job, "I thought it was a terrific idea," Hope says. "Great for the show, risky and against the rules. Once I was dead, I think everybody on the show was on their toes."
Berman says Sutherland was vehemently opposed to the twist, and producers agreed to shoot an alternate ending that saved Teri. But her death forced writers to find new ways to torture Jack: Daughter Kim was threatened anew, and he later lost loves including Audrey Raines (Kim Raver) and Renee Walker (Annie Wersching).
The coincidence of timing to terrorism's rise gave the show a cultural cachet, though executive producer Howard Gordon says it was "unfairly co-opted" by some on both sides of the political aisle.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia defended the use of torture on suspects by citing the show's hero having "saved Los Angeles ... he saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?" But former president Bill Clinton and Barbra Streisand also were fans.
The attention was both "flattering and strange," Cochran says. "We were accused by one side or the other of having a political agenda, which we emphatically did not have. We were just trying to keep people watching."
This month, New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly referenced 24 in announcing the capture of the would-be Times Square bomber, even if he got the details wrong: "We know that Jack Bauer can do it in 24 minutes, but in the real world, 53 hours is (a) pretty good number."
Pictures tell the story
The split-screen style devised by first-season director Stephen Hopkins visually juggled multiple plotlines, added urgency and made even Jack's banal dialogue compelling. "It became cool just to look at the guy do something that wouldn't be dramatically interesting," Gordon says.
And the jigsaw plots forced flexibility in storytelling. Producers frequently painted themselves into corners, forcing them to take absurd leaps in logic to find their way out.
Though producers often mapped out seasons in broad strokes, they filled in details as they went along. "The ending would always change into something different, based on what was working," Sutherland says. The Nina plot "probably had more holes in it than any other mole we had because we came to it so late," says Gordon.
"Forget what I said before," Sarah Clarke, who played Nina, recalls Surnow explaining one day. "You did it for the money!"
Like Lost, fans held 24 to a higher standard and were less forgiving about plot holes, rehashed story lines and niggling details, especially when Bauer would improbably travel long distances across L.A. freeways in minutes. Cochran counters that "every single TV show repeats itself shamelessly, but the real-time format took everything we did and drew it out over four or five episodes, so it was painfully obvious." And the big twists and reveals became more difficult. "They wanted to be fooled each week; that's hard without becoming ridiculous," Surnow says.
Now producers are plotting at least one feature film. Although the project has not yet received a go-ahead, it would be set in Prague, send Jack across Europe and ditch the real-time concept.
When series shooting wrapped April 9, Gordon says he was "intensely relieved." But Sutherland felt differently: "A sense of accomplishment, but it was mixed with a real sense of sadness" at the end of the main chapter of his defining role.
And that's how Bauer will end his last tragic day next week.
"For the longest time, we had talked about a happy ending," Gordon says. "But it did not feel authentic." Though this season's plot was not reworked because of its finality, "the very last moments of the show gave it a contextual significance that just made it much more meaningful," Gordon says. "It's very much a sign-off to the series."
Source: USAToday
