It’s the Perfect Time for the ‘24’ Revival
Shit’s bleak these days man, I don’t know how else to put it. You turn on the news and–you know what, don’t turn on the news. Stop doing that. Log off of Twitter. Close your browser. (Finish reading this story first, though.) My point is, the horrors seem inescapable and the nation is in freefall. Scary hours, here in the dying days of late-stage capitalism. What I’m saying is, we need a hero, or at least one specific hero (if you can call him that). What I’m saying is it’s time for Jack Bauer to come back.
Bauer, for the uninitiated, is the protagonist of 24, one of the biggest television phenomenons of the aughts. Played by Kiefer Sutherland in what quickly became his defining post-’90s role, Bauer works for the fictional Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU) of the United States government. The show, which ran for eight full seasons plus a TV movie and two reboot limited series, played on the alleged premise that most terrorist threats in the United States are stifled within 24 hours, often getting before the perpetrators can actually carry out their plans. Each episode of each 24-episode season covered one hour of that 24-hour window in real time, leading to genuinely innovative televised thrills and also every hack comedian/annoying coworker for a solid decade making the same, “WHEN do they use the bathroom?!” joke.
The timing of the show’s release played a role in its cultural resonance that cannot be understated. 24 premiered on November 6th, 2001, just weeks after the September 11th attacks. There’s no way the showrunners could have anticipated the America that would await them when 24 premiered, but what they ended up providing was a certain ugly catharsis. I’m not here to push a narrative that America was at its best in the months following 9/11. I’m speaking as someone who was in fourth grade when it happened and vividly remembers the nasty cocktail of xenophobia, American exceptionalism, fear, and bloodlust that hung in the air on country music stations in my home state of Virginia, school assemblies, and television broadcasts. 24 was the right show at the right time—an ugly, violent power fantasy in which one steely American badass could singlehandedly save us from the terrorists.
The show stuck around through most of the George W. Bush administration, pitting Bauer against presidential assassins and Mexican cartels and nuclear terrorists, among others. It became appointment viewing, one of the must-see broadcast series of the era. Throughout the run it weathered all manner of criticism–primarily that it was Islamophobic (and xenophobic in general) and glorified/misrepresented state-sanctioned torture. The last time we saw Bauer was in 2014’s 24: Live Another Day, which committed the cardinal sin of abandoning its namesake 24-episode run for a tidier 12-hour miniseries format (still in real time) and was almost instantly forgotten by everyone who watched it who wasn’t GQ editor Frazier Tharpe. It wrapped up with Bauer turning himself in to Russian authorities to free longtime ally Chloe O’Brian (Mary Lynn Rajkskub). Bleh.
In the years since it seemed like the culture had moved beyond the need for Bauer. The original series and its application of the character seemed too charged, too jingoistic, too vengeful. America was changing. Its heroes were changing along with it. Chris Evans got cast as Captain America and those movies made more money than God. Box office speaks for itself—we wanted heroes we saw as representative of the best we had to offer. Fifteen-odd years later it’s hard to argue that anything we have to offer the world is in the remotest vicinity of Steve Rogers.
