The show has received 57 Emmy nominations in its seven-season run, winning for Outstanding Drama Series in 2006, the same year Kiefer Sutherland won his Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.
Bauer a memorable TV character
Sutherland’s Jack Bauer has become one of the most memorable characters in TV history, up there with Gunsmoke’s Matt Dillon, Columbo’s Lt. Columbo (his first name was never revealed) and Perry Mason.
But 24 seems to have “jumped the shark,” a TV industry term to describe when a series has run out of ideas and begins to look like a parody of itself.
In its seventh season, 24 is stuck in a cycle it can’t escape. Bauer is facing a grilling before a Senate committee about his torture tactics when he is taken away by the F.B.I., which needs him for a job. Bauer deploys his controversial torture tactics on another suspect and again becomes the bad guy. But he convinces others that he’s the only person who can catch the terrorist and is released. Other writers are noticing this tiresome pattern.
Of course, enjoying a dramatic series such as 24 requires suspension of disbelief in which viewers grant the writers license to create a dramatic situation for the hero in which he triumphs, regardless of the implausibility. But 24 has worn out the “only Jack Bauer can do this” plot device.
Fewer jaw-dropping moments
The series premiered in October 2001, right after the shock of 9/11, when America was searching for a hero who could take on the world’s terrorists. The episodes were truly engaging and dramatic.
In one scene that first season, Jack’s daughter Kim and her friend Janet York were kidnapped. Janet, while freed from her captors, was seriously injured and taken to a hospital. Her father, Alan York, who was portrayed as a sympathetic character, was granted a private visit in his daughter’s hospital room and proceeded to suffocate her. It was a total surprise.
There were several jaw-dropping moments in subsequent seasons, prompting much excited discussion on message boards on the show's Web site.
Now those moments have become routine. The First Gentleman is shot? Sure. Two airliners collide? Seen that. The White House is invaded by terrorists who take the president and others hostage? Par for the course.
Plot Devices Recycled
Even the writing has become clichéd. “You’ll never get away with this,” the First Gentleman tells his captor. “I’ll send him to you in little pieces,” the captor tells President Taylor. And that constant cycle of Jack Bauer as criminal, Jack Bauer as hero gets tired.
Also, perhaps 24 has become a victim of the times. While Bauer’s torturing of suspects always turns out to have been justified because the suspect turns out, according to the script, to have been a terrorist, things are more murky in the real world. Torture of prisoners suspected of terrorism is controversial as critics say it’s not only immoral but ineffective or that suspects reveal erroneous information.
24 is a great show and still has its ardent fans. Viewers were, after all, robbed of an entire season of 24 by the writers' strike. But while the series has entertained millions of other viewers for seven seasons, it may be time to give Jack Bauer a well earned retirement and let fans enjoy the heyday of the series in syndication.
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