Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer was a mainstay of the golden age of television, but reboots of the franchise have been witless. Worse still, there’s now talk of another
In two months, 24 will be 20 years old. This presents the world with two options. The first is an opportunity for misty-eyed retrospectives and an excuse for viewers to rewatch the first season. A chance to rediscover Jack Bauer’s first – and most personally devastating plummet from warm-hearted family man to state-sanctioned killing machine. And maybe some additional context; to remind viewers just how integral 24 was to the golden age of television, or how its 9/11-adjacent debut caught the public’s taste for blood.
The second option is to make more 24, which is a terrible idea. Even during its initial run, 24 became too silly for its own good. Characters were offed and revived without any real care or thought. Storylines went haywire; a nuclear bomb went off in a city one morning and was forgotten about by lunchtime; Jack Bauer beat a heroin addiction in approximately 90 minutes. Subsequent efforts to revive the show – the season set in a cartoon approximation of London, the season that didn’t feature Jack Bauer at all – only saw 24 become less and less vital. Surely everyone knows that making more 24 would be a huge waste of time.