It is a rainy weekend here in New York City. That means it is the perfect time to sit back, turn on the TV, and get lost in a great show. While there are hundreds of newer series you could jump into on Netflix, Prime, Paramount, Hulu, Max, Apple TV, etc., I think it is more appropriate to look at the show that paved the way for all of them: 24. And let’s not forget the main character, who created the on-screen template for characters like Jack Reacher, Jack Ryan, and James Reece, Jack Bauer.
Is it a little overdramatic to say that 24 and Jack Bauer paved the way, or built the template, for the series we love today? Maybe. Is it entirely appropriate to attribute that overdramatic thought to a show that is by and large overdramatic? Absolutely. But here is the truth that any 24 fan will tell you: there are a handful of things commonplace today in the television landscape that weren’t that way until this series did them. And there was never a television character like Jack Bauer, until Jack Bauer made everyone want more characters like Jack Bauer. Do you see what I am saying? No? Ok, fine, here are four ways the series and its lead changed TV forever.
I have killed two people since midnight; I haven’t slept in over 24 hours. So maybe, maybe you should be a little more afraid of me than you are right now. – Jack Bauer
Pioneering the binge watch
Nowadays, it isn’t weird to sit down with lunch and hit play on a series like Stranger Things, Scandal, or Game of Thrones, then look up and see it is time to make dinner. When the series dropped, most shows adopted the case-of-the-week format. Every episode had a beginning, middle, and end where they took down a small villain. Some of them had begun doing more prominent underlying characters, but the studios believed audiences needed a tight bow wrapped up at the end of the episode. Creating the perfect endpoint for any moment you felt the need to hit stop and be productive.
That is where 24 changed minds. Each episode was an hour in a day. The real-time format made it impossible to do a villain-of-the-week. We had an hour to watch, so they had an hour to keep us engaged. The cadence the series created was set up from the fifteen-minute mark to the 45-minute mark, and every single episode ended on a cliffhanger. The next episode spent the first fifteen minutes wrapping up the last fifteen minutes of the previous installment.
Watching this on television live felt unnatural when it first came out. There was never a solid ending. But guess what I was doing the following Monday at 9 pm? Damn sure wasn’t missing 24. Admittedly, I didn’t get into the series until Season Four was airing. So Seasons One-Three…I binged on DVD. Netflix saw this effect and created dozens of series, starting with House of Cards, that adopted the same thing.
That’s the problem with people like you, George. You want results, but you never want to get your hands dirty. I’d start rolling up your sleeves…I’m gonna need a hacksaw. – Jack Bauer
Adopting the cinematic budget
That brings us to the next change. Think about TV series of the 80s and 90s. Every episode of Friends, Seinfeld, ER, and Law and Order would take place in multiple reusable sets across apartments, coffee shops, hospital rooms, and courtrooms. They kept costs down by restaging and redressing the same places over and over. They also kept the costs down with filler episodes and fluff that took up time. 24 brought out the checkbook and changed this. Was the CTU office used over the series? Yeah, that was a way to shave budgets, but Jack Bauer tracked all over the cities of Los Angeles, London, and New York, and the amount of bullets and bombs going off meant that, if Fox wanted to keep it going, they had to treat it like a big-budget film. That included the lead. Kiefer Sutherland was awarded $40 million for three seasons in 2006, making him the highest-paid television actor of all time. That paved the way for Netflix to invest in someone like Kevin Spacey for House of Cards, Prime invested in Chris Pratt for The Terminal List, and Apple TV invested in Jake Gyllenhaal for Presumed Innocent.
In short, 24 proved that event-based television was not only enjoyed by fans, but a good investment for studios. Their ROI was worth it.
If you don’t tell me what I want to know, then it’ll just be a question of how much you want it to hurt. – Jack Bauer
Cheering for the bad guy
Ah yes, the anti-hero trope. It is so unoriginal. Today’s television landscape has lived in the gray for decades. We have gotten more used to an evening moral playground between the hero and the villain that it is no longer surprising. Heath Ledger’s Joker and Marvel’s Thanos showed how villains have changed by becoming less evil and hell-bent on world destruction and domination, and more relatable to the average watcher. But that wasn’t always the case. There used to be no gray hats. It was the white hat and the black hat, with no room for an in-between.
Jack Bauer changed that. He was the first gray hat on primetime television. Some seasons his hat was dirtier than others, but there were a few things you could always count on: Bauer was going to go off the reservation at some point. In Season One, he was a desperate man trying to save his family. By Season Two, he was a broken man. With nothing to lose and situations causing the President of the United States to make terrible decisions, Bauer became an expendable wildcard with no compunction about blurring the lines or all-out breaking the law in the interest of navigating dangerous situations. Nowadays, Jack Reacher works outside the law. James Reece is actually attacking the law in Season One, and even Boy Scout Jack Ryan tends to go rogue every season. All of them took their guidance from Jack Bauer.
You can look the other way once, and it’s no big deal, except it makes it easier for you to compromise the next time, and pretty soon that’s all you’re doing: compromising, because that’s the way you think things are done. You know those guys I busted? You think they were the bad guys? Because they weren’t; they weren’t bad guys; they were just like you and me. Except they compromised… once. – Jack Bauer
Nobody was safe
Ok, here it is…be warned…even though it has been a quarter-century, I still feel the need to say: SPOILER ALERT from here on out.
I mentioned him being a broken man. I have mentioned the series Game of Thrones. What made the latter so compelling wasn’t simply our love of fantasy or Peter Dinklage’s witty dialogue. Every episode felt like you never knew who could die. Once Ned Stark (Sean Bean) – in retrospect, we should have seen that coming because this guy never lasts until the end of a project – bit the big one at the end of Game of Thrones Season One, you couldn’t expect anyone to make it through. That is what happened when Bauer’s wife is murdered at the end of Season One; no one felt safe. Throughout the seasons, he lost almost everyone. Tony, Michelle, Curtis, David, all gone. None seen coming.
So help me, God, I will kill you, and you will stay dead this time! – Jack Bauer
There were some obvious problems with the series. For one, by episode eight, you knew the big bad would give way to a bigger bad. And by episode eighteen, there would be a twist: the “NOOOOO” moment for Bauer. For two, most of the series biggest conflicts could have been avoided or minimized with a solid hire in the Human Resources Department of CTU. Every season saw a mole or a compromised agent pulling strings for the big bad. The peak of this series is Season Three through the halfway point of Season Seven. It is a little slow at the start and falls off hard in the second half of Season Seven.
25 years of Jack Bauer reminds me how old I am. But it also reminds me how much one of my favorite shows of all time changed the landscape of television. The cultural impact of the series is palpable. Oh, and the cultural impact of Jack Bauer is such that all the Chuck Norris jokes have been retrofitted to fit him. So, if you love Jack Reacher, The Terminal List, Cross, Game of Thrones, House of Cards, etc., 24 may be the next binge you should take on.
Right now, it is available on Hulu.
