If any one show has represented the post-9/11 era on television, it is “24,” the Fox drama that has offered counterterrorism as entertainment for nine years.
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On “24,” torture saves lives. On “24,” phones are tapped, plots are disrupted, terrorists are killed, and one man, Jack Bauer, will stop at nothing to protect the American people. For viewers, “24” is part sum of all fears, part wish fulfillment in an age of shadowy enemies.
For Fox, the show’s trademark clock is about to stop ticking. Nearly a decade after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that so heavily influenced people’s perceptions of the series, cast and crew members said they were told on Friday that it had been canceled.
In an interview early this month, as the network was weighing its options, its entertainment president, Kevin Reilly, said, “It’s a hard decision for all involved.”
“24” first captured America’s attention in late 2001. The first season, which involved the explosion of a passenger plane and an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate, entered production well before the 9/11 attacks, but had its premiere eight weeks afterward. At the time, a review in The New York Times noted the “deadly convergence between real life and Hollywood fantasy.”
After this season’s finale in May, “24” will live on, possibly as a feature film, and surely in classrooms and in textbooks. The series enlivened the country’s political discourse in a way few others have, partly because it brought to life the ticking time-bomb threat that haunted the Cheney faction of the American government in the years after 9/11.
Walter Gary Sharp, an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University who taught the course “The Law of 24” in 2007-8, said “24” acted as “a tool to foster public debate to help the public and the government of all nations to consider the proper limits on democracies in their efforts to combat terrorism.”
The character of Bauer, a secret agent played by Kiefer Sutherland, became a stand-in for a stop-at-nothing approach to counterterrorism, and his tactics were evoked by Bush administration officials, Republican presidential candidates and even a justice of the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia.
John Yoo, who helped shape the Bush administration’s interrogation techniques as a Justice Department lawyer, asked in a 2006 book, “What if, as the popular Fox television program ‘24’ recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon in an American city. Should it be illegal for the president to use harsh interrogation short of torture to elicit this information?”
But for the same reasons the show found fans in Bush-era Washington, it has also faced severe scrutiny for its depictions of torture.
“On some level ‘24’ is just a big ole’ ad for torture,” David Danzig, a deputy program director of Human Rights First, a nonprofit group, wrote in an e-mail message. “Those of us who watch the show a lot — and there are tens of millions of us who do — know exactly what is going to happen as soon as Bauer starts to beat a suspect up. He is going to talk.”
The torture sequences were misleading, Mr. Danzig said, because they contributed to a “pervasive myth” that torture was effective. He recalled that Gary Solis, the former director of West Point’s law of war program, once called “24” “one of the biggest problems” in his classroom.
In an e-mail message this month, Mr. Solis said that when he would preach battlefield restraint in class, a “not infrequent cadet response” would be something to the effect of “Yeah? Well, did you see Jack Bauer last night? He shot a prisoner right in the knee, and that dude talked.”
The cadets knew right from wrong, and the comments were usually made with a grin, Mr. Solis said. Still, “24” presented a conundrum for the law of war professors, some of whom personally enjoyed the show but wished the torture scenes could be toned down if not eliminated altogether.
Similarly, other officials have said that “24” and other shows influenced the behavior of interrogators at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer at Guantánamo, told a fellow lawyer that Mr. Bauer “gave people lots of ideas,” according to Jane Mayer’s 2008 book, “The Dark Side.”
Mr. Danzig’s group met with the “24” producers in 2006 and introduced them to real-life interrogators in 2009. He noted that the series did evolve over time — Mr. Bauer stood trial in Season 7 for his torturous actions — and said that “there is now a little more sensitivity toward the portrayal of torture.”
Still, he added, “the take-home message” has not changed.
While speaking to television writers in January, Mr. Sutherland said of the torture sequences: “It’s a television show. We’re not telling you to try this at home.”
He also refuted claims of a political slant to “24.” “One of the things that I was always so unbelievably proud of our show is that you could have it being discussed by former President Bill Clinton and Rush Limbaugh at the same time, both using it and citing it to justify their points of view,” he said. “That, to me, was incredibly balanced.”
For years, “24” regularly drew 10 million to 15 million viewers, and it became a bona fide hit on DVD, partly thanks to its groundbreaking real-time format. As the first serious serialized show of the decade, “24” reaffirmed that viewers would follow a complex plot for an entire season, setting the stage for dramas like “Lost.”
Much of the credit can be given to Mr. Bauer’s character, the archetypal hero of the counterterrorism age. “Everyone loves a man of action, someone larger than life, like John Wayne, a hero that saves the day regardless of the personal sacrifice,” Mr. Sharp said, “and Jack Bauer saves the day every season, if not every episode.”
Like many mature series, though, “24” has had an erosion in its ratings. So far this season it has averaged 11.5 million viewers. Its cancellation was first predicted in early March by television trade publications. On Friday, Fox said that the final episodes would be shown on May 24. Although NBC reportedly contemplated picking up the show, it has opted not to.
“May it live on in DVD for years to come,” Rodney Charters, director of photography for the series, wrote on Twitter.
A “24” movie script is in development, although a film is not guaranteed. Mr. Sutherland said in a recent interview that the movie would be a “two-hour representation of a 24-hour day.” For Jack Bauer, there is always a ticking time bomb to defuse.
