As a former CIA operations officer, people ask me all the time:
A) "How realistic is 24?"
B) "Is everyone at the CIA just like Jack Bauer?"
And C) "Did you kill anybody?"
To which I reply, with a sigh: "It's a TV show, stop your reality-check, and just enjoy the ride. Also, do I really look like someone who would kill? I drive a Prius."
Like the millions of 24 fans, I've waited with bated breath (for nearly four years) for the return of the real-time terror-hunting action that is the Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU). More importantly, I've waited for the return of CTU's most controversial employee, the intensely brooding Jack Bauer. There's something haunting about the kachung-kachung-kachung of that ticking clock that just gets my adrenalin pumping. But the only true real-life comparisons between actual counter-terrorism and 24: Live Another Day – the 12-episode "event series" that debuts Monday night on Fox and Wednesday night on Sky1 in the UK – are as follows: A) there are, in fact, 24 hours in a day, and B) there are CIA employees named Jack.
That's where the realism ends. And that's a good thing.
Jack Bauer would have had an incredibly short career at the Central Intelligence Agency. He's certainly not your "typical" CIA officer. Other than being seemingly incapable of speaking above a barely inaudible whisper, he is an agent gone truly out of control. And the CIA is all about control – it has to be. The stakes in the real world are incredibly high, and a rogue CIA officer could cause such grave damage to the agency, the operation and himself that nobody like Jack would make it past Day One, let alone eight seasons. The closest real-life example of a renegade intel officer like Jack is probably Robert Levinson, who vanished in Iran seven years ago. But Levinson was a contractor – a private citizen gone rogue – and, sadly, a tragic example of why operational support and control are so important.
And then there's Chloe, who is by far my favorite character on 24. If the show really wanted to be realistic, they'd have Chloe and Jack hook up, because interoffice romances are rampant at the CIA. Anyway, from what I've gathered in watching the first new episode, Jack's longtime trusted partner and techie virtuoso took a hiatus from CTU to spend time at Sephora perfecting her smoky cat-eye while hanging out with a cool Goth crowd. In a timely subplot, we learn that she also went rogue. Seemingly unhappy and disillusioned with the questionable actions of CTU, Chloe pulled a Snowden. She released thousands of classified documents, WikiLeaks-style, with a cache that appears to have exposed intelligence secrets and turned her into an enemy of the state. Apparently, "going rogue" is the new kale.
Meanwhile, Jack is in London, busy jumping off bridges, which a man of his age really shouldn't be doing to his knees. Real operations officers would avoid bridge-jumping in favor of eliciting clandestine information from sources to derive actionable intelligence. They would not be devising a break-in to a secure CIA facility, complete with explosions, to stage a dramatic, Pulp Fiction-esque rescue. I was in "Special Gym Class" in fifth grade – you know, for the kids who couldn't throw balls. Athletically gifted, I was not. I still can't do a pull-up. But my success at the CIA didn't require me to pass the Presidential Physical Fitness Test, or go jogging through the rain all day at Quantico, like Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs. Sadly, I was also never issued a sexy black leather catsuit and called on to scale down walls with Cirque du Soleil grace, like Jennifer Garner on Alias. Real spies and intel officers use their brains more often than their brawn – intelligence is the most effective weapon in the arsenal of an officer at the CIA.
The reality is that audiences would be bored to tears if they were forced to watch hour upon hour following the real inner workings of the CIA. First of all, we're called officers, not spies. And like any office, there are ridiculous fights at Langley over who drank the last drop of non-fat hazelnut Coffeemate, or whose turn it is to call the creepy maintenance guy to fix the busted air conditioner, or who has the weirdest boss. And for the record, that would have been me: she had an enormous Beanie Baby collection housed in a hand-carved wooden ark on her office credenza.
At the CIA, real office drama is beyond banal: 30-minute dissertations over the color-coding of government forms, not 30 minutes to the end of the world, with perfectly timed commercial breaks. Never once in the Live Another Day premiere does Kate Morgan – Jack's new CIA antagonist and inevitable love interest, played by Yvonne Strahovski – have to fill out any forms or wait for approvals to track down Jack. During my first year at the agency, my Beanie Baby-loving boss reprimanded me for giving her an ecru-colored form to sign instead of the cream-colored one. If anyone had been eavesdropping on our absurdly heated debate, you'd think we were fighting over slacks in a J.Crew catalogue.
I get it: when you watch a spy show or an espionage thriller, you want to feel like you're getting a glimpse into the inner sanctum, by way of heroes like Homeland's Carrie Mathison, Zero Dark Thirty's Maya or Argo's Tony Mendez. But government intelligence work can often be more like The Office than 24. Yes, there's travel and excitement, but there's also ineffective management, budgets to balance and loads of petty gossip. Much to my dismay, I discovered there are way more people like Dwight Schrute than Jason Bourne at the CIA.
Of course, 24: Live Another Day is a ride hell-bent on excitement, as ever, without any slowing down. "Enhanced interrogations", drones, drones and more drones, plus hints of Reagan with a president who may have Alzheimer's – there are enough of those truth-y details to give you a shock of realism. So while 24 doesn't accurately portray the CIA (or any intelligence agency), it does incorporate enough nuance to create a hyper-action packed world that's still cool to watch.
I could point out inaccuracies – you can't bring a cellphone into a CIA facility, the agency would never bring a prisoner into a classified facility like an overseas station, and CIA facilities are way more secure than the offices on 24 anyway – but where's the fun in that? Watching Kiefer Sutherland jump off bridges is a fictitious escape, and we should be glad to have it back, private and clandestine citizens alike. Except I'm still a little jealous that when I was on ops overseas, I didn't have that kachung-kachung-kachung clock following me everywhere. That would've been really really cool.