One Year From Now, Will "24" be a Good Show Again?

When 24 finally returns in January 2009, it will have been over a year since we learned from the preview that they're bringing Tony back from the dead in a plot twist that would be show-killing if they didn't so badly need him; almost two years since the middle of the sixth season, when we all realized that the show had fallen into cliché, repetition, oddly fervent patriotism and utterly unfun melodrama; and three years since its fifth season, one of the great narrative cycles in 21st-century television, from its gleefully merciless opening minutes (they shot David Palmer!) to its unforgiving closing shot (the Chinese got Jack!)

Everyone knows that the sixth season went incredibly wrong - boring Bauer family plotlines, an out-of-nowhere mid-season reboot that shifted Jack's focus from evil stereotypical Arabs to evil stereotypical Chinese. But much more than all the myriad individual bad ideas, there was an awful sensation that all the of the show's success had gone madly, horrifically, to everyone's heads. Remember, the show was not very huge back when it debuted - it had middling ratings, and probably wouldn't have lasted a full season if Fox hadn't set such store by its concept (24 episodes, 24 hours.) It certainly wouldn't have lasted much longer if it hadn't been for changing viewer habits: the 24 Season 1 DVD is the pop culture object that marks the shift from old TV to new TV.

So the show became bigger, and bigger, and Kiefer Sutherland's Jack Bauer hit that awesome-ridiculous sweet spot, loved ironically and sincerely by emo hipsters and Minutemen. When season six debuted, "Jack Bauer" was interchangeable with "Chuck Norris" in the hundreds of stupid-funny jokes permeating the internet, the punchline of all of them being: Jack Bauer is God.

What happened to 24? Well, Joel Surnow may have been part of the problem. The famously conservative executive producer (he had a fake-news comedy show on Fox News that lasted about two seconds) seemed to believe that the show was a work of pure patriotism - that Jack Bauer's example was saving real lives. Certainly, in season 6, lacking any major twists or genuinely interesting drama, the flag-waving did seem more obvious. But don't take my word for it.

Here's the DVD cover for season 1:














Mysterious, oblique - Jack Bauer is trapped between the dark and the light.
Here's season 4 (not the best, but certainly the most active):

Moody. Could that fire in the background be a nuclear explosion? Or perhaps hell, beckoning Jack hither.

Now here's season 6:

Yup.

There may be hope. Joel Surnow has departed the show, after initiating a major reboot that will send jack to Washington, DC (bye-bye, LA), without CTU, with a woman president. The show has been down before (Season 3's Colombian drug dealer brothers were a bizarro low point.) Maybe the extra year off will give all the creators some time to plan things out just a tad bit more.

After all, season 6 wasn't all bad. In fact, I think it may have the most mesmerizing beginning of any season - in episode 1, Jack sacrifices himself to save the country he loves, allowing himself to be handed off to an old enemy (and then, suddenly revitalized, goes vampire on a terrorist); in episode 2, he teams up with one terrorist to battle another (Alexander Siddig made such a great partner for Jack - until the writers sent him off to die in a dumbass assassination attempt on the president, all the way across the country from Jack Bauer); and, in episode 4, just seconds after he killed Curtis, his closest compatriot and opposite number, Jack, defeated by his own devotion to his duty, quits CTU... only moments before a NUCLEAR BOMB GOES OFF IN LOS ANGELES!

I think this might be the most powerful scene in "24" history. That's despite the fact that, in many way, this is also the most ridiculous scene in "24" history, not in the least because of the poorly-animated CGI mushroom cloud... actually, no, I take that back, not even the most finely-animated millimeter-perfect CGI would have worked. If the producers of 24 had, in fact, dropped a nuclear bomb on Los Angeles and filmed that, it would have looked unrealistic. How do you sell a nuclear bomb, in this day and age?

This way:
I love the look on Kiefer Sutherland's face here - the weakness, the fear, the realization, the abject horror mixed with disbelief. Here's a guy who just had to kill his best friend, and you can see him thinking the same thing we usually think watching this show - like, "How is it that the worst thing I could ever imagine happening just happened, and not two minutes later, something else happens that makes that other thing look like nothing much, at all?"

Maybe that should be where the show ends - or where we tell everyone to stop watching, years in the future. Do we need to see Jack Bauer solve everything? Can't we just assume that he will fix everything, or at least catch the guys responsible? Wouldn't it be so powerful for the show to leave Jack at his most human - in the eerie quiet that follows a supersonic boom, with the light on earth, briefly, much brighter than the sun?