In the summer of 2001 I, like I suspect
many TV critics and viewers, were not convinced that television was about to
enter a new Golden Age. We'd essentially gotten confirmation of it with the
Emmy nominations that July.
For those who have forgotten back then the
Emmys was very much in the 'cut and paste all nominees from previous year' era
in addition to being limited to five nominees in every category. And they
basically did that with the nominees for Best Drama, all of which had been
nominated the previous year.
I had no question that the current seasons
of The Sopranos and The West Wing were masterpieces deserving of
every nomination they got. But by this point ER and The Practice were
in their creative decline and Law & Order, while still a great show,
was becoming increasingly formulaic. Furthermore while there were several new
acting nominees, by and large they were all from the same shows that had
dominated the Emmys the previous year.
While Michael Imperioli and Aida Turturro from The Sopranos and
Bradley Whitford and Rob Lowe more than deserved their nominations you couldn't
escape the fact that they were just shuffling certain cards from the same deck.
This was true with the majority of the
other nominees: Dennis Franz was there for the eighth consecutive year for NYPD
Blue, Amy Brenneman and Tyne Daly were back for Judging Amy and
basically everyone who had been nominated for The Sopranos and The
West Wing the previous year was there again. The only nominees from series
that had debuted in the 2000-2001 season were Marg Helgenberger from CSI and
Andre Braugher for Gideon's Crossing – and Gideon's Crossing had
been cancelled.
Furthermore with David Chase announcing
that Season Four of The Sopranos wouldn't debut until the fall of 2002
(and was actually considering making it the last one) it looked very much like
television would be returning to the era of relative mediocrity very soon. To
be sure Six Feet Under had aired during the summer of 2001 on HBO but while
the ratings had been very good the critical reception hadn't been quite as
ecstatic as The Sopranos had been.
Then I got the Fall Preview issue of TV
Guide. Back then in addition to giving previews of every new show that was
going to air on network TV, the editors also made clear which shows they
thought were, from a critical perspective, the ones to watch. They had quite a
few of them for the 2001-2002 season, including Alias, Undeclared and The
Bernie Mac Show. But the one they said flat out was the best new series of
the fall season was 24.
By that point the promos had been rolling
out for weeks on Fox, mainly because the network knew just how high concept it
was and how hard a sell that could be. Kiefer Sutherland was playing Jack
Bauer, a man who had received intelligence that there was going to be an
attempt on the life of David Palmer, an African-American Senator running for
President. (The first season took place on the day of the California
Presidential primary.) The show was going to be 24 episodes long and unfold on
'one extraordinary day' in real time.
This was, without question, one of the
biggest swings that any TV show had ever taken in history. At that moment TV
series were still not heavily serialized. Even The Sopranos didn't have
overarching plots that took over a full season and The West Wing was very much a story of the week. Furthermore
it was compressing the action to a single
day which was a violation of every
rule in television. How could you have character arcs in a single day? Where
was emotional growth going to be? How could you manage sustained plots?
It's worth
noting that much of the success 24 managed in its first season was
almost entirely due to the critical attention to it. It would not officially
become a ratings hit until it aired immediately after the first season of American
Idol in Season 2, after which there was enough crossover to push into
becoming a ratings juggernaut. By contrast during Season 1 it ran against many
prominent established hits on network TV such as NYPD Blue on ABC and Frasier
on
NBC. Most of its first season it was lucky if it finished third in its
timeslot.
So the critics
and various awards shows were more responsible for 24 surviving that
first season. At the end of the year the Golden Globes would nominated it for
Best Drama and Kiefer Sutherland would win for Best Actor in a Drama at both
the Golden Globes and the SAG Awards. The Television Critics Association would
name it the Best Show of 2001, ahead of The Sopranos and The
West Wing. And in the summer of 2002 24 would be nominated for ten Emmys,
including Best Drama and Best Actor and would win for Best Dramatic Teleplay
for the Pilot.
And by that time
it was clear to everyone that TV was a much different place. Six
Feet Under would receive 23 Emmy nominations, outdoing The West Wing's 21. Alias
would
become a critical and pop culture hit, launching both J.J. Abrams and Jennifer
Garner into orbit. And perhaps most important The Shield debuted on FX to
the highest ratings of any basic cable drama in history and be nominated for
three Emmys, with Michael Chiklis registering what was at the time one of the
biggest upsets in Emmy history by winning Best Actor in a Drama.
After the 2002
Emmys it was clear the Golden Age of Television had truly begun. And Jack Bauer
and 24
had
led the way.
24
means
a great deal to me. It's not just that it's one of the greatest shows of all
time winning 20 Emmys during its eight seasons on the air. It's that its one of
a handful of all-time classics on TV that I watched from the moment it debuted
until its final episode. And like most viewers I have special place in my heart
for those series.
There are only a
relative handful of all-time great dramas I was in from the moment they debuted
until the end of the series and as you'd expect all of them were on either
broadcast or cable before streaming messed up the equation for all of us. These
masterpieces also include The West Wing, Six Feet Under, Dexter, The
Good Wife, Parenthood, Homeland and Better Call Saul as well as some
undervalued gems as Fringe and Person of Interest. It's also why I
have a place in my heart for shows such as The Gilded Age that I don't
necessarily have for The Last of Us. I was there at the start of the former rather
than the latter.
Now this doesn't
mean I per se think these shows are necessarily better than other gems on the
list. Indeed I do believe The Wire, Lost, Mad Men, Breaking Bad,
Battlestar Galactica and The Shield are
masterpieces, having seen every single episode of all of them. But because I
came to them slightly behind every other major critic – and in the case of some
of them much later than most – the shows in the previous
paragraph have a more important place in my heart. I suspect that those people
who came to the shows in this paragraph before I did and the other shows later
would feel the same way.
I once wrote
that I considered the three most groundbreaking shows of the 21st
century were in chronological order 24, The Wire and Lost.
The
common thread between these three is how each of them revolutionized how
television could work as a narrative in a way that so many other series tried
to imitate and very few afterward could succeed at. And as much as I love Lost
I'm
pretty sure it could only have come to existence had 24 not been such
as a smash hit and broken many of those molds.
24
wasn't
as deep as many of the series that were on network TV: it was very much an
action based show more than anything else. Yet even that was revolutionary at
the time. Indeed in his review of it in The Revolution Was Televised when it came to
action heroes of the 2000s said:
"I'll
take Jack Bauer over any of those guys. The snarling, bloody, paranoid hero of
Fox's 24 may not have transported me to some far-off land where I didn't have
to think about the dark state of current events, but that was exactly why I
liked him."
What's ironic
about a show that would become known for glorifying and justifying so much of
what was going to be called the War on Terror is that it was never meant to do
so. As I'll relate in this series it ended up falling into these events
entirely by happenstance rather then design. It really was a case of art
imitating life and that in the decade that followed so many real life elected
officials were willing to use it as cover was not something that the
showrunners ever intended. All they'd wanted to do was what everyone else on
television, particularly on network TV ever wants to do: create a riveting, popular show.
And no matter what your political alliances were, you couldn't argue they
didn't succeed at that.
In fact in an
era where the culture wars were about to become toxic, 24
was
one of the last TV shows, if not Hollywood works of art, that was immensely
popular with conservatives as well as the traditional liberal. Republican
politicians celebrated it and even Democrats have reason to admire it: I really
can't think that Barack Obama could have gotten elected had it not been for
David Palmer being such a powerful force on it for the first four seasons. And
despite Hollywood's issue with what was happening in the aftermath of 9/11 and
the War in Iraq Emmy voters had absolutely no problem nominating it along side
the liberal fantasy that was The West Wing during the five
years the two shows overlapped. (The West Wing beat it the
first two seasons; 24 beat it in The
West Wing's final year. )
And for a series
that by design gave us little time for character depth if you ask any fan of TV
during that period they will tell some of the most gut-wrenching character
deaths in TV history took place on 24. I'll save the particulars as we get into the
series but speaking personally it was never more gut-wrenching for me as a
viewer when the clock on the show went silent because it meant we'd lost
someone who meant a great deal to the viewer as well as the character – and
worst of all, we didn't even have time to mourn. Like Jack, we were just going
to have put in the background and concentrate on the crisis facing the city, if
not the country.
Now a full 25
years after it debuted I think it well past time (heh heh) for me to give it
the tribute it deserves in my column. I've done so before more than once in
previous articles but most of that was about the politics involving the show
itself and not as the work of art which it truly was and always will be.
So in this
series I will be taking a fond look back at Jack, Chloe, David Palmer and all
those who worked in the White House and at CTU for eight seasons. All of them
were the longest days of their lives and I wouldn't have missed a single minute
of it for the world.
So let's start
the clock.
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