The beautiful thing about humanity is its ability to see different answers to the same question. You, for example, might have witnessed the unexpected failure of this year’s 24: Legacy and put its lack of heat down to the absence of Kiefer Sutherland.
But that isn’t true of the people who made it. No, Howard Gordon and Brian Grazer have decided that 24: Legacy didn’t work because it wasn’t enough like Law & Order: SVU.
That must be their thinking, because it’s the only logical explanation for what they’ve just announced. You see, Fox is developing a new series of 24 that has nothing to do with terrorism. No bombs. No soft perimeters. No weaponised pathogens. Instead, the new version is said to revolve around a female prosecutor who has to clear the name of a murderer she helped prosecute before he’s murdered by the state.
Now, I’m not saying that this is the worst idea in the world – because that happened in the sixth season of 24 when Jack Bauer watched a nuclear bomb go off and then just went about his day as normal – but it certainly doesn’t sound very much like 24. People watch 24 because it’s an entertaining place to park their brain for an hour. It’s a firework display, full of whizz-bang theatrics that don’t make any sense when you hold them to any form of scrutiny. It is categorically not a place to watch a harried prosecutor prepare and file a succession of emergency motions at 3am in a dingy strip-lit office.
That just all sounds a bit too slow for 24. When 24 works, it’s thanks to simple sleight of hand. You’re so busy oohing and aahing at each new berserk plot machination – there’s a bomb! Kiefer’s cut his arm off! Everyone has died and come back to life and died and come back to life! – that you don’t pay any attention to how little sense it makes. Slowing the pace and shifting the focus to a complicated legal procedure risks exposing all of the show’s flaws in as harsh a light as possible.
That said, I’m not really as worried as I make out about this. Ever since season six caved in on itself like a bad soufflé, 24 has gone to great lengths to reinvent itself as something more serious and slow. There was the TV film 24: Redemption, where Jack Bauer went and saved Africa. There was season seven, where Jack Bauer stood trial for his use of torture. There was 24: Live Another Day, which was in part about the agony of dementia. Every time 24 comes back it wants to show us that it can change, but it reverts back to its dumb ways of old again and again without fail.
This is because 24 is a beast to make. As well as plot to consider, there are the logistics and constraints of the real-time format to worry about, plus the series is often being written on the fly while episodes are already in production. With all those balls in the air, and with 24’s reputation as an action thriller to maintain, it’s little wonder that things tend to get stupid fast. This new show, I guarantee, will fall prey to same old mistakes. It won’t be able to help it. It’s baked right into 24’s DNA.
So, sure, although the sensible thing would be for 24 to just admit defeat and give up forever, perhaps this new criminal justice reboot will be worth watching, if only because the prosecutor will definitely be set upon by wolves in episode five, and she’ll definitely waterboard at least some of them. After all, that’s what we want from 24, right?
