'24' and the All-American Memory Hole

We don't like to admit things to ourselves.

It’s funny how we’ve collectively memory-holed “24.” Fifteen years ago, the show—which followed the exploits of Jack Bauer, a counter-terrorism expert with deep-seated anger issues—was a ratings and awards juggernaut; but now, despite a regurgitative culture devoted to remaking old IP and pumping nostalgia for the shows and TV of yesteryear, it’s not even a blip on the radar.

There are good reasons for this. The show was very much a reflection of a bad period in the American psyche, when the lingering trauma from 9/11 drove a lot of ostensibly sane and moral people to condone acts like torturing prisoners, so long as the “right” people were the ones strung up by their big toes. That collective fear helped power our invasion of Iraq, as well as smaller indignities—the security theater of having to dump your liquids at airport security gates, the constant “terror alerts” on news programs, and so on.

Within that context, “24” was cathartic. Sure, there might have been no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, stripping away our pretext for rolling in there with a couple hundred thousand troops; and sure, maybe all those investigations didn’t uproot huge networks of homegrown terrorists; and sure, we planted a lot of bad cultural and legislative seeds that would sprout a decade-plus later, cracking the foundations of society—but at least we could tune in on Tuesday nights and watch Kiefer Sutherland as Bauer blasting his way through waves of colorfully ethnic terrorists, often saving Los Angeles from nuclear and viral destruction with seconds to spare.

And Sutherland was excellent: sweaty, tense, simmering with fury until it was time to explode. He was smart enough to play the character as an evil man willing to commit evil acts for ostensibly the greater good; the problem, at least in retrospect, was that most of the audience didn’t see things the same way, because they didn’t view his actions as evil. Even Anton Scalia took a pause from his lifelong plunge down the rabbit-hole of Constitutional originalism to declare: “[Bauer] saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?”

(You get the sense that most of today’s Supreme Court would likewise have zero issue with a federal agent violating a prisoner’s civil rights, provided the President ordered it.)

The show’s scriptwriters also took pains to make the stakes and enemies as unambiguous as possible—in real life, the “ticking time bomb” scenario nearly always comes with its share of uncertainties. The episodes often made a point of having some government bureaucrat or random civilian screech something about laws or ethics as Bauer took out someone’s kneecap, but it was clear that person was meant to be seen as the minority opinion, and besides, often as not they would be killed by a bomb or a crashing plane a few episodes later.

A more introspective society, once the proverbial dust from the “War on Terror” cleared, might have examined the expressions of its own bloodlust. Not America, though—we always prefer to shove the past in a proverbial bin, shut the lid, and never open it again. That we’ve blipped out “24” is symptomatic of that conscious forgetting, but it applies to so much else; I guarantee you that in a decade, people will make a point of never mentioning COVID, in the same way that our ancestors made sure to delete the ravages of the 1917 flu from our collective consciousness.