The first season is as tense as anything television has managed: one day, one hour an episode, a phone that never rings at a good time. The later days repeat the trick with less conviction, but Kiefer Sutherland holds them together.
Robert Cochran and Joel Surnow’s idea is easy to state and hard to sustain: twenty-four episodes, one hour of a single day each, with a clock in the corner that keeps running while the characters are off screen. Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) runs a Counter Terrorist Unit office in Los Angeles, and on the night of the California presidential primary he is told that someone intends to kill Senator David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) before the polls close. That first day is as tense as anything television has managed. The eight that followed, made over thirteen years, repeat the trick with less conviction, and the man at the centre is the reason to keep going.
Sutherland plays Bauer hoarse. He whispers where other actors would shout, and by the fourth hour looks like a man who has not sat down in a week. The first season works because Bauer starts it as a husband with a marriage to repair: he and Teri (Leslie Hope) are freshly back together, their daughter Kim (Elisha Cuthbert) has climbed out of a bedroom window, and the phone calls between the office and the house are what the show is really about. Haysbert’s Palmer is the other pole, a big, unhurried man with a deep voice, the only person in the series who appears to think before he speaks.
Stephen Hopkins set the look on the pilot and Jon Cassar, who directed and produced across the run, kept it. Rodney Charters and Jeffrey C. Mygatt shoot handheld on long lenses with a visible grain, so that a woman in a parked car looks watched. Jonathan Lee’s production design gives the CTU office glass walls, blue light and a screen on every surface, a room where everyone can see everyone and nobody trusts a soul. David Latham’s cutting is what people remember: before each break the screen splits into three or four boxes, a phone in each, and you watch a lie travel between them. Sean Callery’s score is a low electronic pulse and the beep of the clock, and we could pick it out with our eyes shut.
We were frightened by a telephone. Early in the first day Bauer is driving, talking to Teri, and the line drops, and the clock ticks on in the corner while he redials, and we noticed we had stopped breathing over a lost signal. That is what the format does when it works: it turns waiting into an event. The clock sometimes runs in silence at the end of an hour, and the series keeps that silence for its worst moments; after the first time you dread the sound of nothing.
Then the format starts to cost. Every day needs a traitor inside the building, so every year there is one, and by the fifth you can spot them early. Every day needs a hostage, and for two seasons that meant Cuthbert’s Kim, sent into the city to be chased by whatever the writers had to hand; there is a stretch of the second season involving a wild animal that we would not defend to anyone. Hours twelve to eighteen sag in nearly every season while one villain is swapped for another. And the interrogations, frightening in the first season because Bauer is a man losing his temper, harden in the middle years into a method that always works. We grew tired of watching it work, then cross that the series never asked whether it should.
The later years have compensations. Mary Lynn Rajskub’s Chloe O’Brian, an analyst with no manners and no wish to acquire any, became the best supporting character in it and the only person Bauer reliably tells the truth. Sarah Clarke’s Nina Myers is the sharpest presence in the first season, and we will say no more about her. Kim Raver’s Audrey Raines and William Devane’s James Heller give Bauer something like a family, and the twelve-episode return, Live Another Day (2014), is tighter for being half the length, with Yvonne Strahovski’s Kate Morgan beside him as an agent who is not there to be rescued.
Watch the first day in long sittings, four or five hours at a time, which is how it was built to be seen even if nobody could see it that way in 2001. Then have a night’s sleep and decide whether you want eight more. Bauer never gets one. Certificate 15, 45 minutes to the hour.
