Checks, Balances and the Ticking Clock: What “24″ Taught Us

I would have killed to have been a fly on the wall at the pitch for 24, which recently ended its eight-season run. I would have liked to be there when the writers sat down with the producers to sell them the show. Beyond the accidentals—the ticking clock, the graphic violence, the pained expression on Kiefer Sutherland’s face—comes an inherent confusion over the essentials: What’s the trope for 24? Man versus institution? Man versus man? Man versus time?

Maybe it’s a little of all three. In 24, which recently ended its eight-season run, we felt the tension of autonomous individualism set against the necessity of structure and procedure. We saw both the individual and the organization function both as hero and villain: CTU, Jack Bauer’s sponsoring organization, is integral in the defense of the country against acts of terror and thievery writ large, and on its best days it works in fluid coordination with the FBI, the CIA and even the National Security Council and the President. But on its worst days it inhibits the effective work of its agents, it drags the investigation down in bureaucracy and politics, it plays into the hands of savvy villains.

Enter Jack, willing on a dime to “go dark”—to ignore the calls and protocols of his superior officers. Ever loyal to the president, he finds the Constitution an occasional nuisance and the Senate an incredible waste of time. Jack is always looking forward, never looking back, and those who are calling on him to look back will just have to wait their turn. Jack, of course, is our hero; he can never be wrong. So we see the dark side of going dark in his peers and antagonists: Tony Almeida, more than once, Presidents Charles Logan and Allison Taylor, and with them any number of other like-minded characters, lose their way in the dark.

It’s difficult to say what the overarching moral of 24 is. I once wrote a tongue-in-cheek devotional based on the show, and I was later startled (though not surprised) to find that a Christian publisher had created a whole book of the same in total seriousness. Searching for a moral means wading through a morass of violence; it means keeping your wits about you when the show’s presentation (with the ticking clock, the occasional handheld camerawork, the simultaneous presentation of as many as four separate scenes) is designed to stress you out. We’re intended by the producers to notice our heartbeat, first and foremost, and only later to notice that we were high-fiving our friends while Jack was torturing his brother.

Nevertheless, the morals are there. The show undoubtedly holds a mirror up to contemporary culture, asking it critical questions in the process: Is it more important to defend ourselves from the evil of others or to guard ourselves from the evil within? Is the most heroic life one lived in perpetual isolation, or do we achieve heroic goals only on the strength of our relationships? Why do we trust who we trust, and how do we arrive at that level of trust?

Jack cheated death on multiple occasions in every season, sometimes thanks to his own quick thinking, but often as not because he had the backing of trustworthy friends. They weren’t perfect, but they were good, and they worked well together. CTU shows us the brilliance of a well-operated network of people, using their particular gifts well and drawing energy from their commitment to each other and to their higher power—the president, or the Constitution, or the United States. Whatever—it’s not a Christian show, people.

But CTU also shows us the capacity of any system to break down—it’s vulnerability to manipulation from outside or the whims and wiles of people on the inside. Jack knocks people out of the loop a lot, sometimes for their own good but more often for the greater good. In 24 we are actively encouraged to trust no one, while trusting everyone. That’s the paradox: there are real implications, in real time to real life and real relationships, to the moral complexity of imperfect humanity. We’re not perfect, and our imperfections infect our striving for whatever good we’re striving for. But the striving—that’s where we’re tested, and all involved are rooting for us.

In season seven the president and her chief of staff look out the window of the oval office in stunned silence as two planes collide into one another. Soon after that scene, with a simple phone call the chief of staff reveals his innocence in a plot against the president. In 24, as in life, we learn who the heroes and villains are by what they mourn and what they celebrate. And maybe that’s the moral of this eight-season story: every moment of celebration, every moment of lament, is a potential consecration to common mission. When we suffer together, we endure together.