‘24’ and the Great Memory-Hole

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.

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Nick Kolakowski is the author of several crime novels, including “Where the Bones Lie”, “Payback is Forever”, „Maxine Unleashes Doomsday“ and „Boise Longpig Hunting Club“ as well as the Love & Bullets trilogy of novellas. His work has been nominated for the Anthony and Derringer awards, and his short story “Scorpions” appeared in The Best Mystery and Suspense 2024. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including Mystery Weekly, Shotgun Honey, Rock and a Hard Place Press, and more.

His „Payback is Forever“ (Shotgun Honey 2022) is inspired clearly by the novels of Richard Stark. Our review here (in German). – See also his Hell of a Mess. A Love & Bullets Hookup.

Nick Kolakowski, geboren 1980, aufgewachsen in Washington. D.C., hat Geschichte in Chicago studiert. Er schreibt Romane, Kurzgeschichten, Lyrik und Essays, viele davon über Crime Fiction und verwandte Themen. Seine Texte erscheinen u. a. in der Washington Post, in Shotgun Honey, North American Review, The Evergreen Review, Rust & Months. Kolakowski lebt in New York City. Eine Besprechung des von Parker inspirierten „Payback is Forever“ in unseren Bloody Chops.

Bei Suhrkamp auf Deutsch: Love & Bullets.
His essays with us. 

His website nickkolakowski.com

His column „Smoking Gun“ with us: 
‘Salem’s Lot’ and the Horror of a Stephen King Adaptation
(27) „Rebel Ridge“: Calmly Burn the Whole Thing Down
‘Monsieur Spade’ and the Faustian Bargain
John Woo is Remaking ‘The Killer.’ But Why?
The Newest ‘Ripley’ Series is Stunning and Flawed
‘Sugar’: Not the Neo-Noir Revival We Need
(3) Moral Redemption in Noir: Is It Possible?
(4) What Makes Jack Reacher Tick?
(5) ‘True Detective: Night Country’ Tries to Make the Familiar into Something New
(6) Is David Fincher’s ‘The Killer’ a Comedy? 
(7) Rewatching ‘Drive’: Gosling as Noir’s Apex Predator
(8) Elmore Leonard  – City Primeval
(9) Cormac McCarthy Used Crime Fiction’s Tropes to Make Masterpieces
(10) Parker: Donald Westlake’s One Amazing Trick
(11) Cosby, Winslow, Pruitt: Three Heavy-Hitting Thillers for Summer
(12) Weed-Based Crime Thrillers are Going Up in Smoke
(13) ‘The Last of Us’: Crime in the Post-Apocalypse 
(14) What Made “Glass Onion” and “Knives Out” So Popular?
(15) Jordan Harper’s One-Two Punch of Crime Fiction Deserves a Wide Audience
(16) ‘True Detective’ Season 2: Was It Better Than We All Thought?
(17) From ‘Touch of Evil’ to ‘True Detective,’ Long Shots are Crime Films’ Secret Weapon
(18) Michael Mann, again: What Michael Mann Teaches Us About Enduring Crime Fiction
(19) „Heat 2“ – How Do You Craft a Sequel to a Masterpiece?
(20) 4 Ways Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” Novel Stands Out From the Film.
(21) On „Heat“: Manhunter Takes Down Thief: How Michael Mann’s Early Career Led to ‘Heat’
(22) The Most Honest Nihilism – on „The Way of the Gun“
(23) No, Time to Die – The latest James Bond movie digs into the fatalism at the iconic spy’s core.
(24) Cormac McCarthy’s Overlooked Masterpiece? – „The Councelor“
(25) „Nightmare Alley“ – How Guillermo del Toro’s Film Alters a Masterpiece Noir Novel
(26) David Cronenberg – The Carnal Crime of “A History of Violence” and “Eastern Promises”
(27) With Parker, Donald E. Westlake Pulled Off Crime Fiction’s Most Spectacular Magic Trick
(28) Guy Ritchie’s Return to Crime Films is Worth Watching
(29) Alex Garland’s ‘Civil War’: Hint of Things to Come?
(30) David Lynch and the Beautiful Weirdness
(31) ‘Where the Bones Lie’ and the Engine of California Noir
(32) “Den of Thieves 2”: Stealing from the Best
(33) White Lotus and the Gentle Art of Hating Your Protagonists
(34) Neal Stephenson
(35) Where is Storytelling Going?
(36) ‚She Rides Shotgun‘ and the Making of Legends