It's day five for 24, the American drama that charts the thwarting of terrorist attacks in real time, an hour for an hour over 24 weeks. The novelty of the storytelling has gone. (Mike Figgis, who used split screens and continuous action in his film Timecode, has pointed out he had got there first in any case.) The viewer is aware that the variety of imaginable terrorist assaults cannot be infinite: series one, a presidential assassination; series two, a nuclear bomb; series three, a deadly virus; series four, attacks on nuclear power plants and a presidential assassination. Diminishing returns.
The personal horrors that can plausibly be inflicted on the programme's hero, the semi-maverick agent Jack Bauer, are running out, too: the kidnapping of his family, the killing of his wife (by his former mistress), the murder of a girlfriend, the kidnapping of his daughter (again) . . . At the end of the fourth season, Jack was stripped of his identity and deemed officially dead. Like Lear, he is a deposed king who keeps losing everything.
So why does 24, which returned on 12 February (9pm) with a two-hour season opener, not look ridiculous? Why is it exhausting but not exhausted viewing? Well, we have a new opening scenario, just about. It is not unusual, at the beginning of a series of 24, to find Jack exiled from the Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU) he once led, but this time he is truly living another life, that of an oil-rig worker ironically, given his secret life, named Frank. He lives in Bakersfield, California, cohabiting with a single mother named Diane Huxley and her suspicious teenage son, Derek. Jack is grateful for this unglamorous, blue-collar life. If CTU once represented his alternative family, the Huxleys are the alternative to that alternative. Jack has something to lose again and it is his former CTU family that threatens to rob him of it.
It would be futile to argue that the best part of 24's success did not rest on Kiefer Sutherland's performance as Jack Bauer. It is unsentimental and yet not heartless. Jack never comes within a hundred yards of a joke, never raises a Simon Templar eyebrow. Yet, somehow, Sutherland is neither humourless nor unknowing in the role. Bauer, Sutherland seems to understand, is the fine line America imagines it is traversing between doing whatever it takes to win the "war on terror" (screams from the torture room are the show's leitmotif) and maintaining its liberalism. But the line shifts to the right each season as Bauer becomes more ruthless and vengeful. The degradation of Jack's character, and thus of America, is one of the series' bumpy through-paths.
However, despite Sutherland's magnetic, dangerous presence, 24 is also an ensemble drama, and one that is constantly being reinvigorated. New to the cast this time are a bipolar first lady (played by Jean Smart), Connie Britton as Jack's love interest, and a new Russki villain (played, as usual, by a Brit - Julian Sands). Unlike most comparable British dramas - Spooks, say - 24 does not allow any member of its dramatis personae to escape proper characterisation, and some become reasons to watch all of their own. For instance, Chloe O'Brian, CTU's top computer analyst, might deserve a place in Channel 4's promising sitcom The IT Crowd. Here she leavens proceedings with her crosspatch, Asperger's syndrome geekiness. At the height of the crisis last time round, she suggested that when "all this is over" Jack might like to talk things over with her. Mary Lynn Rajskub's acting is always perfect, but Sutherland's incredulous, double-take response was a joy to behold. This season Chloe sleeps with a fellow agent. I bet that works out well.
The vivid characterisations grant 24's writers another weapon: we really care when these guys get killed off. The opener of the current series announced a "special guest appearance" by Dennis Haysbert, who had from the start played good President Palmer. From the words "special guest" I deduced that he was not going to last beyond the first episode. Six minutes in, he was duly assassinated.
In consequence, I was unprepared for the car bombing of Michelle Dessler, a former CTU agent for whom, two years back, we spent half a season worrying when she was trapped in a hotel polluted by the previously mentioned deadly virus. Her husband Tony Almeida, another mainstay, rushed out to save her. He got it in a second explosion. In other programmes such profligate and fatal violence towards recurring characters would look like a breach of contract with the viewer. Here it seems shocking but fitting.
I took part in a judging panel for the Royal Television Society drama awards this past week. The only writer present, Anthony Horowitz, creator of Foyle's War and Midsomer Murders, pointed out how hard it was to write successive series without repeating yourself. The second season of Desperate Housewives (Channel 4) is proving his point. One has to wonder what will happen in the second batch of Prison Break (Channel 5, Mondays, 10pm) after the break has, as it were, broken. I could not claim, hand on heart, that the remarkable writers on 24 are making it look as if it's easy to resolve the problem of inbuilt redundancy. You can sometimes detect the sweat not just on Bauer's forehead but on theirs. But they are making the task look possible.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
