All Due Respect . . . The Sopranos Changes Everything-A Chapter From the Revolution Was Televised by Alan Sepinwall

Author:Alan Sepinwall
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2013-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Tell me where the bomb is!…

24 goes to war on terror, boredom

Every decade has iconic action-film heroes to choose from — John Rambo or John McClane in the ’80s, the good Terminator or Neo in the ’90s — and the ‘00s offered no shortage of potentially defining ones: Captain Jack Sparrow, Batman, Spider-Man, and all nine members of the Fellowship of the Ring. (Okay, maybe not Boromir.) These all were, in one way or another, escapist heroes operating in fantastical worlds, which isn’t surprising given the harsh realities of that decade.

Me, I’ll take Jack Bauer over any of those guys. The snarling, bloody, paranoid hero of Fox’s 24 may not have transported me to some far-off land where I didn’t have to think about the dark state of current events, but that was exactly why I liked him.

24 wasn’t initially designed as a ripped-from-the-headlines drama. But when life horrifically imitated art on September 11, 2001, 24 was in a perfect position to reflect and deal with our terrifying new world.

The idea for 24 — an intensely serialized real-time drama, each season covering 24 hours in Jack’s dangerous life — came from a very mundane, mathematical place.

“I was standing in my bathroom one day,” recalls the show’s co-creator, Joel Surnow, “thinking about how for the rest of my life, I’m going to have to do 22 episodes a year. I’m basically a journeyman TV writer, so it’s 22, 22, every year of my life is 22. And I thought, ‘What if it was 24? Could you do a whole show that spanned one day?’”

He called his friend and frequent collaborator Robert Cochran, with whom he had developed USA’s La Femme Nikita, and asked what he thought of doing a TV show in real time.

“He said, ‘I think it stinks,’” says Surnow, “so I hung up the phone and I didn’t think about it.”

Surnow couldn’t let go of the idea — nor, it turned out, could Cochran, so a few days later the men found themselves brainstorming ideas at a local IHOP. They had no particular genre in mind; they were simply considering the scenarios you could apply a 24-hour real-time format to, like the day of a young couple’s wedding(*).

(*) Years later, ABC would actually try this idea with Big Day, a short-lived sitcom told mostly in real time. Let’s just say Surnow and Cochran were wise to go a different route.

“The key that we realized, very quickly,” says Surnow, “is that for real time to work, it should be a race against time. We asked what would keep someone up for 24 hours. And then we asked, ‘What if there’s a presidential candidate in town and we know he’s going to be assassinated?’ And if the same federal agent who has to stop the assassination has his daughter go missing at the same time, then you’re not going to bed.”

Surnow and Cochran took the idea to FX, but were told the idea might be too expensive for the channel to produce.

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