twenty-four

24 was a flagship show for FOX for nearly a decade. It featured the central character of Jack Bauer, an anti-terrorism task-force leader who found himself plunged into a terrorist conspiracy and for which he only had the titular amount of hours to unravel the plot. Each of the...

Before a second of its first episode had been broadcast, 24 arrived on television schedules in the Fall of 2001 with the kind of zeitgiest-grabbing topicality that can’t be programmed, engineered or bought. Mere weeks earlier viewers had watched helplessly as the all-too-real world came powering through their television screens...