Twenty years ago this week, “24″ premiered on Fox. It was an ambitious and innovative concept, as each 24-episode season covered 24 hours in the life of counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer. On TV, real time is harder to pull off than fake time, and yet the show made it work entertainingly for a few years, crowding the story line with deaths, cliffhangers, and unexpected twists. Split screens and a ticking digital clock also helped to give it a distinct visual style.
“24″ had a timely concept, too, as it arrived less than two months after 9/11. (It was originally scheduled to premiere on Oct. 30, but it was moved to Nov. 6 because of the attacks.) Suddenly, history had turned the show from a network action series about a good guy trying to save the world into something a lot more rooted in our reality. While we saw headlines about the War on Terror, we saw Jack Bauer — played by a deadly serious Kiefer Sutherland — on the front lines.
I was a fan for the first four or five seasons, before the stories became formulaic and the twists became too frequent and overly absurd. The need to keep the viewers from boredom began to overwhelm the art of suspenseful storytelling. I also tired of the show’s torture scenes, Bauer’s ends-justify-the-means approach, and the stereotyping of Muslims. More recently, I just got annoyed at the way the show wouldn’t go away, with a film, a limited series, and a spin-off.
These days, it’s more common for TV shows to boldly play around with formatting. “This Is Us” has a jigsaw puzzle narrative, “Ordinary Joe” is following three alternate stories about the same man, and “The Affair” gave us the same events from different points of view. But before they arrived, “24″ — along with “Lost” — gave us a greater sense of what serial storytelling could do.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at matthew.gilbert@globe.com. Follow him @MatthewGilbert.