In his time, Jack Bauer survived torture, kidnap, heroin addiction, relentless bereavement, exposure to a weaponised Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease pathogen, actual nuclear explosions and shared screen time with Freddie Prinze Jr. However, Jack Bauer is just a man, and now the time has come for him to face the one enemy not even he can defeat – the fickle whims of market forces out to capture the desirable 18-to-30 demographic.
A new spin-off series of 24 was announced by executive producer Howard Gordon yesterday. Usually, this would be a cause for celebration. After all, there are few joys in life as pure as seeing Kiefer Sutherland scowl and grunt and straight up murder his way through an ocean of suspiciously accented baddies, stopping only to fall in love with someone who will inevitably wind up dead because his character’s soul is cursed and he’ll never achieve true happiness. In televisual terms, that’s about as good as it gets.
However, this time it’s different. This time, Kiefer Sutherland is nowhere to be seen. The new spin-off series of 24 will apparently have a brand new protagonist, and he’ll be young and lithe and energetic and enthusiastic and he’ll probably wear a baseball cap and rap and know how to Facetime people. True, he hasn’t been cast yet, but he’s bound to have freckles and a shiny face and a Bebo account and a microscooter and a wisecracking Furby for a partner. Justin Bieber. It’s going to be Justin Bieber, isn’t it? Justin Bieber’s going to be the new star of 24. This is the worst.
Surely the 24 producers would have learned their lesson by now. Time and time again, they’ve tried to buddy Bauer up with a hip, young interloper, and every single time it’s ended in dismal failure. Next to the fire, blood and scar tissue of Jack Bauer, they’ve all come off as bland little drizzle-puddles. They teamed him up with Prinze Jr and that didn’t work. They teamed him up with Little Lord Fauntleroy and that didn’t work. They teamed him up with the endless void that was Chase Edmunds, and the only fun to be had there was when Jack ended up thwacking his arm off with an axe.
And, this time, the new boy isn’t even going to have Bauer to prop him up – he’ll have to shoulder the entire series by himself. And he’ll be in his twenties, for god’s sake. Nobody has ever cared about anything that anyone in their twenties has ever done. Ever.
Jack Bauer had a life. He had a dead wife, an estranged daughter, and decades of complicated military history that kept him awake at night. The man was a tangle of anger and regret. His entire existence ached. What’s the biggest regret that his twentysomething replacement will have endured? That he bought a silver iPhone 6 instead of a gold one once? This is all wrong. It’s wrong.
Of course, we probably shouldn’t write the new 24 off before it’s even been made. After all, by starting with a fresh-faced newcomer, the producers have another opportunity to corrupt and corrode and calcify their lead character until he’s just as much of a worn-down battle machine as Bauer ever was. And, technically speaking, the new series will take place in the same universe as the rest of 24, so there’s still a chance that Jack Bauer will appear and spend a single episode on the rampage, just like when Phil Mitchell turned up on EastEnders, flushed Ian Beale’s head down the toilet and left again.
But, at this stage, that is just a pipe dream. Right now, 24 as we know it is dead. We’ll miss you, Jack. Damn it.
