'24' helped make the world safe for a black president

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The Fox series 24 debuted on Nov. 6, 2001, weeks after the worst foreign attack on American soil. In the eight years since then, its fictional forecast of endless terrorism in this country has been a lightning rod for controversy and a source of inspiration for those who championed the fight against the “axis of evil.”

Fox’s cancellation of 24, announced on Friday and effective with the series finale on May 24, ends a signal moment in the national teleculture when fiction and reality fused in the fall of 2001.

The drama’s open-ended storyline had promise from the beginning: Jack Bauer (played by Kiefer Sutherland) directs a federal Counter-Terrorism Unit in Los Angeles. Bauer’s also a man fighting his own demons, trying to restore a marriage made rocky by his own infidelity. One night, Bauer discovers that his daughter Kim has sneaked out of the house in the middle of the night.

This happens shortly before Jack is called to his office, where he finds that an assassination attempt is expected to happen sometime that day — an attempt on the life of Sen. David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert), the first black American presidential aspirant with a real shot at winning the White House. Bauer later finds there may be someone inside his agency who’s involved in the planned assassination — possibly his closest co-workers.

What’s followed in the years since 2001 has been a TV series that ventured the possibility of serial terrorist attacks on the United States; a web of complicities between foreign powers, assassins and U.S. officials; and a government mindset by which the ends justify the means — a rationale of fictional behavior that mirrored the pre-emptive foreign-policy doctrine of the real-life Bush-Cheney administration.

The Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning Fox show blazed fresh stylistic trails. Its real-time structure, with each episode documenting one hour in the life of national crisis, was joined with split-screen views, a noisy on-screen digital clock, and a relentless tension and foreboding. These signature touches (as well as characters with complexity and depth, people we actually care about) eventually made 24 the longest-running espionage-based series in television history.

The autumn of 2001 was thick with shows that anticipated the gathering storm of terrorism we live through today. Besides 24, other shows making their debut — ABC’s Alias, CBS’s The Agency and NBC’s UC: Undercover — were the canaries in a cultural coalmine, transmitting the new national anxiety about our friends and enemies, foreign and domestic, and how each could trade places in a geopolitical eyeblink.

The Wen Ho Lee and Robert Hanssen espionage cases, the anthrax attacks, would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid and bureaucratic infighting at the FBI were all real-life examples of what 24 tapped into so effectively: the predictable unpredictability of life in an age of terrorism.

Since 2001, of course, other TV series have addressed our nervous Zeitgeist, from the lighthearted (NBC’s Chuck) to the deadly serious (CBS’s The Unit). But Fox’s 24 remains the long-distance runner, the template for national-insecurity-as-prime-time-entertainment in the post-9/11 world.

The ways in which the world of 24 and our own have connected in unsettling ways. It’s eerie enough to consider how the story arc of 24 has played out against the emerging real-life backdrop of two foreign wars undertaken in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It’s scarier still to see how deeply, and frequently, the over-the-top, extralegal actions of a fictional TV super-agent have worked their way into the deliberations of officials of the actual government of the United States.

Well before the United States went to war in Iraq in March 2003, the thorny moral and judicial issues of torture’s legality, detainment without trial, and racial profiling in defense of national security were being played out on the series.

Some in the military think it’s led to a theoretical “What would Jack Bauer do?” mentality about the application of state-sanctioned mayhem.

At a panel discussion at the UC Berkeley Law School in March 2008, Margaret Stock, a Army Reserve officer and an associate professor at West Point, noted that in the period right after 9/11, her students, “when confronted with a discussion of torture, would say, ‘But what about Jack Bauer? What about this episode?’ 

“Some people say, ‘Well, what happens on TV can’t possibly influence people in the military, that’s crazy,’ ” she said. “Well, it does influence people in the military. It does influence the public, and people in the military are just like members of the public.”

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia referred to the Jack Bauer character when Scalia debated and defended torture at a panel of judges in Canada in 2007.

And in 2008, Diane Beaver, a lawyer who worked with the first commander of the Guantánamo Bay prison, told Vanity Fair that “An inescapable message of the program is that torture works. . . . ”[Jack Bauer] gave people lots of ideas.”

Legal scholar Steven Keslowitz, writing in the Cardozo Law Review in May 2008 , explores how Jack Bauer and his actions on the nation’s behalf have influenced judicial reasoning on “legal issues pertaining to striking the proper balance between maintaining civil liberties and protecting the nation from harm.”

Keslowitz said the series has “exerted an influence not only on the way in which the general public perceives the law, but also on the ways in which laws are made and cases are decided.”

Keslowitz observed: ” 24 serves as the primary frame of reference for many Americans with respect to issues such as torture, terrorism, and even presidential politics. Because 24 presents a hyper-dangerous world, it is highly probable, based on the television crime studies, that 24 has a palpable effect on public fears of terrorists.”

If 24 gets the blame for fanning those fears, the show also gets credit for daring — years before the nation and Barack Obama had fully embraced the audacity of hope — to envision a world in which the United States was governed by a black president. Haysbert, who portrayed David Palmer as candidate and president, said the show’s depiction of a black American leader may have actually burnished the bona fides of Obama’s campaign.

“If anything, my portrayal of David Palmer, I think, may have helped open the eyes of the American people,” Haysbert told The Associated Press in July 2008. “And I mean the American people from across the board — from the poorest to the richest, every color and creed, every religious base — to prove the possibility there could be an African-American president, a female president, any type of president that puts the people first.”

In physics and psychology, the so-called observer effect states that, in varying degrees, the act of observation changes that which is being observed. Of all the shows on television in the last 20 years, 24 may be the most dramatic example of that at work in the culture.

Today we’re living lives that reflect what the creators of 24 and the United States after Sept. 11 have in common: the fact of being both observer and observed, each effectively feeding off the other, for inspiration, for policy, for rationale, for ratings.

The 24 brand will live on; work’s recently started on a feature film based on the series. But as 24 heads toward its television finale on May 24, the show that made terrorism must-see TV takes its place as a landmark indicator of the uncertainty that regulates the post-9/11 world.