25 Years Ago Tonight, '24' Premiered on Fox and Put a Clock on the Screen

The first thing on the screen was a clock. It read 12:00:00, and it beeped — two alternating tones, patient as a heart monitor — while a voice explained that what followed would take place between midnight and one in the morning, in real time. Then the hour split open. A senator was preparing a victory speech for 7 a.m. A father was discovering that his daughter had climbed out of her bedroom window. And on a 747 descending toward Los Angeles, a photographer slept while the woman he'd just met in the bathroom lifted his wallet and his press credential, then left the airplane by parachute with a bomb ticking behind her.

Television had never asked its audience to keep time before. Every drama before that night — Tuesday, November 6, 2001, eight weeks to the day after the September 11 attacks — ran on elastic hours, in which a drive across town took exactly as long as the plot needed. 24 ran on a clock the viewer could check. The episode lasted 43 minutes. The missing 17 were the commercials, and the clock didn't stop for them: characters got into cars as the picture cut away and got out of them when it returned, and the number on the screen counted the advertising as part of the hour. The ads weren't between the show. They were inside it.

Fox had set the premiere for October 30; after the attacks, the 747 explosion was cut and the show moved a week

Fox had scheduled the premiere for October 30, and the pilot, filmed the previous March for $4 million, ended its first hour with the 747 exploding in mid-air. After the attacks, that shot couldn't be shown. The network pushed the premiere back a week, and the revised pilot that reached critics showed, in the words of a Kansas City report published five days before air, "small pieces of flaming debris in the nighttime sky" where the explosion had been. "We went to Fox and said, 'We'd like to lose that,' and they were happy to do it as well," co-creator Joel Surnow said at the time. What couldn't be cut was the act itself, because the whole first movement of the series hangs on it. So the show that came to define the post-9/11 decade of American television opened with an act of aviation terrorism, lightly sketched, eight weeks after the real thing.

11.64 million people watched the premiere, per Nielsen's count for the episode. Fox wasn't yet sure it had a series: the network had ordered 13 episodes, and the rescue that closes the season's first half was built to double as a finale if the order stopped there.

The split screens were a solution to a telephone problem, and the clock was the co-creator's idea

The pilot was shot mostly in an old Chatsworth pencil factory, and its headquarters set was first assembled inside a Fox Sports office. Director Stephen Hopkins shot with handheld cameras and a rule that the camera could never sit where a person couldn't stand, so the viewer stayed, in the production's phrase, within the room. The split screens that became the show's signature weren't a style looking for a subject; the script was full of phone calls, and editor David Thompson needed somewhere to put both ends of them. "Splitscreens are great, boxes are even cooler," he said, and the boxes multiplied. The ticking clock was Surnow's idea. The final cut of the pilot was its 24th, delivered to composer Sean Callery on April 24, 2001, which is the kind of coincidence a show like this collects. Kiefer Sutherland, meanwhile, took the lead without grasping the premise: he'd skipped the line in the script that said all events take place in real time, and signed on for the character instead, citing the shades of grey in it and a hero who couldn't handle his own teenage daughter.

The critics understood the premise instantly. In The New York Times, Caryn James called the pilot "a drama sleek, suspenseful and absorbing enough to overcome its blatant gimmick" and the most daring of that fall's crop of government series. Tom Shales, in the Washington Post, wrote that Jack Bauer was "in for a helluva day, and you may well want to be there with him for every agonizing twist and turn." Surnow and co-creator Robert Cochran won the Emmy for writing the pilot. The gimmick, it turned out, was load-bearing.

When the first season ended, the show marked its worst moment by silencing the clock

Because the clock was never decoration. It was the antagonist that appeared in every scene and couldn't be shot. It made the audience complicit in a way no previous series had: you weren't watching time pass for these people; you were spending it with them, minute for minute, and the spending was the suspense. When the show wanted to mark the worst moment of its first season — Jack Bauer finding his wife Teri dead in the final hour, on May 21, 2002 — it didn't use music. It used the clock, running to 12:00:00 with its beep removed. The producers and the fans named it the silent clock, and it became the show's unit of grief: the sound the series had trained you to hear, withheld.

A West Point dean flew to the set in 2006 and asked the producers to stop the torture scenes

The clock also gave the show its argument, and the argument followed it out of the television set. 24 was built on the ticking-bomb premise, the interrogator's hypothetical made weekly flesh, and the Parents Television Council counted 67 torture scenes across its first five seasons. According to Human Rights First's figures, cited by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker in February 2007, American prime-time television carried fewer than four acts of torture a year before the attacks and more than a hundred a year after them. In November 2006, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of West Point, flew to California with three of the most experienced interrogators in the country to meet the show's producers and ask them to stop. "The kids see it, and say, 'If torture is wrong, what about 24?'" Finnegan told Mayer. He asked for a show in which torture backfired. The producers answered that they were careful not to glamorize it, and that Bauer never enjoys inflicting pain. Both things ran in the same article, and the argument has never really closed; it simply became part of the show's file, the way the clock became part of its grammar.

The record closed at eight seasons, 192 episodes and 20 Emmy wins

The record, when it closed, read like this. Eight seasons. 192 episodes. A finale on May 24, 2010. Sixty-eight Emmy nominations and 20 wins, with the summit arriving in 2006, when the fifth season took Outstanding Drama Series and Sutherland — nominated for the role in 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005 — finally won lead actor. The show won the Golden Globe for best drama series, and Sutherland won his own Globe for the first season. A television movie, 24: Redemption, aired in November 2008. When Fox revived the property in 2014, for 24: Live Another Day, it kept the clock and broke the format to do it: 12 episodes, set in London, with hours skipped to fit a day into half a season. When it tried again in 2017, with 24: Legacy — Corey Hawkins in the lead, no Bauer — the clock survived and the show didn't, cancelled after its 12 episodes. The format turned out to be portable. The day wasn't.

A season runs about 17 hours watched straight through, and the first reached DVD in September 2002

A season of 24, watched without interruption, runs about 17 hours, and the first season was on DVD by September 17, 2002 — released immediately after the season ended, which the show's episode record counts as a first for a television series. Broadcast television still ran the show an hour a week, with a winter break and reruns, but the object itself was already shaped like the thing television would become: serialized past the point where a missed week could be forgiven, structured so that the only comfortable way to watch was all of it, in order, as fast as you could. The streaming era didn't invent that appetite. It inherited it, from a show that had to wait for commercials and counted them anyway.

What remains, twenty-five years later, is the device, and the device remains startling in its simplicity: a number in the corner of the screen, counting up, telling the audience exactly how much time the characters have left and daring them to look away. Every episode of 24 began at a stated time and ended at a stated time, and nothing in it was allowed to pretend otherwise. Television had shown clocks before. It had never before agreed to be governed by one.