Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer was a mainstay of the golden age of television, but reboots of the franchise have been witless. Worse still, there’s now talk of another
![Don’t stay another day: why TV doesn’t need a 24 revival](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/6716c67845c8e6fbc34b9c62846a5abc8ea51327/0_29_1950_1170/master/1950.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&enable=upscale&s=a381b4085fa9e28f42407fd400b61c26)
In two months, 24 will be 20 years old. This presents the world with two options. The first is an opportunity for misty-eyed retrospectives and an excuse for viewers to rewatch the first season. A chance to rediscover Jack Bauer’s first – and most personally devastating plummet from warm-hearted family man to state-sanctioned killing machine. And maybe some additional context; to remind viewers just how integral 24 was to the golden age of television, or how its 9/11-adjacent debut caught the public’s taste for blood.
The second option is to make more 24, which is a terrible idea. Even during its initial run, 24 became too silly for its own good. Characters were offed and revived without any real care or thought. Storylines went haywire; a nuclear
bomb went off in a city one morning and was forgotten about by lunchtime; Jack Bauer beat a heroin addiction in approximately 90 minutes. Subsequent efforts to revive the show – the season set in a cartoon approximation of
London, the season that didn’t feature Jack Bauer at all – only saw 24 become less and less vital. Surely everyone knows that making more 24 would be a huge waste of time.