At the end of the day: The '24' finale

On Sunday night, the nation will be split into two halves: those gripped by the TV drama '24'... and the rest. But is it the best programme ever? What does it all mean? And can life ever be the same again? As the serial reaches its climax, the critic David Thomson offers 24 thoughts about '24'

1.

The first question must be: can I write at length about 24 without giving you a fatal clue as to what will happen this Sunday night? I promise to try to be tight-lipped, for raw suspense is the heart of this beast. Yet you know how enthusiasm can lead one astray. So I hope my editor will allow me to say that, if I were you, I wouldn't take the chance. I'd put this paper aside until 10.45pm Sunday, by which time, alas, it's just a stale novelty. Like great fruit, secrets rot fast.

2.

It follows from 1 that what we are considering here is primal cliffhanging. In America, as 24 became a cult show, adherents would gather and argue: "I found it fancy and obscure at first, but once I got the feeling that it was building... nothing's been the same since."

"But they can't sustain it, can they?"

"No, you're right – it'll build great, but the ending has to be a letdown. It's the American pattern."

Well, the last hour is not a letdown, it is not disappointing, it...

3.

But some of you maybe don't know the show, and you may be tempted to tune in on Sunday to see what the fuss is about. 24 is a TV serial (not a series – see 6 below) about a day in the life of the FBI agent Jack Bauer, based in Los Angeles. It's the day of the California primary in a presidential election year, and Jack is involved in the security measures to stop an attempted assassination of candidate Senator David Palmer.

4.

It's called 24 because each episode is one hour in the day of the primary, midnight to midnight. But Jack has a crowded life: he is only shakily reconciled with his wife Teri and his teenage daughter Kim, after having had an affair with his co-worker and right-hand woman, Nina. And the people out to get Palmer kidnap Teri and Kim to put pressure on Jack – to make him help them.

5.

Does Nina accept that the affair is over, as she does all she can to help Jack? Just look at her face as she realises she's the only one he can rely on – in helping to rescue her natural rival. So watch Nina's face: it is the mouse in this computer. But she and Teri look alike. Which is odd and pointed in a TV show where making sure the audience can follow what is happening must always have been important. For 24 is difficult, crowded and demanding – a lot of it takes place at night (for a summer day in Los Angeles this is very noir), and much of what is said is muttered, groaned and done in a way that makes life tough on viewers. But 24 isn't into comfort.

6.

This is not the American way – hence the fact that, after its early days, American TV opted for the open-ended series form. In a series, you establish the endless situation and the ageless characters (think Friends) and then turn that engine over so that the viewers are immediately at home with any episode, or any section of any episode.

7.

The idea of "story", on the other hand, is based – as it has been ever since the serialised novels of the 19th century – on the confidence that says: we can hook you, you are going to be smart enough to keep up and clamour for every new episode, you won't go away. If you think of it like this, then 24 is not so much revolutionary as a return to a more challenging past.

8.

Along with The Sopranos, 24 is also a sign of how far cable TV is pushing network shows into being more interesting. Of course, in America, where it showed on the Fox network, each episode of 24 filled an hour – with commercial breaks – but they only run 45 minutes in the UK. Purists may say that Britain gets the better side of the deal. I disagree; the commercial breaks, the bumpers, the digital clock, all worked very well together, and many of the adverts set up fascinating interplays with the show itself, for they were trying to sell the comfort, the peace of mind and the absence of betrayal that it scorns. So the commercials became just one more interruption in a narrative determined by fragmentation.

9.

There's a great tension in the idea of a serial that is interrupted – think of a serial killer who is always being intruded upon before the coup de grâce. Interruption functions in 24 not just in the mounting scale of subplots (Jack's emotional life, Jack's job, ditto for Senator Palmer, Teri's crisis, Kim's rebellion) but in the way, temporally and spatially, a fixed format keeps splitting.

10.

Like? Like the way, under stress, the normal single image (the screen) of film and TV breaks down into multiple images. And the way the narrative line is being both kicked forward and broken up by interrupting events and telephone calls. Many people have noted that 24 is the first great work driven by the cellphone. It often seems to be a portrait of a world in which hushed neurotics are talking to themselves and clutching their heads, as if wondering whether they've been shot. But the cellphone isn't just a gear system for the story – it's a paradigm of a world in which we can always break in on others (and be broken into). And these telephones aren't just linking systems, tender and warm. They're bugs, parasites eating their way out from inside the wounded head. If Luis Buñuel had done 24, all the ads would be for Nokia.

11.

Multiple images (or split screens) had a fling in the Sixties, in movies such as The Boston Strangler and The Thomas Crown Affair – screens with four or five postage-stamp insets. But it was given up because it was confusing, even though in those days the different pictures were illustrative (they were pictorial extras, not conflicting systems). What happens in 24 is much more; it's as if we are in the editing room, looking at the Avid editing system, and all the possible strands of film to be used in one sequence. Within the crowded frame you get close-up and cross-cut close-up; some people are watching and some are being watched. You begin to be an editor, and to see that editing fabricates – asserting one totality over all the points of view.

12.

Which brings us back to Nina – always in the office, in the background, patching phone lines, doing stuff for Jack, watching what's going on, giving Jack broody, unsatisfied glances and seething with paranoid prospects. Nina's face is the glue of the series, but the glue won't dry or harden.

13.

But Jack's the action man, and it's vital that Jack is played by Kiefer Sutherland – a rather battered kid, an actor who is often assigned to villainy (the redneck Marine in A Few Good Men, the rapist Bob in Freeway). So now, with Jack the apparent protagonist, the hero, the possibility lingers that he could be a snake, or even a mole. His affair with Nina speaks to the subtext of personal betrayal – Senator Palmer's wife has a fascinating plan to undermine her husband even as he rises to power. Is Jack a mole or an ex-rat? If you saw the end of episode 23 you will know who the mole is – so there's no need for me to tell you. I will just say that when episode 23 ended in the US, there were grown men on their knees, pounding the floor, crying out: "I knew it!" At least, that's what my family tell me.

14.

LA – lies allowed, Los Angeles, lost again, lousy air, looking anxious – you can play the game for ever. But this is a show that made Angelenos proud that television knew all about its grim and banal recesses, its burnt-out wastelands where blossom trees wear trash in their hair. After more than 90 years of using LA as a backdrop, here's a work that makes the odious, endless, beguiling place fresh as morning. But a city map can help you follow the show.

15.

Senator Palmer – a black president? Why not – he grows so much in the day. And his dilemma (how to balance the search for power with family truths) is the mirror image of Jack being torn between job and family. That's why Teri's discovered pregnancy (interruption) is so potent and so...

16.

Music. One criticism. 24 never really establishes a unique music of its own – like "Runaway" in Michael Mann's classic Crime Story, another serial. Suggestion: the perfect serial music for 24 would be Philip Glass's rolling chord progressions, so inevitable, so subtle.

17.

Credit where it's due: Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran created 24, and with more than a dozen different writers and directors, they maintained its line, its tone and its audacity. Moral: TV is the art of the producer.

18.

Let it be said that, by chance alone, the show's view of the US security agencies coincided fruitfully with the slowly emergent understanding that the events of 11 September might have been identified and averted. So what does it mean that they weren't? That the people in charge are inept, or brilliant? We live in a world where even the good news is bad, if you shift the light in which you see it. And when you see 24 with the ads, why, it's easier to understand why someone might think of undermining the US.

19.

No one really gets tired – this is a new version of the American dream. Don't die: keep awake.

20.

A second series? Fox has said yes. And it really will be 24 again – in that the action will all take place in the course of a single day. Who returns? Who survives the first series?

21.

Episode 24 has a killing scene – done from the point of view of a dead-eyed CCTV camera – that is one of the great shots in film. When the killer gazes up at the camera it's as if those eyes have seen the back wall of our soul.

22.

I suspect the second series will be a dud. You can't repeat great new stories.

23.

But what 24 hasn't tried, or dared yet, is something those other LA stories do – I mean Robert Altman's Short Cuts and Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. In those films, the multitude of stories seem to reach to the horizon. No false tidiness keeps them all in place or harmony. It is up to us to realise that story is infinite and only made aware of fellowship by some plague of frogs. 24 could cut away even more – to the disparate, disconsolate traces of life in LA, to people voting for or against David Palmer, and being bored and vacant while sitting next to the frenzy of Jack Bauer.

24.

For 24's real subject is the continuum, and the curious contrast between lives that feel so empty they can't muster the hope to think, and those that can't find enough minutes in 24 hours to breathe.

The final episode of '24' is at 10pm on Sunday on BBC2 and BBC Choice