Something is missing from the New York Times list of the best 100 television shows of this century.
The immediate difficulty with offering a critique of the New York Times list of the best 100 television shows of this century is the immensity of the task of having an informed opinion not only on the 100 series on the list, quite a few of which ran for hundreds of episodes, but also on a sufficient number of other shows to be able adequately to assess what was left off. Out of the 100 series on the list, I watched at least a full season of 21 of them, including nine of the top 20. Maybe half of the other 79 are shows I know enough about to describe something of the premise and perhaps name or at least picture some of the cast.
There are also some apples and oranges issues with comparing scripted shows with Anthony Bourdain’s travelogues or reality and competition TV such as Survivor or The Great British Baking Show, or including high-quality miniseries such as Band of Brothers and The Queen’s Gambit alongside shows that ran for years. As Dan Foster notes, the rankings of those shows appear to make sense only if they are downgraded for not lasting as long as shows that aired for nearly or beyond a decade. Foreign television was mostly but not entirely excluded, leaving room for British productions such as Downton Abbey, The Crown, and the British original of The Office.
On balance, it’s a fairly solid list, even with the inevitable quibbles and biases. I was gratified at the inclusion of favorites such as Andor, The Americans, Shogun, and Better Call Saul. By contrast, there are valid reasons why important milestone shows such as American Idol or The Apprentice didn’t make the cut. But one really conspicuous omission jumped out at me: 24.
The anti-terrorism adventures of Jack Bauer and the Counter-Terrorism Unit could not have more perfectly captured the zeitgeist in the years after its debut in November 2001, which literally opened with an airliner blown out of the sky by a terrorist. It ran for over 200 episodes, only finally wrapping up in 2014. The show won awards (including an Emmy for best dramatic series) and spawned all manner of moral debates. Which is what good, timely television dramas are supposed to do.
Along the way, 24 rewrote the book for how suspenseful, intense, action-packed, and addictive a show of its kind could be. If the show’s original conceit — 24-episode seasons covering a single 24-hour time period in which “events occur in real time” — sometimes forced it into absurdities, it also kept the adrenaline flowing. If you were streaming the show (or, back in the day, watching it on DVD), it was nearly impossible to stop with one episode, and often hard to sleep after watching a few in a row. But the omnipresent ticking clock and the envelope-pushing terror threats (loose nuclear warheads, biological and chemical weapons, hostage situations, political assassinations, electromagnetic pulse weapons, you name it) kept viewers on the edge of their seats like almost nothing else today outside of the show’s spiritual successor, the Israeli drama Fauda. Meanwhile, Kiefer Sutherland’s performance gave us one of TV’s most compelling and tortured action heroes, as Bauer got progressively hardened and traumatized by his experiences, yet never stopped rising to the moment. There were many other fine performances from the revolving supporting cast, and many moments that made you stop in your tracks.
Sure, 24 could shatter the audience’s suspension of disbelief at times, and the show’s late-season twists and subplots got more ridiculous over time. The great humor writer Dave Barry, who was a devoted fan of the show, got immense comedic mileage out of live-blogging each episode with gags about porous perimeters, the Mole Room, apparently bottomless wells of frogmen, the terrorist who was defeated by a coffee table, and DAMMIT CHLOE I NEED TO KNOW WHERE THE BOMB IS. But questionable tropes and shaky later seasons are hardly unknown to other entrants on the list. (I enjoy The Diplomat, but c’mon.) And the first season of 24 in particular was incredibly tight and tense all the way to its shocking ending.
It’s hard to overcome the suspicion that 24 was left off the Times list because it just seems so politically incorrect. It was widely associated with Bush-era anti-terror policies, especially coercive interrogations. It speaks to a period that already feels like history. Instead of cartoon Bond villains, Jack Bauer most frequently faced off against Islamic radicals, the Russians, and the Chinese (although his extensive enemies list also ranged from corrupt American politicians, radicalized British anti-terror experts, and his own CTU colleagues to Serbian extremists and African warlords). If anything, the biggest charge laid against 24 at the time was that it felt so real that it made people buy into Jack Bauer’s view of the world. Of course, almost any show that involves battling criminals, terrorists, or foreign tyrannies will be at least a bit right-coded, but it’s easier for left-leaning TV critics to embrace the more anguished and hand-wringing terror-fighters of Homeland.
That’s ironic, because at the time, Fox went out of its way to make one of the show’s defining heroes a black president, David Palmer (memorably portrayed by Dennis Haysbert), who was rather obviously a Democrat. Years before anyone heard of Barack Obama, this was still a statement, and Palmer did his part to make Obama seem more thinkable for some Americans. That, too, speaks to the breadth and depth of 24’s legacy.