25 years later, Howard Gordon reflects on '24'

"24" launched 25 years ago this month, while that world-famous digital countdown clock stopped beeping in May 2010. Yes, there was a 2014 continuation ("Live another Day") then a 2017 spinoff, but by then, "24's" momentous time had come and gone. That "24" whatever-it-takes worldview, that cathartic fury, which had helped shape American culture — and some argued U.S. policy — in the months and years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, is now part of TV history.

(2026 marks another milestone for "24 ": Twenty years ago, it became the last broadcast network series to win the Emmy for outstanding drama.)

On the occasion of the 25th, Newsday spoke with Roslyn native Howard Gordon — the creative force behind the Fox hit conceived by Joel Surnow and Bob Cochran and who is now showrunner of Netflix's "The Beast in Me" which goes into production on a second season this week:

Your early involvement with "24" is well-known — you had a pilot for Fox that didn't go forward, then Fox asked you to join this new show as a writer. Then 9/11 happens. How did that impact your approach to the show?

That 9/11 happened at the very beginning of its run almost instantly changed the tenor of what the story of a counterterrorism agent meant, and also how the audience would inevitably watch this show. Jack Bauer [Kiefer Sutherland] was cut from a very specific kind of cloth — the lineage of Clint Eastwood, Gary Cooper, Charles Bronson and the noir character that came after [World War II], or the soldier who was damaged, came back, then tried to impose some sort of order on an otherwise chaotic or corrupt world.

The show then became firmly — some argued at the time too firmly — embedded in the zeitgeist?

Jack was this rugged loner with an unshakeable, unwavering moral compass — and the choices were not about making a right or wrong choice, but the least of two bad choices. That was the secret of the show — somebody doing these hard, superficially immoral things for the greater good. ... [At the time the country] was exercising American power in the form of two wars abroad that included Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, and there was a rise in Islamophobia. The show got weighted and freighted with that too. [But] Jack certainly became scarred in a way where he didn't do those hard things without a steep personal and psychic price. That became the North Star for the show which in many ways was a tragedy.

You found yourself in the middle of a lot of debates, including the show's depiction of torture. A general at West Point, for example, complained that the show was affecting how interrogation techniques were taught there?

In terms of what responsibility you have as a storyteller, you do have to recognize that there is a population of people who are going to look at this and not distance themselves from the fact that it is entertainment. Ultimately, this is a network television show, not an instruction manual for interrogation [but] it leads one to wonder about a system that empowers interrogators who are not able to make that distinction.

Let's settle this question once and for all — what happened to Jack? The last time we saw him, he'd turned himself over to the Russians?

I did a pilot with ['24' and 'Homeland' producer] Chip Johannessen for a potential comeback in which Jack has been in a gulag for some period of time, and the Russian/Ukraine war was the backdrop for our story. But the one thing we're so committed to not doing is just to have it come back for the sake of coming back. The show was so specific to its tone and its time [but] I have ideas. Jack has aged as I have aged and that idea of being kind of at the end of your tenure — your power — where all you've really got is some wisdom. That idea of Jack as an older man is interesting to me and I know it is to Kiefer. I think he's game for the right idea.