Gripping but controversial, we look back on 24, one of the 21st century's landmark TV shows

IF ANY one show has represented the post-9/11 era on television, it is 24, the American TV drama that has offered counterterrorism as entertainment for nine years.

• Jack Bauer interviews Serb warlord Victor Drazen (Dennis Hopper) in season 1. Picture: Complimentary

On 24, torture saves lives. On 24, phones are tapped, plots are disrupted, terrorists are killed, and one man, Jack Bauer, will stop at nothing to protect the American people. For viewers, 24 is part sum of all fears, part wish fulfilment in an age of shadowy enemies.

For the show's creators, Fox, however, its trademark clock is about to stop ticking. Nearly a decade after the 11 September, 2001, attacks that so heavily influenced people's perceptions of the show, the company is planning to cancel it. The current season, its eighth, will be its last.

In an interview early this month, the Fox network's entertainment president, Kevin Reilly, said: "It's a hard decision for all involved."

The show first captured America's attention in late 2001. The first season, which involved the explosion of a passenger plane and an assassination attempt on the president, entered production well before the attacks on the World Trade Centre and elsewhere, but had its premiere eight weeks afterwards. At the time, a review in The New York Times noted the "deadly convergence between real life and Hollywood fantasy".

After this season's finale next month, 24 will live on, possibly as a feature film, and surely in classrooms and in textbooks. The series enlivened the country's political discourse, partly because it brought to life the ticking time-bomb threat that haunted the Dick Cheney faction of the Bush administration in the years after 11 September.

Walter Gary Sharp, an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University who taught the course "The Law of 24" in 2007-8, says 24 has acted as "a tool to foster debate to help the public and the government of all nations to consider the proper limits on democracies in their efforts to combat terrorism".

The character of Bauer, a secret agent played by Kiefer Sutherland, became a stand-in for a stop-at-nothing approach to counterterrorism, and his tactics were evoked by Bush administration officials, Republican presidential candidates and even a justice of the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia.

John Yoo, who helped shape the Bush administration's interrogation techniques as a Justice Department lawyer, asked in a 2006 book, "What if, as the popular Fox television programme 24 recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon in an American city. Should it be illegal for the president to use harsh interrogation short of torture to elicit this information?"

But for the same reasons the show found fans in Bush-era Washington, it has also faced severe scrutiny for its depictions of torture.

"On some level 24 is just a big ole' ad for torture," says David Danzig, a deputy programme director of campaign group Human Rights First. "Those of us who watch the show a lot – and there are tens of millions of us who do – know exactly what is going to happen as soon as Bauer starts to beat a suspect up. He is going to talk."

The torture sequences are misleading, Danzig says, because they contribute to a "pervasive myth" that torture was effective. He recalls that Gary Solis, former director of West Point's law of war programme, once called 24 "one of the biggest problems" in his classroom.

In an e-mail message earlier this month, Solis wrote that when he would preach battlefield restraint in class, a "not infrequent cadet response" would be something to the effect of "Yeah? Well, did you see Jack Bauer last night? He shot a prisoner right in the knee, and that dude talked."

The cadets knew right from wrong, and the comments were usually made with a grin, Solis says. Still, 24 presented a conundrum for the law of war professors, some of whom personally enjoyed the show but wished the torture scenes could be toned down if not eliminated altogether.

Similarly, other officials have said that 24 and other shows influenced the behaviour of interrogators at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer at Guantanamo, told a fellow lawyer that Bauer "gave people lots of ideas," according to Jane Mayer's 2008 book, The Dark Side.

Danzig's group, Human Rights First, met with the 24 producers in 2006 and introduced them to real-life interrogators in 2009. He noted the series did evolve – Jack Bauer stood trial in season seven for his torturous actions – and said that "there is now a little more sensitivity toward the portrayal of torture."

Still, he adds, "the take-home message" has not changed. While speaking to television writers in January, actor Sutherland said of the torture sequences: "It's a television show. We're not telling you to try this at home."

He also denied claims of a political slant to 24. "One of the things that I was always so unbelievably proud of in our show is that you could have it being discussed by former President Bill Clinton and Rush Limbaugh at the same time, both using it and citing it to justify their points of view," he says. "That, to me, was incredibly balanced."

For years, 24 regularly drew in audiences of ten million to 14 million viewers, and it became a bona fide hit on DVD, partly thanks to its groundbreaking real-time format. As the first serious serialised show of the decade, 24 reaffirmed that viewers would follow a complex plot for an entire season, setting the stage for dramas such as Lost.

Much of the credit can be given to Bauer's character, the archetypal hero of the counterterrorism age. "Everyone loves a man of action, someone larger than life, like John Wayne, a hero that saves the day regardless of the personal sacrifice," says Sharp, the law professor, "and Jack Bauer saves the day every season, if not every episode."

Like many mature series, though, 24 has seen its ratings eroded. So far this season it has averaged 11.5 million viewers. Its impending cancellation, which was first reported in early March by TV trade publications, will be announced in the coming days, according to a person associated with the show, although Fox was declining to comment. Although NBC reportedly contemplated picking up the show, it has opted not to.

A 24 movie script is in development, although a film is not guaranteed. Sutherland said in a recent interview that the movie would be a "two-hour representation of a 24-hour day." For Jack Bauer, there is always a ticking time bomb to defuse.