---
title: "Showrunner Howard Gordon says pulling 24 was considered after 9/11, as the Jack Bauer drama turns 25"
url: https://badiyaa.com/24-at-25-howard-gordon-jack-bauer/
published: 2026-11-08T12:12:00+00:00
modified: 2026-11-08T12:12:00+00:00
section: Entertainment
publisher: Badiyaa
---

# Showrunner Howard Gordon says pulling 24 was considered after 9/11, as the Jack Bauer drama turns 25

The Fox thriller's premiere slipped a week to November 6, 2001, and lost a plane-bomb scene; it went on to collect 20 Emmys from 68 nominations.

Twenty-five years after Jack Bauer’s first ticking hour, showrunner Howard Gordon says the show’s survival was briefly in question. “I don’t think I’m overstating when I say that there was consideration to pull the show,” he told the Television Academy in an interview published on the anniversary, November 6.

The reason was the date. *24* had been set to premiere on October 30, 2001, and its pilot ended with a mercenary played by Mia Kirshner blowing up a commercial airliner. After the September 11 attacks, that ending was cut and the debut moved back a week, to November 6. Only four episodes had been shot.

Gordon said “the overall thought was that the audience would want either ‘blue sky shows’ or comedy.” He added a qualifier worth keeping: “I’m not sure how far the conversation got, but there was a real concern.”

The worry proved misplaced. Nearly 12 million people watched that first episode, in a season of comfort viewing led by *Friends* and *Frasier*. Fox had introduced the show the previous May as one of just two new dramas. The other, the soap *Pasadena*, had ended its run four days before *24* arrived.

## A showrunner who almost was not there

Gordon, a veteran of *The X-Files*, joined after his own pilot lost its place on the schedule. Fox entertainment president Gail Berman wanted him alongside creators Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran. He watched the pilot that night and told her, “You made the [right] choice, because I am so completely blown away by 24.”

He called the real-time format “a 24/7, 52-week-a-year enterprise,” which also explains the infamous second-season subplot, when Kim Bauer met a cougar in the woods. The writers needed Elisha Cuthbert’s character off camera for several episodes. It “just may not have been our finest moment,” Gordon said, then offered the defense every showrunner keeps handy: “Everything couldn’t be a perfect 10.”

## What the record shows

The Television Academy’s database lists 68 nominations and 20 Emmys for the series. By our count of that same list, 2006 alone produced 12 nominations and five wins, a quarter of the show’s lifetime Emmy haul, including Outstanding Drama Series and a lead actor trophy for Kiefer Sutherland after four straight losses in that category.

- Episodes: 204 across nine seasons, including the 12-part 2014 revival *Live Another Day*

- Win rate: 20 of 68, or about 29 percent

- Peak season for awards: season five, which opened by killing off David Palmer

Gordon credited that season’s run to nerve and to Gregory Itzin and Jean Smart as the first couple. “It was like a really magical season,” he said. He was blunter about the next one, which “didn’t have the same luck.”

The format’s rules also defeated the long-discussed movie. A feature could not reproduce a story told over 24 hours, Gordon argued, and the money on offer fell short. “So in some ways, a two-hour movie is almost by definition a reductive version of it,” he said. The script, as he put it, “was put in the dustbin. But it was really good!”

## Further reading

- [Wikipedia: 24 (TV series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_(TV_series))

*Image: Kevin Payravi, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons*

*This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*