24’s Joel Surnow & Robert Cochran

October 2006

By Mansha Daswani

When 24 launched on FOX in 2001, few thought the
high-concept show—where the entire season plays out over the course of
just one day—would last its entire run, let alone return for a second
season. The network continued to believe in the show and this year, five
seasons in, that faith paid off, with 24 picking up five Emmy Awards, including best drama, best actor for
Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, and best director for Jon Cassar. Creators
Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran speak to World Screen about the challenges and
rewards of producing what has been described as television’s most thrilling
show.

WS: What has kept the series fresh season after season?

SURNOW: We start from scratch each year. We don’t have to
conform to what a lot of TV shows do, which is basically tell the same story
over and over again. We are constantly challenged each season with a new set of
characters and a new story line. It really is difficult. We find ourselves
tearing our hair out at the beginning of every season just trying to get this
thing to have the right foundation and the right elements to keep it working
for an entire 24-episode season. Also, there’s the tightrope act of, when you
do recast each year, is this cast going to work? Do we have chemistry?

WS: Why do you think this past season in particular did
so well?

COCHRAN: It might be just
momentum. After a while, you get a bigger audience every year. Law &
Order had a similar run; they were
respected in the first few years but they didn’t really grab the attention of
the TV world until they had been on for a few seasons. And it may be that
people had to get used to the format.

WS: The killing off of major characters also caused
quite a few headlines this year.

SURNOW: We always do it for a real reason, not for the sake
of being shocking. If a bunch of people we don’t know die in the course of the
show, you don’t really feel it. But when Jack’s wife died or when Edgar died,
that makes us care more about our main characters. That’s what our viewers want
to see.

COCHRAN: Our feeling is, if we kill someone and nobody is
upset, then we killed the wrong person. You want the audience to react with
some emotion, with a sense of loss. One of the themes of the show is the price
we pay for the fight we’re in right now, and if the audience doesn’t feel that
price, along with the characters, then it doesn’t mean much. As you know, we’ve
killed an awful lot of people off!

WS: There was also controversy over some of your story
lines, like Jack Bauer’s use of torture. Has the network ever asked you to tone
things down?

COCHRAN: The only time was at the end of the first year
when we felt that it was best for the show for Jack’s wife, his pregnant wife,
to be murdered. When we first brought that up to the network, their reaction
was, that’s not going to happen. But we kept after it and after a few days they
began to feel as we did. It wasn’t that we wanted to make things as wretched as
possible, but if you look at the season, Jack saved his daughter, he saved the
president, he caught all the bad guys, and if on top of that he walked away
into the sunset with his family, the tone of our show would have been violated,
there would have been something very dishonest and very tacky and unfitting
about that ending. Jack’s got to pay a price for the fight. The one thing he
wasn’t able to save was his wife. Looking back at it, that was a signature
moment of the show. There might have been some people who didn’t want to watch
anymore [laughs], but for people who stuck with the show, that was the message,
that anything could happen.

WS: Given the war on terror, are you ever concerned
that the story lines may be too close for comfort for audiences?

SURNOW: It’s no more terrifying than what they see on the
news. Hopefully there’s a sense of wish fulfillment in the fact that Jack
always does end up getting the bad guy.

COCHRAN: The world we live in now unfortunately provides
almost an unlimited amount of dramatic situations. We don’t consciously try to
rip things out of the headlines, nor do we try to anticipate headlines. But in
the nature of things we’re going to tread on territory that’s being talked
about or things that happened in real life.

WS: Can you talk about some of the visual tricks used
to build the tension in the show?

SURNOW: That’s a function of our incredible crew, starting
with our director, Jon Cassar. One of the things that comes from the top down
is that we want it to feel real. We want to feel like we’re eye level with
people and we’re not doing things out of people’s point of view. The whole
process of the show is to experience the suspense and the tension, and that’s
always from a person’s point of view, usually Jack’s. That way you don’t see a
lot of high angles looking down on people and taking you out of the immediacy
of the moment.

WS: What are the greatest challenges in producing the
show?

SURNOW: The challenge is always the story. We don’t want
to have to be outrageous just to be different.

COCHRAN: Because we have done it several times, in the back
of our minds there’s some confidence that we can do it again. But in terms of
the actual mechanics of it, it certainly hasn’t gotten any easier, because
every year we tend to use up a fair amount of incidents. We can’t kidnap [Jack
Bauer’s] family again. We can’t fake his death again. Those ideas get used up.
We just have to think of new things every year.

WS: The success of 24 has led in part to the crop of serialized dramas
on the air this fall. Are you concerned about viewer burnout?

SURNOW: I keep hearing that most of [the serialized dramas] over the past couple of years have not been successful. There’s not a lot of
people who know how to do this. This is a very specific type of writing. What I
keep hearing now as we’re going out into the development season is that [the
networks] want more stand-alone shows because they’ve been having lots of
problems with the serialized format.

COCHRAN: I’ve always felt that a series works or doesn’t
work almost always not because of the concept but because of how it’s carried
out. [Viewers] are not going to watch a show because it’s serialized and they’re
not going to not watch it because it’s serialized. There are people who say, I
don’t want to get caught up in something where if I miss an episode or two, I’ll
get lost. Generally speaking, despite that one exception, people watch the
series because it entertains them every time they turn it on, and not because
of the format. So some of these shows will work, some won’t. People may draw
big grand lessons from that, but I think the only lesson you can draw is that
if a show works, people will watch it.

WS: Were you surprised by the tremendous international
response?

SURNOW: Our international audience is as important as our
domestic market. It’s really important to us that our fans are still liking the
show overseas. And just from the selfish point of view, it helps support the
show financially because it’s expensive to make. The more revenue we can get in
from around the world, the better the production value of the show.

WS: Given audiences’ various new sources of
entertainment, does that change the way you produce television?

SURNOW: You’re always impacted by the fact that people
have hundreds of choices on TV—how do you poke your nose out above the
pack? That’s why we have those 24
moments, those outrageous moments that happen over the course of the show that
hopefully get people talking. Jack Bauer kills people in cold blood—I
think that kind of storytelling is exactly what you have to do in today’s marketplace.

COCHRAN: You do get the feeling that all television shows,
or most of them, are more fast-paced now than they used to be. Even we’re more
fast-paced now than we were. Those things pervade the in-dustry as a whole and
they get in our DNA as you’re writing or producing. I don’t think it’s a
conscious reaction to what’s going on, but you certainly can’t afford to bore
anybody and you better get on with the story pretty quickly and you better come
up with twists and turns of whatever kind that keep people watching. We don’t
say to ourselves, there’s a lot of two-minute episodes on cell phones and iPods
out there, we gotta compete with that. But it enters into the way things are
done in a more subtle way.

WS: Do you have time for other projects?

SURNOW: This is a full-time gig for right now. We are
trying to get the 24 movie
launched. We’re going to try and write that this year.

COCHRAN: We’re trying to branch out and maybe do another
show or two. We don’t want to get too far away from what’s worked for us. On
the other hand, you’re not going to see 24: Miami or 24: New York. That won’t happen! And I promise you won’t see
another real-time show, at least not from us. They’re just too hard to do! But
we won’t stray too far from the thriller mood and tone.

WS: Is there anything you can share about the upcoming
season of 24?

SURNOW: We will be dealing in the real world of terrorism
in a way that we have never up until now. It will probably be the most
controversial season we’ve had.