CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 11/21/08

No Time Out:
24's Howard Gordon

By jason davis

After a strike-enforced holiday, Jack Bauer returns for more real-time action in this Sunday's 24 TV movie. CS Weekly talks to writer Howard Gordon about the challenges of dramatizing every minute.

After graduating from Princeton in 1984, Howard Gordon and his writing partner Alex Gansa set off for L.A. with an eye toward writing television. Breaking in on Spencer for Hire before being staffed on Beauty and the Beast, the duo caught the attention of Chris Carter and soon became producers on The X-Files. After the dissolution of their partnership, Gordon remained with Mulder and Scully before brief tenures on both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel, bridged by his short-lived collaboration with future Heroes creator Tim Kring on ABC's Strange World. When writers Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran created the real-time drama 24, Gordon was one of their first hires and continues to shepherd the series as its seventh season gets underway with a two-hour prequel movie.

How did you become interested in screenwriting?
I have always been, almost to the exclusion of anything else, a television fan. I never came out here aspiring to be a movie writer. I loved television, and the idea of writing for it was something I always thought I would do from an early age.

When you first heard the concept of 24, what was your initial reaction to the real-time element?
I saw this pilot, and it was the best thing I've seen since X-Files. [On] X-Files, I always felt it was a championship basketball team and I was the fifth guy on the floor. I was so impressed with Chris [Carter], but also with Glen [Morgan], Jim [Wong], and with Darin Morgan and Vince [Gilligan]. I got to work with some brilliant, brilliant people, and I always felt like the journeyman among them. These guys were doing one great show after the next, and so I had a bit of a second-class citizen status there. Yet, on 24, right from the beginning, I connected. I felt real ownership in the show and real authorship, and Bob and Joel created this show that I felt was revolutionary in the storytelling, but it was a way of telling stories that really was comfortable for me. I took to it very easily…very intuitively.

What were the initial challenges you discovered in writing real-time teleplays?
Because it came to me naturally, the challenges were always trusting the illusion of real time. Even an otherwise mundane scene was somehow more interesting because we were in this amazing narrative experiment of real time. I thought this about X-Files, too—how many times can there be an alien encounter and Scully just misses it? How many times can she be looking away? Then, Glen and Jim, in the third episode, write ["Squeeze"], so suddenly it opens up. Similarly, with 24, we thought, maybe we'll get through 12 episodes, but what happens after breakfast eight hours from now? It just happened to be something that kept on going. Even after that first year, we said, "We did it, but there's no way that we can do it again." The studio said there's no way you can do it again, so it was this constant challenge, and the show has changed.

When you look at it, it really is told from the spine of this character, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), and, year to year, he's had these aspirations. The first year he wanted to get his family back together and his work had taken him away. He's had this affair. He wanted to repair his marriage and to deal with his troubled adolescent daughter. At the end of the year, he saves the day but he loses his wife. So, in the second year [he needs] forgiveness from his daughter, but also to forgive himself, and so, through the action of stopping this nuclear bomb, he gets to do that. When Audrey (Kim Raver) comes around in year four, it's a second chance at love and hanging up his six-gun and spurs and putting on a suit and falling in love. Of course, character is destiny, and this guy's not destined for love. It's always told from this aspirational angle of what Jack Bauer wants. I think after he lost Audrey after season five, the show has become harder and harder to write. The show has gotten exponentially harder to do. You've really been over so much of the character and so much of this character's story's been told that it's harder to find stories that are relatable. After he's lost his wife and he's lost the second love of his life and his daughter's forgiveness, there's not a lot he's left in the world, and he's this existentially bereft character who's dealing with only himself in the world.

There are no lighthearted 24 episodes in season seven is what you're telling me…
There are no lighthearted episodes in season seven [laughs]. It's interesting because the pace of the whole show has gotten accelerated. In a way, even in that first year we allowed it to breathe more. There are whole episodes where Jack doesn't even come in 'til the second act, and what happens is actually very understated and small. We have gotten to this place where we've all gotten revved up and very Jack-centric in the stories.

Was there any talk, after season one finished, of changing the format of the show for season two?
Yeah. The network actually asked us to experiment, and Joel and Mike [Loceff] wrote a story that took place in the course of a single day. I think they did it half-heartedly, and I think it was really to illustrate, more to themselves than to the studio, that the premise really was real time. That's what the promise of the show is. Similarly, we promised in the first year not to have cliffhangers. It was a hollow promise and one we never had any intention of carrying out, but the conventional wisdom of the time was cliffhangers are alienating—no one wants to be left hanging.

To what extent do you plot the season at the start of the year?
Zero. I always have said that we're lucky to know where we're going to begin, let alone where we're going to end. Generally speaking, if you've planted enough narrative seeds and understand the emotional underpinnings of the show, you have some idea of how it might conclude. [What] gives it this energy is the improvisation. We don't plan it out, and that accounts for some of the improbable twists that we wind up taking—it keeps it fresh and interesting.

It also keeps the actors from playing the result…
Absolutely! If the actors know where they're going, they'll play to it and it'll get all fucked up.

So Gregory Itzen [who played President Charles Logan] couldn't be all conniving and evil until he got the script saying that he was conniving and evil.
Exactly. Then you have to trust us that we have actually back-filled it all in a sensible enough fashion.

Is that the case, do you actually look back at the preceding episodes?
Oh, God, yeah. We go through like archivists. If it's a good enough place to go, we will absolutely contort ourselves and maybe even twist the internal logic of what we've seen to make something good pay off.

Can you describe the process of breaking an episode and writing the script?
It's one long story with cliffhangers and digressions and chapters, but the process is painstaking. Sometimes, it's what's the premise of the episode? What happens if this happens? And sometimes, it's just slogging through the mud continuing the story that came before. The good and the bad news of this is that you are bound by what came before and limited sometimes by what you know has to come after, so there's only so far you can go. The process is not unlike X-Files in that it's difficult to find something interesting in real time. What can happen in this very limited timeframe that's interesting? That's the biggest challenge. Also, people don't change very often in the course of a single day. They certainly don't change much hour to hour. The dramatic epiphanies that most shows rely on—the so-called arc of the character—is almost invisible in our show, and so it's really kind of endowing "the now" with significance.

In season six, it seemed like you were trying to break up the season more than in previous years—for example, the nuclear threat is averted seven hours before the season ends. Was that in aid of making the narrative less predictable?
It wasn't as conscious as that. It just had to happen based on the premise that we came up with. No one seamed to realize that if Jack started in China, it would take three-quarters of the season to get him back to L.A. So, certain things that had to happen to accommodate the corner we'd painted ourselves into at the end of season five. Jack had to be traded while the shit had already hit the fan, and so it did create a catch-up mode that was really out of sync and atypical for what we usually do on 24. I was pretty happy with it. It was very much a story that embraced Jack's sacrifice and summed up all we had seen to that moment.

How did the strike affect your plans for season seven?
It delayed them and, in a crazy way, the show benefited from it. Finding the right story for season seven took two false starts, so we really got off in a wrong-footed way. We completed eight episodes before the strike hit, and it was probably a good time to take a breather and take stock of where we were. When we came back, the network ordered this prequel [to season seven], which, I think, has come out pretty good. I didn't want to do it, and I resisted as long as I could. They forced my hand, and I'm glad they did, because I think it is going to ground what we've got emotionally. It's actually a very good run up to the season proper.

Is there anything you can tell me about it?
It takes place in Africa. Looking at the show strictly from Jack's emotional perspective, he's on the cliff at the end of last year. It's a very "to be or not to be." This year, he starts out on trial, answering to Congress about his conduct—torture, illegal detentions, all the things that the show itself got brought to task for by the media. Between that cliff moment and the start of this year, there was a bridge missing emotionally. How did Jack get from there to here? The prequel answers that.

What do you look for in hiring writers for 24?
As it turns out, I look for age and experience.

You seem to have a lot of former showrunners on staff.

The show has a very high degree of difficulty. I know everybody always says that about their show, but this does. I do tend to hire people I know and people I know can do the job, so a lot of people here now are people I've worked with before. I've worked with everyone here: David Fury, Manny Coto, Alex Gansa. It's a real treat to hire people whom you admire so much.

What advice would you give a writer just starting out in TV?
Keep writing. Be persistent. Be hard on yourself. That's the best advice I'd give anybody. People who are too pleased with their work are not looking at themselves hard enough.

Jason Davis has been the DVD Manager for CS Weekly, a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.



24 courtesy 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

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