If you’re anything like me, your first thought upon hearing Donald Trump argue in favour of torture last week was probably, “Wow, I bet Donald Trump watches a lot of 24.”

It stacks up. After all, Trump is a man so enamoured with television that his advisers apparently have to pry him away from it, plus his reported method of watching films involves fast-forwarding through exposition to get to the action scenes. Of course he’s a 24 fan. 24 is nothing but action. And, on 24, torture always works.

Always. Watch 24 for long enough, and you’ll know when it’s coming. Jack Bauer will drop his head with a mixture of relish and regret, and threaten to force-feed a towel to a suspect. Or threaten to kill their family. Or threaten to gouge out their eyeball with a knife. Or electrocute them with lamp wires. Or hold a plastic bag over their airway, like he did to his brother back in season six. Jack isn’t the only torturer on 24 – pretty much everyone at one point or another has tortured, been tortured or both – but it’s always effective.

This is because 24 is fiction. It’s a shark. It has to keep moving forward or else it dies, and the torture scenes are a byproduct of that. Say there’s a bomb that Jack Bauer needs to locate. The show is so fidgety and propulsive that a realistic (and more successful) method of information extraction – creating a rapport with the suspect and gradually gaining their respect – would kill it dead. Narratively speaking, it’s much easier to lash a guy to a chair, hold a gun to his wife’s head and get an answer out of him before the next commercial break.

This did not go unnoticed. In 2007 – the year Jack tried to suffocate his brother – high-ranking members of the military visited the 24 producers and criticized its reliance on torture as a storytelling device. Public condemnation of treatment in Guantánamo Bay still ringing in his ears, US army Brig Gen Patrick Finnegan claimed that actual soldiers saw 24 as a justification of torture. “The kids see it, and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about 24?’” he told the New Yorker. “The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.”



The following season was a direct, if convoluted, response to that. It whipped the action across the country, from Los Angeles to Washington, so that Jack Bauer could stand trial for his relentlessly unlawful interrogation techniques. However, this was slightly undermined by a later episode in which Jack was prevented from torturing a suspect and, as a result, terrorists invaded the White House.

Since then, in its eighth season and the London-set Live Another Day miniseries, 24 attempted to be slightly more responsible in its attitudes towards torture. In simplistic 24 terms, this meant that there was still loads of torture, but it was only really the baddies who did it. And, without wanting to spoil things too much, this trend continues in the upcoming Jack-less 24: Legacy series. Torture happens very, very early on in the series, but our new hero keeps his hands clean. For now.

Because who knows how the season will play out? Now that the president of America has given torture his two-thumbs-up seal of approval, 24 has license to fall back into the bad ways of old. Perhaps the day will once again be saved by a burst of clench-jawed patriotic waterboarding. It’d be a step backwards, but at least it’d be keeping with the times.

Maybe President Trump should take note of a story told to PRI by a former US army interrogator in 2014. While questioning an Iraqi detainee, the interrogator found that the usual methods – screaming, throwing chairs, flipping tables – fell short. The detainee gave up his information in the end, but only by bonding with the interrogator over something they had in common: a shared love of 24.