24: Longest Day Enters The Hardest Season

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For no particular reason, except possibly to torture himself, Robert Cochran keeps a neatly typed story/character grid from the first season of "24", the real-time television spy thriller he and Joel Surnow created four years ago, pinned to the bulletin board of his otherwise memento-free office. It's a comprehensive episode-by-episode cheat sheet of the actions and interactions of every major character, the pivotal plot points, the timing of every twist.

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Kiefer Sutherland is the only '24' cast member returning full time for the fourth season. Get Show History, Talk with Fans

It was all there, six episodes' worth, meticulously planned before the pilot was even broadcast: every exploding, collapsing, double-crossing, fate-of-the-nation, assassination-plot cliffhanger that would soon turn "24" into the most talked-about television show of 2001.

Considering the complexities of the plots, and the fact that each season's 24 hourlong episodes (with a ticking countdown clock on screen at all times) sketch out a single crisis-filled day in the life of the nation, a precise outline would seem indispensable. Except, it didn't work out that way.

"That was the furthest ahead we were ever able to plan," Mr. Cochran says, wistfully, walking over to the first-season grid, touching it as if it were some kind of long-lost relic. "We were able to plan ahead maybe five or six episodes a couple of more times that season. In the second season, maybe three or four."

And this year?

He looks a little embarrassed. "This year, I would say ... none."

Hard as it is to believe - and Mr. Cochran says no one from the outside ever believes it - the writers of "24" are pretty much making it up as they go along, this year more than ever. And when the fourth season debuts on Fox on Jan. 9 (it then moves to a new Monday-night time slot), they will be doing it in the midst of wholesale cast changes, embarking on dramatically new story lines and further testing the loyalty of an audience that has already seen practically every major character - including Agent Jack Bauer, the show's world-weary centerpiece played by Kiefer Sutherland - disgraced, compromised, tortured and, in some cases, killed.

Missing from the cast when the new season begins will be Dennis Haysbert, who played the noble but undermined President David Palmer; Elisha Cuthbert as Kim, Jack Bauer's constantly-in-jeopardy daughter; Carlos Bernard as Counterterrorism Unit station chief Tony Almeida, who ended last season being arrested for treason; Reiko Aylesworth as Michelle Dessler, a spy; and Almeida's wife, who spent much of last season assuming she was about to die from a terrorist-disseminated virus. In fact, besides Mr. Sutherland, only one member of last season's cast will return (though many of the departed will make brief appearances over the course of the season). Stepping into the breach will be William Devane, Shohreh Aghdashloo - nominated for an Oscar for her performance in "House of Sand and Fog" - and a number of other new faces.

"We love the characters and we love the actors, but we just ran out of things for them to do under the configuration we had set up," Mr. Cochran says, explaining why he and Mr. Surnow felt such drastic changes were necessary. "I'm not sure the network was thrilled, but we'd really put the characters in positions where there was no place to go with them."

For the record, the network was not thrilled. "I did have doubts, of course - anyone would," says Gail Berman, Fox's president of entertainment, when asked how she initially reacted to the idea of revamping one of her network's highest-profile shows. "But '24' is just a different animal. It has an audience that has come to expect the unexpected."

Jolting that audience has been the show's trademark since the first season ended with the death of a major character, Jack Bauer's wife, murdered by his ex-girlfriend who, oh yeah, also turned out to be a rogue East German spy. In the second season, only halfway through, there was a nuclear explosion in the California desert, leading to riots and almost to full-scale war. Last year's 24-hour story line included, in addition to sundry prison breaks, point-blank shootings and extortion plots, the agonizing deaths of innocent hotel guests exposed to a mutated virus and Agent Bauer racing to stop terrorists from poisoning the city of Los Angeles while, incidentally, he was also fighting through heroin withdrawal. That makes for a pretty long day.

Which is why, when the fourth season - set 18 months after last season's traumas - begins, Mr. Sutherland's character is trying to lead a less harrowing life. Having lost his job and put his drug problems behind him, he's working as a consultant for the Defense Department and starting a new romantic relationship, with the Defense Secretary's married daughter, played by Kim Raver. But inevitably he gets drawn back into the counterterrorism maelstrom and once again finds himself facing a day in which lives will be at stake, terrible things will happen and naps will not be an option.

Beyond the existence of terrorist sleeper cells in America, Mr. Cochran and Mr. Surnow won't talk much about future story lines - partly because they don't want to spoil the surprise, partly because they still don't know how things are going to play out. "Every season is like a brand-new jigsaw puzzle," Mr. Cochran says, trying to explain how it is that, four seasons in, the seven-person writing staff still can't manage to work out the plot more than a week or two in advance. "If we could figure out what the magic formula is, we'd be thrilled. But we haven't been able to do that."

"Sometimes," he humbly says, "it's just hard to think of good stuff. And everything on this show affects everything else. If I'm sitting at my word processor and come up with what I think is a great idea for a character, then I run next door and find out that maybe they've just killed that character. So now I have to go to that writer and say, 'No, don't kill that guy. I need him.' Well, now that other episode is completely screwed up. So we have to sit down and rethink that other episode and if part of it is already shot, we have big problems.

"So we go back, tear things apart and put them together in way that will accommodate what I want to do in the next episode, and by then we're only a week away from shooting. Then, of course, the production people will come in and say, 'We can't do this' for some technical reason. So we tear it apart again. By the time we do all that, we're lucky to make it."

Characters often get painted into corners, and sometimes, the writers freely admit, the last-second solutions are less than elegant. In the first season, Agent Bauer's wife (whom the writers often refer to as "that poor woman") suffered a convenient bout of amnesia to keep her from sharing critical details with other characters. And in the second season, in order to occupy Kim Bauer, the peril-prone daughter, for a few episodes, the writers had her stuck in a hunter's snare trap and stalked by a cougar.

"Sometimes the show runs strictly on adrenaline and velocity," says Howard Gordon, who shares executive producer credits with Mr. Cochran and Mr. Surnow. "Our job is to make sure the train is moving fast enough so that, even if there's a hole in the track, it'll keep going.

And all of that, Mr. Gordon believes, hinges on Mr. Sutherland's portrayal of Jack Bauer, an intense and often grim character constantly forced to make horrible choices - sometimes including the killing of innocent bystanders - to save lives and protect the people he cares about.

"Jack is this really tragic character," Mr. Gordon says. "He's really the walking damned. He can't have the life the rest of us have. He kind of bleeds for our sins."

It hasn't been all that easy for Mr. Sutherland either. "Season one was difficult," the actor acknowledges. "It was an act of faith. And after making 48 films, you end up a little low in the faith department. There were so many things being done at the last minute, it kind of scared me. But now I trust that they'll work things out." That includes the radical changes in the cast, the individual members of which - himself included - he considers less important than the show's innovative format.

"The format could go on forever," he says. "They could make it about a firefighter's worst day. Or someone in the Army. Or a woman who's pregnant, and her car has broken down."

Of course, he doesn't know whether the producers would ever consider anything like that. But then again, neither do they.