A new season of 24 could be on screens in the near future, but it's looking like a near-total reinvention of the action-adventure series that fans have watched in the past.
Fox is working with 24 producers Howard Gordon and Brian Grazer on an American Crime Story-style anthology series as a way to extend the franchise beyond Kiefer Sutherland's super-agent Jack Bauer and its counter-terrorism storylines.
According to Deadline, Howard Gordon and Jeremy Doner will pen a pilot script that takes advantage of the 24-hour time clock for a brand new leading character — a female prosecutor.
This criminal justice twist on the 24 format would follow the prosecutor in real-time as she unravels a conspiracy to execute a potentially innocent death-row inmate, who she unwittingly had a hand in putting away.
If this format were to be a ratings hit, Fox would move ahead with an anthology format where each new season used the 24-hour clock to tell different kinds of stories.
This radical shift was first mooted by Fox chairmen David Madden and Dana Walden at the recent TCA press tour as a way to reinvigorate the franchise after Jack Bauer-less spin-off 24: Legacy struggled in the ratings.
"We are really exploring what the future, the next version of 24 might be, maybe in more anthological storytelling," Walden told reporters.
She also addressed moving away from the terrorism theme: "I think that partly what is exciting is, we're opening up the possibility of it being anything where that 24-hour clock is at the most critical period of a story, so I don't want to limit them."
This anthology format is the latest in a series of ideas that producers have come up with to branch out beyond the traditional 24 episodic series.
A few years back, a feature film spin-off was considered but ultimately dropped because producers felt it would be too complicated to port over the running clock on the big screen.
