With last week’s news that Fox was canceling 24 after its eighth season, I think it’s safe to say that most viewers weren’t all that surprised. The show has slowly been eating away at itself in terms of story lines and character developments over the years, and in terms of relevance, the action series has seen better days. Still, 24 is a remarkable show that made a mark on television for the creative risks it took.

Perhaps it was only through some strange cosmic alignment that 24 was already well into production and set to premiere right on the heels of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Even though the 2001 pilot had to be postponed and edited slightly, the crux of the series—a lone man in a minute-by-minute battle against terrorism—spoke to audiences like nothing else on TV at the time. It was even exciting to see Keifer Sutherland, an actor who had up until then built a solid reputation for playing scumbags and otherwise questionable characters in film, sink so thoroughly into the heroic role of Jack Bauer that it’s hard to separate the two any more.

With the standard American television season clocking in at 20-26 episodes, the idea of following a single character through a full day in real time seemed like a natural fit, but because it would require focused plotting, non-stop production and a consistent time slot, it had never been successfully done before. Not to mention that a day in the life of your average Joe would hardly be gripping enough to maintain an audience for a full season. While most of us spend a majority of the day toiling away at work and around eight hours fast asleep, apparently there’s no time for rest in the fight against the terrorists. Or so TV—and for years, the federal government—would have us believe. Whether it was because of Bush-era hysterics or just America’s general uneasiness about national security, 24 became an instant TV phenomenon.

Using the real-time format allowed the show to credibly divert attention from Jack driving in a car somewhere and focus on multiple characters and threads at once (which gave way to the split-screen intercutting that the show is now famous for) while always staying focused on the main plot over the course of a season. It didn’t hurt that 24 also pushed boundaries with the level of action—and in later seasons, torture and violence—that could be shown in primetime. And when it came to making hard decisions about who lived and who died, 24 knew how to take the hard road when necessary, sometimes to shocking effect.

Sure, there was a certain suspension of disbelief that had to happen to buy into it completely. Who can realistically get across Los Angeles in forty minutes during rush hour? Who can go for a whole day without eating, sleeping or even using the restroom? One man? Maybe. One man plus a whole CTU office plus the federal bigwigs in Washington plus all the bad guys? The point is that 24 made sure it felt real—felt even remotely possible—even when it wasn’t. That is, until it couldn’t any longer.

So where did it all go wrong?

There were missteps along the way, but for five seasons, the show was a bona fide hit with steadily climbing ratings, a strong cast of characters and ever-rising stakes—until the sixth season when it all went off the rails.

Through a set of circumstances far too complicated to detail here, Jack is captured by the Chinese government at the end of the fifth season. This set up one of the biggest cliffhanger moments in the series, because as we all know, the Chinese government DOES NOT PLAY. (They don’t even like Google!) To have this all-American hero now in the custody of the largest Communist entity on the planet…well, it harkened back to some old Cold War notion that all of a sudden we might be on the verge of nuclear war or some other worldwide chaos. How will Jack escape? Will someone have to go rescue him? Thanks, Jack, WE’RE ALL DOOMED! And yet, when the sixth season premiered, that plot was squandered entirely. Jack was released without incident thanks to some hush-hush dealmaking. Hoo-ray.

In fact, the sixth season as a whole went on to betray everything that made 24 so great. Suddenly, all the tricks and contrivances that could be overlooked for the sake of just getting to the action were now blindingly obvious, to the point where it all bordered on campy nonsense (Jack had a brother all this time? Mentally-challenged computer geniuses? Someone actually elected Powers Boothe as Vice President? Aaron Pierce loves Martha Logan and raspberries?). It also became apparent that 24 was never supposed to take place in our universe, but instead a nearly identical one where high-tech wizardry outpaced our own and leaps in logic and common sense and even time itself were the norm. In my opinion, the sixth season may have also retroactively ruined every season before it by exposing all sorts of faults that you might have simply chosen to ignore previously.

The reaction from audiences sent a clear message and the show’s producers, causing a postponed seventh season (due to the 2007-08 writers strike) in order to regroup and clean house. The seventh season touted a new setting as the biggest change for the show, finally putting to rest many a theory that Los Angeles had now somehow become an international hotbed of terrorist activity. By that point, it was unclear if 24 would ever be able to fully recover, and with America’s new outlook, if it would even still be as relevant as it used to.

After another change in setting for the current eighth season, it seems like the show is still up to the same old tricks—none of which are the substantial turnaround in quality that viewers were hoping for, as evidenced by the sinking ratings. It’s unfortunate really, because the format of the show is open to so many opportunities, and it seems like every season starts off with promise, only to settle into the same old ruts again and again. Someone’s a mole, someone has a secret past, someone’s a stubborn bureaucrat who can’t see the truth in front of their nose and of course, someone is a double-agent. As inspired as some of the show’s better moments were, it had rested on its laurels for far too long.

Now officially cancelled, there’s only the smallest of opportunities for 24 to wrap things up for the series as a whole in a satisfying way. There’s already talk of Jack Bauer living on in feature films, but without the real-time format and intricate plots, what’s to say it won’t be just another action/spy thriller that we’ve already seen done to near perfection with the Bourne series or even the new-and-improved James Bond?

One big plus is that screenwriter/director Billy Ray (Breach, State of Play) is already on the case with a proposed draft of a script (and he knows his way around government/espionage territory). Ultimately, I’m hoping that if Jack Bauer makes his way to the silver screen that his next move will be better than anything we’ve seen lately. Our TV heroes deserve better.