‘Hijack’ Is Apple TV+’s Version of ‘24’ With Idris Elba as Jack Bauer
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Imitation is the sincerest form of television, but some aspects of hit shows are easier to imitate than others. Fox’s 24, for instance, inspired other dramas built around international intrigue, most notably Homeland (which shared several producers). But nobody else attempted to set an entire series in real time. Oh, you’d occasionally see a show do a real-time episode, like the online-ordering fiasco from The Bear Season One, but no one has been brave or foolish enough to attempt it on a regular basis.
It’s not hard to understand why. Telling an ongoing story in real time has an obscenely high degree of difficulty, one that even 24 only sometimes cleared. Almost all of that show’s dumber story points — Teri’s amnesia, or Kim being menaced by both a survivalist and a cougar — happened entirely because those characters needed to be kept out of the main story for a bit without simply skipping over several hours in between. The gimmick consumed plot with such force and speed that each season stealthily told two or three stories in a row, rather than stretching a single one across 24 episodes. As one of that show’s longtime producers Howard Gordon once put it to me, “It’s like driving at 65 miles per hour on the highway and you’re building the highway as you’re driving.”
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But 24 was created in the days when TV shows traditionally produced 22-24 episodes a season. In this era, when 10 or fewer has become the norm, might a real-time thriller be more workable? Apple TV+’s new miniseries Hijack makes a solid case in the affirmative, even as it still can’t entirely dodge some of the familiar 24 pitfalls.
Created by George Kay (Lupin) and Jim Field Smith (Criminal), Hijack uses its seven episodes to tell a story spanning the length of a flight from Dubai to London. Armed criminals take over the plane, and the only man who can possibly save the day is Sam Nelson (Idris Elba), a powerful and skilled negotiator who tends to be brought in to prevent deals from falling apart. As his ex-wife Marsha (Christine Adams) puts it, “When it all kicks off, Sam’s the best at handling it.”
The shorter season length, and the confined space in which Sam, the hijackers, and the other passengers are stuck together for the duration, works wonders in keeping the tension high, without requiring the sort of silly contortions 24 so often had to try in order to fill so much time.
More importantly, Hijack has Idris Elba. Like Kiefer Sutherland before him on 24, Elba has the sheer charisma, and the serious acting chops, to lend gravity and urgency to even the most ridiculous situation. There are times in this show when the people responsible for the hijacking seem more like supervillains in their ability to do anything to anyone. Yet whenever we shift back to Sam trying to puzzle his way through the latest problem(*), Elba makes it all seem gripping and real.
(*) Among his solutions is a plot device that’s all the rage lately in suspense dramas: using the online chat function in a video game to communicate with someone when phones and other devices aren’t an option.
Sam’s a different sort of action hero than Sutherland’s Jack Bauer. Yes, Elba is still built like a Norse god, and there are occasions where that size comes in handy. Mostly, though, Sam is a man who understands that the best way out of this calamity is to figure out what these people want, and how to appease them without anyone dying in the process. Elba’s long been one of our best onscreen thinkers, as The Wire often recognized that the most interesting thing it could put on camera was Stringer Bell quietly sorting through the latest turn of events. Elba’s expressiveness is put to tremendous use here, both in letting us see Sam’s mind work, and at showing us the different façades that he has to put on in order to keep things from getting out of control. (In attempting to gain the hijackers’ trust, for instance, he has to let the other passengers believe for a while that he’s betrayed them to protect himself.)
Everything on the plane moves as relentlessly as you would hope for in a real-time thriller, and there’s one sequence, at the end of the sixth episode, that left me so amped and shaken I needed to take a walk around the block before starting the finale. The hijackers, the other passengers, and the crewmembers (notably Ben Miles as the pilot) are all broad types at best, but they serve their purpose in providing obstacles, allies, and stakes for whatever Sam is doing.
It’s when Hijack diverts its plotting from the flight that it gets into trouble. I lost track of exactly how many outside subplots Hijack is juggling, but it feels like dozens. Marsha, for instance, is now dating London cop Daniel (Max Beesley), whose own ex Zahra (Archie Panjabi) happens to work in counter-terrorism. There are bits of business with air-traffic controllers in both Dubai and London, notably with Eve Myles as Alice, a harried mom who’s always getting in trouble with her boss but proves cool in this particular crisis. There are debates between various British government officials, and the inevitable subplot where Sam’s teenage son Kai (Jude Cudjoe) somehow gets tangled up with the bad guys. This was a classic — if inevitably terrible — 24 recurring move with Kim, but at least there, it eventually connected things back to Jack. Without spoiling anything significant, Sam never finds out that Kai is in danger, making that entire subplot feel even more blatantly like filler than the rest of it. Some sense of how people on the ground are navigating this mess is helpful, and some of it is pretty good, notably Alice’s early recognition that something must be wrong with this flight, even as her colleagues assume all is well. There’s just way too much time spent with all of these people, most of whom do not have guns pointed at their heads the way that Sam and the passengers do throughout. The tension notably slackens whenever we’re around them.
The show also cheats the real-time idea a bit more obviously on the ground than in the air. Near the end of one episode, for instance, Daniel is interviewing the mother of one of the hijackers at her suburban home; by the time the next one has begun, he’s somehow made it all the way to the prison where several co-conspirators are incarcerated.
But there’s enough story to cover the length of the flight, and Elba and the creative team keep things taut when we’re in the air. But even the hijacking story isn’t wholly immune to the show’s terra firma frailty. The finale for some reason tacks on an extra, nonsensical ending that’s substantially less exciting than the one that by all rights should have concluded everything.
Still, it’s tight enough, and it’s even got “Jack” as part of its title. These are entirely different production companies and distributors, but if Apple were to attempt to put Sam in another deadly situation for a second season, it wouldn’t be the worst thing to have him cross paths with Jack Bauer — whose last adventure, conveniently, took place in Sam’s hometown.
The first two episodes of Hijack are now streaming on Apple TV+, with the remaining episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen all seven.
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