After eight seasons, Jack Bauer has finally met an enemy he can’t defeat: cancellation.

It’s been eight long years for Keifer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer, and Fox has decided the show has run its course.  The network was finding it just too expensive to continue producing it, and while there had been some talk of moving it to NBC, but Mr. Sutherland said, “that was never a real possibility for me.”

Now with the series coming to an end, The Hollywood Reporter spoke with executive producer, and show runner, Howard Gordon, and it sounds like the creative team was also a bit burned out by the 24-episode concept, and was feeling like they had limited themselves creatively.  Even with the series needing to start thinking about season nine, the show’s creative team hadn’t even come up with a basic concept for another season.

With the series coming to an end, this is leaving open the possibility for a movie which will still follow Jack Bauer over a day time period, but in a normal film length which means that he will finally be able to move between cities without the audience being bored for four hours while he flies somewhere.  The longtime premise for the film has been that Jack would travel to London, and Mr. Gordon confirmed that CTU would still be involved in some way, but this is far more about Jack as a character than anything.

I have to say that while I have watched every episode of the series, I’ve always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with it.  It is so insanely preposterous at times that you have to wonder if the writers aren’t screwing with the audience.  ”This scene makes NO sense … throw it in any way, no one will notice!”  Don’t believe me?  I have four words for you: “Season two mountain lion.”  Need I say more?

How many nukes have gone off over the course of this show?  How many times has Jack been on the brink of death?  How many times has he quit CTU/the government, only to be pulled back in for some reason or the other?

No matter how much the show was horrible at, I kept watching because it was like a master class in everything that was wrong with storytelling in the television medium.  And despite everything it did wrong, I still oddly found myself enjoying it.  It was improbable, ridiculous and even insulting at times, and yet we all kept coming back season after season for the love of Jack Bauer … well, and the Satchel of Doom. (which has been missing for seasons seven and eight!)

As much as I loved and hated the show in the same breath, I will miss it at the end of the day.  (Ha!  ”end of the day” … see what I did?!?)  No one else could deliver a screaming line quite like Jack, never again will I hear, “Damn it!” screamed in that way just tells you “If this wasn’t on network television, Jack would be saying something a lot stronger …”

So, good-bye, Jack … and thanks for the hours and hours of me saying, “Why in the world am I watching this …”