Kiefer Sutherland wears a MTM Black Hawk

Between scenes, 24 cut to a black screen and a digital clock, its numbers advancing toward the next crisis. That clock was the whole premise. Each season covered a single day, an hour an episode, close to real time, and the readout kept count of how little of it Jack Bauer had left. Kiefer Sutherland played Bauer across eight of those days between 2001 and 2010, a counterterrorism agent who stopped assassinations and dirty bombs against the deadline and broke most of the rules getting there.

The watch that became the Jack Bauer watch was not the one he started in. In the first season he wore a Rolex Submariner. By the second he had a Casio G-Shock. The MTM Special Ops Black Hawk did not arrive until the fourth season, in 2005, and once it did it stayed to the end of the run. The watch most people now picture on Bauer, the one the brand still trades on, was absent for his first three days.

MTM is a small Los Angeles company that makes tactical watches, barely known outside that world before Bauer wore one. The Black Hawk was its first design built around a light. Three white LEDs sit in the case and work as a flashlight, with an emergency strobe setting for signaling. Inside, a blue glow lights the dial. There is no battery to swap: you leave the watch on an induction pad overnight and it charges through the case, the way a phone does now. It is a quartz watch, not a luxury one, which is the joke inside the placement. Bauer started the series in a Swiss dive watch worth thousands and finished it in a battery-less gadget from a shop most viewers could not have named.

MTM still sells the watch, updated and renamed the Black Falcon: a 44mm case in titanium or steel, a sapphire crystal, around 1,100 dollars. By the company's own account it has since strapped the Falcon to a second agent. When FOX rebooted the show in 2017 as 24: Legacy, Corey Hawkins took over the job, and the new man got the watch with it.