Kiefer Sutherland wears a Luminox

The watch in The Fugitive barely rides on Kiefer Sutherland's wrist. By Propstore's account, Detective Clay Bryce wore his black Luminox strapped to the front of his tactical vest, beside the white CTB patch of the Counter-Terrorism Bureau, where a geared-up cop could read the time without turning his arm. Nick Santora built the 2020 reboot for Quibi as fourteen chapters of six to nine minutes, an entire manhunt sized for a phone. Bryce is chasing Mike Ferro, a blue-collar ex-con played by Boyd Holbrook who is framed for bombing a Los Angeles Metro train and runs to prove his innocence. Sutherland gives the detective a private stake in the hunt, since an earlier bombing killed his wife.

The Luminox is a Swiss quartz dive watch, and a plain one. The case is blacked out, the dial grey, with full Arabic numerals and a second ring of red 24-hour figures set inside them, a unidirectional timing bezel around the rim, a date window between four and five, and 200 meters of water resistance. Propstore sold the watch and the CTB patch together after the series ended, with a certificate of authenticity. The markers and the hands glow, which is the entire point of the brand.

Barry Cohen and Richard Timbo founded Luminox in 1989, and it made its name in 1994 with a watch ordered for the US Navy SEALs after one of their officers went looking for something he could read in the dark. The light comes from small glass tubes filled with tritium gas and lined with phosphor: the gas decays, the phosphor glows, and the dial stays lit on its own with no battery feeding the light and no button to press. Luminox rates the glow to hold for as long as twenty-five years.

So Bryce chases a bomber across daylight Los Angeles in a watch designed to be read in black water on a night dive. The depth rating and the self-powered glow are wasted on a detective who never goes near the water. What he actually uses is the dial, legible at a glance, which is presumably how it ended up strapped to the vest instead of the wrist. The glow is built to outlast almost anything; the platform that carried the show was not. Quibi launched in April 2020 and shut down that December, eight months in.