Variety is reporting what has been whispered around the TV business for a while: this will be the final season for 24 on Fox. The show has been losing viewers and critical acclaim for a while, and it's expensive to produce; after eight seasons, there's apparently not enough upside.

This may not be the end of Jack Bauer entirely; there's a lot of talk of trying to relaunch 24 as a movie franchise. But it's symbolic of one thing: for big-network TV dramas, the '00s are emphatically over.

Launched in 2001, 24 was probably the show that defined the look and ambitions of network-TV drama (as opposed to cable, that is) for the last decade, together with Lost, which ends in May. (Throw in American Idol and maybe Survivor and you pretty much have your time capsule of what network TV in the '00s was.) After The Sopranos stormed the world in 1999, it was clear that cable had raised the game to a level network TV couldn't follow, either in terms of content or artistry. What network TV could do instead—as 24 and Lost showed in different ways—was deliver a version of the blockbuster-movie experience, weekly, on a smaller screen and a TV budget.

As with many groundbreaking shows, 24's innovations are hard to notice now, but what it was first and foremost—before its politics, before the torture issues, before the increasingly insane plots—was a formal innovation. The idea of doing a series in real time (even with plenty of dramatic cheats) was bracing, and by itself it gave 24 the sense of constant heightened stress that was its hallmark. And its visual style—the shaky cameras and the use of multiple screens to show concurrent events—reinforced the idea that there was just too much story to show you only one thing at one time. It was perhaps the first mainstream TV success to reflect an audience that was used to multitasking and multiple screens, on computers or on cable-news channels. It was an action drama for the age of information overload.