We’ve all been told, I’m sure, by some influential figure or other in our formative years, that we should go out and live life, rather than watching it on TV. Some clichés should not go unheeded.

I’ve always been self-satisfied at the low level of TV I watch, and I never expected to have my habits changed as they were by my boyfriend insisting I watch one of his “boy” shows, 24.

Here’s the premise: an hour-long episode of the Fox show is exactly an hour on the show itself; one season of the show is one day in the life of its Superman-ish main character, Jack Bauer, a U.S. agent (played by Kiefer Sutherland in a career-saving move). The content-spies, terrorism, black ops-is not new, but the format is. The aspect of “real time” is mercilessly exact: when a commercial break comes, you miss four minutes of what’s happening in Jack’s dense existence. If you watch multiple episodes in a row, as I tend to, the “real” effect can become somewhat disconcerting.

Cinematic time has, of course, been slowed down to correspond with actual time before, notably in Japanese film and manga. Novels that span just a day have been written by the likes of Joyce, Woolf, and Solzhenitsyn, but such books aren’t exactly nail-biters. The moments stretch to accommodate Mrs. Dalloway’s dithering recollections of disappeared lovers, and time fragments and distorts; there’s no attempt at correspondence with “reality.” The point of a character like her is that nothing happens to her at all.

I’ve been putting “real” in scare-quotes up to now for a reason, which is that 24’s real time is not real-it’s hyperreal, more than the real. I can only imagine the depressing show that would actually mirror my “reality”:

Episode 2: 3:00-4:00 pm. 3:09: In a high-speed chase, Jack is closing in on his target’s black Lexus when he realizes he left his gun at home in his other jacket, not in the cute puffy bomber he wore because it was a little chilly. 3:10: Jack pulls over, has a little cry, calls his mom at her work. 3:27: Jack gets a taco.

Episode 17: 6:00 am-7:00 am: Jack’s alarm doesn’t go off because he forgot to turn it on.

Episodes 18 through 20: Jack sleeps. Some drooling at 8:36.

Episode 21: 10:00-11:00 am: 10:05: Jack wakes up, realizes he’s late to escort the U.S. Secretary of Defense to his meeting with visiting Libyan diplomats. He figures that with the roads the way they are, it’ll take him at least 40 minutes to get to work, so the day is probably ruined anyway. He listens for traffic updates and urinates.

Watching 24 is embarrassingly close to self-mockery, because there is, of course, no one-to-one correspondence to anything “real.” Jack never eats, sleeps, or, god forbid, emits any liquid but blood. The irony of having whittled four hours off my life watching television is not lost on me when I finish participating in Jack’s day, having severely decimated mine.