10 TV Episodes That Were Blatant Apologies
8. "Day 4: 7pm-8pm" - 24
By 24's fourth season, the show had come under increasing scrutiny for its depiction of Muslims, particularly the Muslim-American Araz family who turn out to be terrorists.
The season's early episodes sparked a significant outcry from organisations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who felt that expressing such a sentiment mere years after 9/11 would only agitate prejudices and create a toxic, hateful atmosphere for Muslims living in America.
Fox ended up meeting with the Council and star Kiefer Sutherland even recorded a pre-episode PSA to remind viewers that Muslims hate terrorism as much as everyone else.
But Fox also made a more overt attempt to redress the balance in the season's 13th episode, "7:00 p.m.-8:00 p.m," where Jack Bauer (Sutherland) finds himself teaming up with two Muslim-American store owner brothers, Safa (Omid Abtahi) and Naji (Amin Nazemzadeh), to fend off a gang of mercenaries.
With the brothers taking up arms with Jack and explaining they've been fighting racism their entire lives in America, it's a howlingly on-the-nose apology for the prior insensitivity, though actually a pretty fun set-piece in its own right.