Designated Survivor

As TV show premises go, the idea behind Designated Survivor was pretty good. Take an obscure, but interesting thing about our government – that one cabinet member is kept away from the President’s State of the Union address just in case a catastrophic event occurs that wipes out the rest of government – mix in a humble everyman as the accidental Commander-in-Chief when the black swan event happens, add a sinister plot that thrusts him into that job, and presto, TV ratings gold. You can almost hear the pitch meeting: “It will be The West Wing meets 24. We will even get Keifer Sutherland to play the lead role.”

So why is it, that after just two seasons, ABC canceled Designated Survivor? To me, this was an instance of the whole being far less than the sum of its parts. On paper, the idea made sense – what would happen if suddenly, our entire Congress, Supreme Court, not to mention the President, Vice President, and every other cabinet officer except the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, was killed in a terrorist attack. Putting aside the fact that in real life, this would make Ben Carson President, Sutherland’s Tom Kirkman is a mild-mannered academic, a decent and caring husband and father, and the last person who could ever get elected President precisely because he is presented as the antithesis of a politician.

But Designated Survivor could never decide which it wanted to be – The West Wing or 24 and its failure to land on a consistent narrative arc is largely what doomed it. You could see in Season 1 a clear preference for the latter – an attempt at pulse-pounding (though my heart rate rarely accelerated past “mild jog”) drama involving shady bad guys who always seemed one step ahead. There was, for example, a Manchurian Candidate type, a Congressman at the speech who miraculously survived, but, it turns out, because he was tipped off and part of the plot, with the ultimate goal of getting him to the White House. He, and others, were chased by plucky FBI agent Hannah Wells (Maggie Q), who was hunting down clues while always in peril. Meanwhile, Sutherland’s President Kirkman spends the early episodes in a combination of impotent rage and in-over-his-head self-doubt. The problem was, having been identified as Jack Bauer in 24, you wanted Sutherland to take out the bad guys himself; instead, he got bogged down in bureaucracy.  

While the FBI searched for the ring leaders, the show ran aground on the other half of its premise – how do you stand up a new government after the current one has been torn down? But lack of exposition and an unwillingness to just rip the band-aid off to create story lines and characters made this half of the show weak. The President’s main antagonist was the opposing party’s designated survivor (which I do not think is a real thing), but by the end of the season, she was joining his cabinet, never to be seen or heard from again. You could almost see the writers trying to find their way out of narrative dead ends as the body count rose, story lines involving Kirkman’s family receded, and the attendant shock endings (there was, of course, an assassination attempt on Kirkman, the killing of the FBI’s Deputy Director, and the Manchurian candidate as well), tried to clear the way for a second season reboot.  

Season two course-corrected too far in the other direction. The 24 aspect became an ancillary story line that was confusing and esoteric (mostly involving a computer hacker that turned out to be one of Kirkman’s friends) while the show went full West Wing with rat-a-tat-tat Sorkian walk-talk dialogue that lacked the panache or brio of that beloved show’s wordsmith. Episodes featured the predictable legislative squabbles, foreign policy crises, and B- and C-plot romantic entanglements among the staffers, but none of it felt earned or authentic. Kirkman’s wife was killed off halfway through the second season, setting up a convoluted 25th amendment crisis (presided over by a random Vice President who came into the show out of nowhere as the Mayor of D.C. and by the end of that episode was a heartbeat away from the presidency) when recordings of Kirkman’s therapy sessions were leaked on the Internet, purporting to show him as unstable. 

And attempts at introducing new characters either felt forced (sure, let’s sign up Michael J. Fox to play a lawyer who, in the span of three episodes is a special prosecutor against the president, a private attorney representing a kidnapped American, and a special prosecutor for the President who ends up turning on him) or superfluous (hi there, Tom Kirkman’s younger brother, greetings, ambitious young assistant who gets three lines in each episode!)

Ultimately, it was all to the show’s detriment, resulting in its cancelation. While the show’s failures were many (the haphazard plotting and mediocre casting primary among them), Designated Survivor also suffered from being asked to do too much. Although it will go down as a two-season failure, the show produced a total of 44 episodes – four more than the acclaimed drama Better Call Saul will have aired after its pending fourth season. If dramas aired on cable TV, Netflix, and Amazon have proven anything, it is that less is often more. So too here. Had Designated Survivor been written around a ten-to-thirteen-episode season and not twenty-two, the writing and story development would have been more focused. Instead of trying to serve the dual needs of a conspiracy thriller and a political melodrama, it could have chosen one over the other. Ironically, the seeds of its own destruction were built right into the show’s conceit.

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