Designated Survivor is a new show starring Kiefer Sutherland that will be airing on ABC. You can watch the trailer online here.
Anything with Kiefer Sutherland will automatically get added to my DVR. Not only do I enjoy him as an actor (I loved the 24 series,) but I believe he has enough star power to hold on to an audience so it isn’t “insta-cancelled”. (I will share my theory on that in a later post.)
The show has some potentially interesting aspects to it. As the designated survivor, Sutherland’s character Tom Kirkman plays a low level Cabinet member who is kept separate from Congress during the State of the Union address. This is something that is done in real life to make sure that there is always someone in the line of succession who can take over as President if need be.
While I am excited about the show, I do have two concerns from that trailer that I hope will be resolved in the first episode.
A) The character (Seth,) played by Kal Penn, states that Kirkman had been fired that morning. Why would Kirkman be named the designated survivor if he had been fired? That doesn’t make sense. While it could potentially add more drama to the show, drama for the sake of drama isn’t necessarily a good thing.
B) The designated survivor is supposed to be kept at a distant location. However, when we see him look out the window after the feed goes to black, we can clearly see the explosion from his window. This means that he was not all that distant. They could have just as easily shown the explosion on TV as they watched from California.
Despite those two worries, I will give the show a watch and hope that they resolve those two issues in a satisfactory way.