Designated Survivor

Well, it’s got Kiefer Sutherland looking very un-Jack Bauerish. But the basic plot looks like it was lifted from Clancy’s Jack Ryan novels. I’ll give it a look.

Looks good. Reminds me of another ABC show. The one where Andre Braugher was the Captain of a submarine that didn’t follow orders and launch its nuclear missiles. Unfortunately that one didn’t get good ratings and didn’t last very long.

Designated Survivor looks good enough to watch. Maybe everyone will be tuning in to see if Kiefer turns into Jack Bauer?

Last Resort was the show. However, the failure of that show freed up Andre Braugher to go work on Brooklyn 99, so it turned out well!

Sure, he’s gotta be better that Trump, right?

You mean The Last Ship. The Last Resort would have had them turning the island into New Ibiza with non-stop partying and orgies. That may have been good.

It actually was called Last Resort. As in launching nuclear missiles should be a last resort measure. Although I like your explanation too, since they ended up taking control over an island after they went AWOL.

Oh yeah, sorry you are correct, got the two shows intermixed!

I almost typed that it was the Last Ship because that name makes so much sense… but google saved my bacon!

This. . . is actually a pretty fun premise. I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than about 30 seconds of 24, so I don’t really have any opinion at all of Mr. Sutherland, but I’ll be in for 3-4 eps this fall to see how this develops.

I’d give the premiere about 3 stars. Solid plotting and Kiefer was very good. Points off for the general who was little more than a cheap knockoff of Gen. James Matoon Scott from Seven Days in May and the actor was no Burt Lancaster. Hopefully they’ll shed this character early on.

Yeah, decent first episode. I liked it. It felt like a cross between The West Wing and Homeland.

Kiefer Sutherland is really good in this, its nice to see him on TV and not yelling at someone because a bomb is about to go off.

Just watched this. Enjoying it quite a bit so far. Hitting most of the expected notes, and not a lot of totally unforeseeable ones, but that’s alright. I do hope it goes down more paths than just “WAR MYSTERY,” since I think the notion of government headed up by a stuffy academic could be fun to play around in, once the dust settles a little bit.

That said, ugh, why did there have to be kids? Especially when one is “TV cute” and called “Peanut” by everyone. Horrid :(

Thought it was pretty good. Kiefer seems to be adopting a soft-spoken type of persona for this, which I’m ok with. But my wife heard him talking and thought he had dentures or something (he seems to half-mumble most of the time… at least in the pilot that’s how he talked. Maybe part of his transformation will be to him talking with a bit more assertiveness). Still, she liked it. Since they don’t cast people like Maggie Q in bit parts, I can only assume the FBI investigation as to who’s behind it all will play a pretty big part in the plot for at least this initial season.

Finally got around to watching the pilot episode last night. It was way more suspense and drama than we’d anticipated, from the scenes of the Secret Service busting in and rushing the guy from what I guess were his HUD offices over to the White House, to the tense situation room scenes to the drama surrounding the Capitol building rescue/recovery site. We liked it more than expected, and will be watching again for sure.

Points for irony for having Kal Penn playing a political aide. He (and most of the cast) were very good. Not sold on the teenager or the sneaky Presidential aide though. The General was also a huge cliché, but then when are they not portrayed as such.

It certainly looks like unraveling the mystery of what’s happened and who is behind it is going to factor heavily into the storyline. I’m glad they have a whole other set of characters doing that, as it would be silly for Sutherland’s President to be out chasing bad guys. When they were at the Capital site and the dogs alerted and everyone got excited at first I thought they’d found a survivor. I was thinking “Oh no, it’s the Secretary of Agriculture, now they’ll have to fight to see who gets to be President!”. ;-)

I like the show, and think it’s a quality production, but it’s pretty formulaic and I feel I am being lectured with the key moral lessons every time something happens.

Less of the president hitting the emotional checklist of scenarios feeling like it’s the president hitting the emotional checklist of scenarios, more Maggie Q investigating.

I didn’t enjoy last night’s episode as much as the first two. I just get the sinking feeling that they’re drawing things out too much. I hate it when a story doesn’t move forward at a satisfying pace.

What else can they do? It’s a network TV show and they have a bunch of episodes to fill. It’s what made me pass on this show even though I like Keifer. I just don’t see how you make what sounds like it should be a mini-series into a long multi season 22+ episode per year TV show without massive filler, and endlessly drawn out stories.

It can be done. See The Nine. It was a short-lived show on ABC about Nine survivors from a bank robbery. Probably one of the best TV shows I’ve ever seen. The performances and direction were just so good. Each episode had so much emotion and back-story that it didn’t even matter whether I found out about what happened during the bank robbery during any given episode. It was a very simple premise, and it would seem to be a poster child for “how do you stretch that out for a whole season?” And yet, they did it. Unfortunately, the show was a big flop and they didn’t even air all 13 episodes that they had made and they obviously never got a full season order. But with that level of acting, writing, directing, music and all around quality, I would have watched anything they produced, whether they moved the main story forward or not.

Unfortunately shows like Jessica Jones and Designated Survivor are not like that.

Watched the first two and overall it’s not very good, but in the way that most network shows aren’t very good. I think I’m getting to the point where shows like Fargo, The Americans, The Night Of (even though I had some real problems with that as well), make it almost impossible to watch a network to the bone network show. This seems on the same level as Madame Secretary but way more self-serious. Having said that, I’ll probably stick with it for a bit longer since my wife thinks it’s passable so far.