In this lamentable election cycle, what greater collective fantasy is there than blowing it all up and starting over?
Such is the premise of “Designated Survivor,” the hit new ABC show starring Kiefer Sutherland as a low-level cabinet member who becomes president after the Capitol building is attacked during the State of the Union, killing nearly the entire US government.
“Television has a responsibility to confront what is actually happening in the world,” Sutherland told reporters last August. “Designated Survivor” takes that thought to the extreme.
Though it has that network TV mustiness — subtlety does not abound here, in dialogue or characterizations — its old-fashioned approach to storytelling, its very predictability, is oddly satisfying. (The premiere episode snared nearly 18 million viewers and, last Thursday, ABC gave the show a full 22-episode order.)
Most every other buzzed-about DC-centric show, from “Scandal” to “Homeland” to “House of Cards” to “Veep” (which stars Sutherland’s daughter Sarah), is steeped in amorality. But Sutherland grounds “Designated Survivor” in decency, making him an outlier in both the television and electoral landscape.
“Kiefer’s such a gentle, gracious guy,” producer Mark Gordon told The New York Times last month. “He can be the idealized president we all wish we had.”
“Television has a responsibility to confront what is actually happening in the world…”
- Kiefer Sutherland
As introduced in the pilot, Sutherland’s Tom Kirkman is an academic do-gooder, devoted family man and incorruptible policy wonk. He wears a crew cut, a pair of 1950s eyeglasses and a gray hoodie — part black-and-white sitcom dad teleported from the “Leave It to Beaver” era and part Silicon Valley tech exec. It was Sutherland’s idea to have Kirkman wear his glasses when unsure and overwhelmed, to remove them when determined and forceful — the Clark Kent effect.
Not since Jed Bartlet of “The West Wing” — recognized on both sides of the aisle as the fantasy version of Bill Clinton, minus the bimbo eruptions and snake-oil sleaze — has America had such an educated, even-keeled, dignified fantasy president. (If you’re in doubt, check Jed’s lengthy Wikipedia page.) “Designated Survivor” borrows much from “The West Wing”: the elegiac brass score, the sweeping shots of DC’s iconic white buildings bright against a night sky, the father-son dynamic with a young staffer.
“You don’t have to get up every time I walk into a room,” Kirkman tells a wide-eyed speechwriter. “I’m not the queen.”
Yes, Sutherland-as-Kirkman has that most elusive of qualities in presidential politics: humility. It’s a salve for an electorate repulsed by its two real-life options, both polling at unprecedented unfavorables.
“I don’t think anyone would disagree that this has been the most bizarre electoral cycle in modern history,” Sutherland recently told The Globe and Mail. “So to be able to play a president (a) in the middle of a crisis and (b) who’s really trying to bring a country together within the context of crisis almost mirrors the circumstances we’re dealing with now.”
How odd that a UK-born Canadian actor has twice, with diametrically opposed characters, hit the marrow of specific American trauma. As Jack Bauer on Fox’s long-running thriller “24,” Sutherland was a rogue counterterrorism agent who, season after season, saved the US from catastrophe. That show was well into production on its first season before the attacks of September 11 and debuted a few months later.
“We made 14 episodes of ‘24’ before the terrible events of 9/11,” Sutherland said. “Generally if someone chooses to write about something, it’s usually topical. And it’s always a terrible tragedy when someone’s fiction becomes a reality. But they wrote about it for a reason.”
Jack Bauer mainlined America’s fear and bloodlust, then spewed it out week after week, maiming, torturing and killing in the name of national (in)security. With Bauer, Sutherland created a hero for the Bush era: a man of few words, one with a simple morality. The show was often criticized for its frequent depictions of torture, and Bauer explained his philosophy in the show’s seventh season, which aired in 2009.
“I see 15 people held hostage on a bus, and everything else goes out the window,” Bauer told an FBI agent. “I will do whatever it takes to save them, and I mean whatever it takes.”
Sutherland has made it clear that “Designated Survivor” isn’t that — and his Kirkman is an avatar of optimism.
“The lack of knowledge and understanding of how difficult it is to govern has led to some very poor ideas in our society,” he told the Times last month. “Maybe showing the rebuilding of a government in action will help dial down the rhetoric that’s out there.”
It’s a nice thought — one, much like Sutherland’s heroes, that’s pure fantasy.