Designated Survivor

While the acting government is scrambling to reset itself, Designated Survivor spends a lot of time on Tom's wife, Alex (Natasha McElhone), who is trying to buoy his spirits (he was fired 15 hours earlier and then, well, you know); the Kirkmans' cute daughter, who can't figure out what's going on; and teen son Leo (Tanner Buchanan), acting like an obnoxious teenager and stuff. Yes, we need to know about his family, but not for all the minutes we're given in the pilot.

The execution of this premise, which takes up not quite the first half of the pilot, is taut, fast-moving and reasonably believable, offering some promise that Designated Survivor could develop into an entertaining hybrid of political thriller and family drama. Once Kirkman arrives at the White House, though, the momentum fades as various tedious-looking subplots are introduced, and disbelief becomes more difficult to suspend.

The problem comes in the second episode, along with a suddenly increased capacity to resist everything about Designated Survivor. Here we come up against the show’s message, or more precisely its gross political tendentiousness. ... Mr. Sutherland may not have been the best choice for the role of a virtuous milquetoast concealing a heart of steel--the milquetoast part dominates even when the steel is flashed.

It’s a strangely unbalanced experience. The portions of the show dealing with one man thrust into the highest office in the land and rising to the occasion are practically Capraesque in their vision of a regular American learning to lead on the fly. And yet what lip-service the pilot episode, airing Wednesday night, pays to the actual upheaval that would be going on is dully by-the-numbers. It’s as though the show can’t, or won’t, meaningfully consider the very disaster at the center of its premise.

Designated Survivor has potential as an exercise in which Sutherland alternatingly plays Jack Bauer and James Stewart’s eponymous character from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But everything else about the pilot is undistinguished and formulaic.

Designated Survivor opens with far too much complicated plotting, and it could easily become a morass of ridiculous developments within a few episodes. There’s promise in Sutherland’s determined, principled leader, but he’s surrounded by too many distractions.

It’s an instantly gripping premise (previously mined by Battlestar Galactica), but a tricky one to pull off, and Designated Survivor stumbles a bit in the execution.