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Designated Survivor can't survive creeping Democrat syndrome

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"Designated Survivor" should have been aborted

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The premise for this highly touted follow-up to Sutherland's epic 24, which strung readers along a finely calibrated weekly precipice of threat and an agony of suspense is not unpromising. The entire Capitol Hill and the President have been annihilated by a bomb, leaving only lowly HUD Director Thom Kirkman - 11th in line of ascent under normal circumstances - as the accidental inheritor of the most powerful leader of the free world.

There's no Senate. The Supreme Court nine are none. The country's Capitol is in a mess of trouble, with every variety of potential disaster around every executive order or police skirmish.

But no. The writers have given the new president a sullen, obnoxious son, and a sullen, annoying daughter. A gorgeous wife (who punches way beyond her husband's weight in terms of salient attractiveness point systems in these matters). And a Heinz variety-pak of chief of staff types who mumble against him when his attention is turned elsewhere.

We get, instead of serious dramedy, the purple pangs of familial discomfort in the new digs, and the huge headache of a Michigan Governor who does the Japanese internment thing with his huge Michigander population of Muslims. He arrests a mass of his state's citizenry, and flouts the new president's order to release all the detainees. We are given to feel dismay that a young Muslim lad has been manhandled. The horror.

Everything significant is tabled as the prez Googles and Britannica's constitutional fixes for the miscreant Michigan governor, who is parodied soberly as the tough-guy conservative who jails minorities first, asks questions later.

A veneer of a plot that's disappointing to a vast loyal one-time army of admirers.

The show's credibility, now just wrapping its second episode, plummets into inane and unrealistic lefty tropes. Bad enough that Braindead, another once-promising drama featuring the reliably contentious and beloved obsessive/compulsive Tony Shalhoub (Monk), made the Republican pols in a story involving only pols all evil and controlled by alien bugs, while the heroes and heroines were all Dems or (rarely) Indies. At least that program features literally exploding heads when things got tetchy, and the sidekicks were an active bunch of interesting eccentric sorts.

Here, Sutherland/Kirkman is unsuccored by his cohort colleagues, and the show is headed for the sinking edge of the horizon of unwatchability.

Sutherland deserves better. More important, we deserve better.

A shame. People used to rush home to watch 24. Now they divide by four and use the six to sleep.


marion d s dreyfus . . . 28 September 20©16

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I once read that in the DDR, the circus clowns were reprimanded by the politburo because they did not make enough political jokes about capitalists.

Sigh....


 
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