I really, REALLY wanted so much to like this new TV drama, and was so interested that I was giving liberal network TV (ABC) a chance to impress me.
“Designated Survivor” stars Kiefer Sutherland, of huge “24” Jack Bauer fame, as the HUD secretary, Tom Kirkman, who was pretty much fired by the president just hours before the annual SOTU address before the joint houses of Congress in the Capitol building … And as fate would have it, the HUD secretary was chosen as the ‘designated survivor’ to sit out the address in the event something happened that would wipe out the line of presidential ascendancy to the Oval Office, and it happened. Now the HUD secretary, who thought he and his family were going to be shipped off to Montreal for some lame-assed diplomat position, is the POTUS. He is obviously ill-prepared amid the rubble and body parts of the federal government and must play catch-up quick as nefarious foreign countries look to take advantage of a very wounded America. He also struggles to put politics as usual in the White House basement as he struggles for respect from the US Military heads, the security and intel departments, state governors who are dealing with civil unrest due to the fears of terror attacks, and a lower level of White House aides who were not attending the SOTU at the Capitol (oddly the POTUS’s Chief of Staff), but now must scoff at this unprepared and non-gravitas “government realtor” as their new boss.
The pilot (first) episode of “Designated Survivor” looked pretty good and caused you to think hard about what first had to be done in order to calm the horror and nerves and gain the trust and confidence of the American people, and then establish a concrete federal government standing while the ruins were still smoldering … and if the US Constitution would be the go-to in order to move ahead.
And then came last week’s episode, which I’ll let Jazz Shaw @ HotAir describe the growing liberal stereotyping and agenda that this show is, unfortunately, evolving into:
… Last week I decided to try out the new show Designated Survivor. (Read about it at the link if you’ve somehow not heard of it. I won’t bore you with a plot description here.) The pilot to the show was great in my opinion. Solid acting, great writing and an intriguing storyline. But by the time the show moved into the second episode even I was given pause at the ham handed way the story was being developed. In the midst of the absolute chaos surrounding the destruction of the US Capitol and the death of nearly everyone in the federal government, the new President is immediately set to dealing with a state governor (a Republican of course) who has unleashed the police in his state to begin rounding up Muslims completely at random and locking them in detention facilities. The cops are shown at great length beating and kicking a seventeen year old Muslim boy in the streets to the point where he later dies. When the new POTUS tries to call the Governor to discuss the matter he is insulted and hung up on. He then has to find a clever and forceful way to shut the Governor down and make him abandon his hateful, xenophobic, Islamophobic policy and release the incarcerated suspects. And all this time there is little to no progress being made in finding out who actually blew up the Capitol building, but our hero certainly isn’t going to go blaming an Islamic terror group until he has absolute 100% proof it was them, no matter how strongly he’s being urged to act by the mean, warmongering general on his staff.
Seriously? Could you make this any more of a left wing parody of foreign policy? This isn’t a case of David Guggenheim or Kiefer Sutherland simply being liberals but putting out a good product. I could ignore their personal preference entirely and watch the show. But that’s not the case here. The show is infested with these life lessons for stupid conservatives and it’s not done in the least bit subtly. You’re being beaten with a Left Wing hammer every moment of the episode. Did it really have to be that way?
Let me just add a few observations and points here. If the writers and producers are using the current democrat administration as a template for the show’s plot, being it is a democrat administration on “Designated Survivor”, we are supposed to believe the democrat POTUS who allegedly perished in the massive blast didn’t purge the military leadership, as Barack Obama has, of its staunch war-hawks and replaced them with handpicked complete politically-minded yes-men brass? Come on. And the democrat POTUS’s top dog general at the Pentagon would not be so quick to ignite military dust-ups in the Middle East while covertly meeting with the new POTUS’s carry-over Chief of Staff to discuss a military coup to immediately unseat this barely sitting president.
Another observation involves the FBI. Of course the agent to watch is a minority female who had somebody inside the building when it blew and is now all silently crushed by her lost love while butting heads with her minority boss that is somehow standing in her way of giving the new president her thunks on what they’ve found and who might, or might not, be behind the bombing blah-blah-blah. However, she is knowledgeable in terrorist IED-like devices and recognizes the one, a ‘dud’, that was pulled un-exploded from the rubble and has her scratching her head and puzzled as to why, and if another massive attack is coming before somebody declares the yet undeclared attack on the Capitol building … more info her boss refuses to convey to Pres. Kirkman. It’s as if it, the un-exploded bomb, was deliberately left behind to possible deflect blame to foreign terrorists, but people who actually ‘think’ for themselves(easy to do with these network Hollywood plot lines) and have inner alarm bells, such as me, can see it coming … It will be an inside job, no doubt, carried out in order for some political opposition coup to scrub the federal government and take full fascistic control. Hint: It won’t be leftists/communists/democrats. How do I figure on that?
Well, last week a female Congresswoman, Kimble Hookstraten, was escorted into the Oval Office and introduced as the GOP’s designated survivor (to which the new POTUS remarked, “Of course the republicans would want to be represented”). By the end of the episode, which was even worse than Jazz Shaw described, she was privately sitting in an office Googling the former HUD secretary now undesirable POTUS replacement, and it did not have the feel of her about to be supportive and/or helpful to him.
By the end of the episode somebody was found alive in the wreckage … which is unrealistically being allowed to have the typical and tiresome civilian makeshift memorial of flowers, photos, notes, candlelight ceremonies, etc. very, very close to the destroyed building where search and rescue/recovery is being carried out when you know damn well a very large perimeter that might encompass a large swath of Washington DC, let alone The Hill, would be completely evacuated of non-essential workers and investigators. By the way, they also took the new Pres. Kirkman far too quickly to the White House, and not a secured and secret location until it had been searched top to bottom several times over, which would have taken far longer than the ten or so minutes it took the pilot episode to depict.
As I said, I would wager we will be seeing the plot twist to an inside job, a major coup, before the show gets to the last episodes designated for this season. And then, if this show continues to take the far left preachy positions it hinted at last week you can bet the ratings will take a hard turn away from it from at least 50% of its audience that is not liberal/left and is sick and tired of the Hollywood fare that insults us.
I have a good friend in Washington DC who serves as a government appellate attorney in the court(s) there. Good old boy from Louisiana who is a history buff and whose father and mother both served in the US Military during WWII. He wanted to catch up on “Designated Survivor” until last week’s provocative episode, and his casual discussions with other conservative political pundits of note who are already panning the series and voicing their disappointment, even though Kiefer Sutherland said ahead of the pilot that he wouldn’t be taking his role in a political/partisan direction in order to, in ‘hopes of’, making the show, and America, less ‘politically divisive’. Uh-huh.
Except that liberals/left believe the way to make things less politically divisive is to silence/stifle political opposition to them and their agenda.
Patricia McCarthy and Marion DS Dreyfus @ American Thinker have thoughts on this Tom Clancy-like plot:
After only two episodes, there is something unnerving about the show; where is it going? It could be good; or it could be a work of anti-American, pro-Muslim propaganda. It is too soon to know.
It is an absolute myth that after 9/11 Muslim Americans were targeted for violence by “bigoted” Americans. In fact, there was no backlash against Muslim citizens; this was a trope of the Left, convenient as it fit into their worldview but an outright lie. While there may have been a few incidents of persons behaving badly, there is no truth to the myth. There was no wholesale backlash by American citizens against their Muslim neighbors. There were, however, many Muslims around the world that openly and loudly celebrated the attack on the WTC. This new show depicts a violent response against Muslim Americans in Dearborn, MI, in the aftermath of the horrific bombing of the Capitol. So what is the show’s obvious political agenda?
Good question. It may be to depict us all as deplorable racists, as Hillary does on a daily basis. It may go on to indict us all for our crimes against the Muslim world, as Obama does so often with his slick but un-subtle rhetoric. Or the series may take a turn towards the actual truth of the world today.
While the current administration chooses to deny the obvious, the radicals within the Muslim world are on a mission to bring down the West. It does not matter which self-named group claims credit, there are more of them than Hillary or Obama care to admit. And they mean business. No amount of denial is going to alter that reality, as James Comey reiterated Wednesday. Obama has made us so vulnerable by blaming America for the the “problems” of the Muslim world, and Hillary promises to make us vulnerable by importing hundreds of thousands of unvettable refugees from the chaos that is the Middle East.
Both Obama and Clinton loathe our glorious and selfless military personnel, as they do our men and women in blue. It will be an adventure to see where this series goes. If, as hinted in the second episode, it goes on to accuse America and the American people for the seventh century barbarism that has been visited upon parts of the world for the last fourteen hundred years and on America for the last fifteen years, the show will go down. The American people are sick of being blamed for the monstrous acts of others. That the Left has done this in a calculating way for the last eight years and think that they have the country under its firm control is infuriating…
[…]
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 Republicans of the pols in a story involving 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…
1. I watched the first 2 episodes of CBS’s “Braindead” and immediately saw where it was going and dropped it from my DVR list like a plague.
2. To be clear, the last handful of “24” seasons took the threat/terror plots away from the obvious current Middle Eastern radical Islamic entities and placed it on nefarious Anglo political insider types, which greatly disappointed the long-run series’s loyal fan base.
“Designated Survivor” might just be about to blow itself up…
The Universal Spectator 
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