BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) – If there’s a clear-cut hit on broadcast TV’s fall lineup, it’s likely to be ABC’s political thriller “Designated Survivor.”
It certainly clicked for Kiefer Sutherland, its star, when he first read the pilot script.
“I had no intention of doing a television show,” he told TV writers at Thursday’s session of the Television Critics Association summer conference. “But I remember getting to the end of the script and realizing I was potentially holding the next 10 years of my life in my hands.”
Sutherland stars a bottom-level cabinet member who is suddenly appointed President of the United States after a catastrophic attack kills the incumbent chief executive and most of his administration.
Sutherland’s character, an appointee with no political ambitions of his own, is in charge of pulling the government, and the nation, back together while keeping his own family intact (Natasha McElhone plays his first lady).