Designated Survivor Season 3: Real People Discussing Trans Therapy, Child Brides and Opioids (tr)

During Designated Survivor Season 3, every time a person brings to President Kirkman’s attention a video of a citizen’s testimonial, what he watches is never an actor reading from a script but actual documentary footage.

Some of the topics covered throughout the 10-episode season (now available on Netflix) include opioid addiction and the exorbitant cost of life-sustaining medicines such as insulin.

“A mother whose child died of diabetes, people addicted to opioids, people who were in a transgender therapy group…. It’s always real,” Season 3 showrunner Neal Baer tells TVLine of the video clips. “When there are people saying to Kirkman why they don’t vote [in the previous presidential election], those are non-actors telling us why they didn’t vote.”

Describing the incorporation of documentary footage into an episodic series as something that is “very different,” Baer explains, “When I was first starting out, I did a pilot with John Wells in 1991 called Night Life, which integrated documentary footage with people who work all night. It was ultimately not picked up by NBC, but I’ve had this bug in my ear ever since.”

Episode 1 of the new season ends with Kirkman bingeing a slew of videos from generally disenfranchised Americans. From there the videos get more specific, starting in Episode 2 with an American woman who tearfully describes her sexual assault as a 13-year-old bride. Building off of a public relations snafu in which Kirkman unwittingly posed with a Saudi and his child bride (assuming the girl was a daughter), the episode proceeds to expose hard truths, including how child marriage is legal in all of the United States but two (Delaware and New Jersey).

“I haven’t met one person who knows that the child marriage rate in the United States is sort of equal to what’s going on in Saudi Arabia,” says Baer. “That was why that episode is about assumptions, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, it must be worse,’ and actually it’s not. These are all real facts and figures that are supported by the data we have.”

Baer in fact shared said data with series consultant Eric Schultz, who served as Deputy Press Secretary under President Obama, asking why the issue never grabbed a real-life White House’s attention. “Eric said, ‘It wasn’t on our radar.’ I showed him the figures, and he’s like, ‘Whoa. It wasn’t on our radar.'”

Even if it had been on the White House’s radar, implementing policy to change things, as illustrated on Designated Survivor, would prove problematic and face some surprising opposition. “As [Director of Social Innovation] Isobel says, two of the most liberal organizations, ACLU and Planned Parenthood, were against it,” Baer notes. “And that’s all true. That is all out of California.”

“Did they ever figure out who did it?”
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Yes. It was blamed on the muslims, who actually took credit for blowing up the Capitol, but they were not to blame.

An ex-Afghan War soldier turned congressman was the only survivor of the explosion during the State of the Union speech, which wiped out the entire Senate, the president, vice president, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the entire Supreme Court, and the entire Cabinet, except for the HUD secretary, played by Keifer Sutherland, who was the designated survivor (and by default, the president).

There was another woman member of Congress who was not at the State of the Union, so she survived, too. Basically, 433 members of the House were wiped out. It was mentioned that there were over 1,000 killed in all.

It turns out that the congressman who survived the blast had committed “war crimes” in Afghanistan. Few people knew that, and he became a national hero for surviving the attack on the Capitol building.

It turns out, he had left the chambers during the State of the Union speech and was hunkering down in a specially built shelter in the Capitol Building. He and his wife were both part of the plot to take over the government.

All the men who had worked on the shelter were killed off before the bombing so the secret of the shelter would not be revealed, but it was eventually discovered by some FBI underlings. The FBI director died in the bombing.

The coup plotting congressman was made vice president and, within minutes, a sniper shot President Kirkland so that the no good vice president could become the Chief Executive.

But President Kirkland survived, and waved from his hospital window in his pajamas in a scene reminiscent of Ronald Reagan waving from HIS hospital window after his assassination attempted in March 1981.

The no good vice president and his wife were later seen visiting Arlington National Cemetery, where the VP’s wife shot and killed the new VP. As I said, she was part of the plot, too, and she believed their scheme was falling apart and she flipped out.

Eventually, the other coup plotters were arrested all over the country and of course, they were all members of conservative groups who were unhappy with the direction of the country.

The series had promise at first, but went downhill with liberal story lines, clichés, and other leftist claptrap.

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