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Designated Survivor
2016 · TV series · 3 seasons
Created by David Guggenheim
Tom Kirkman, a low-level cabinet member is suddenly appointed President of the United States after a catastrophic attack during the State of the Union kills everyone above him in the Presidential line of succession.
3 negative4 neutralfrom 7 commenters
Where to watch
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8 comments on Hacker News
Similarly in the pilot episode of Designated Survivor. "Let's nuke Teheran" was seen as a valid, and brilliant, tactical move in order to get negotiations with Iran to go Kiefer Sutherland's way.
Snowpiercer (series): Gave up after the main plot focused on maintaining a lie, not discovering a truth (conventional screenwriting).
Other examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/pwp3t4/im_tired_of_woke/
Eventually got tired of Netflix's money cow strategy by sacrificing quality - buying original ideas and ruining them with more seasons for the sake of engagement: Designated Survivor, Money Heist, etc. Piggybacking on categories that rate higher on IMDB: Korean copycats, cheap documentaries, reality shows.
They know how to cater to public sentiment because biased reviews lead to higher ratings, hoping the brainwashing is not apparent - recent drop in subscribers proves them wrong.
Let's reverse engineer what a PM will think with data:
1. 80/20 rule: Target best performing shows, replicate success to capitalize on fan loyalty/momentum (new seasons or spins): The Crown, Money Heist, Designated Survivor, Narcos...
2. Validation: Look at high movie ratings, copy those categories: Korean dramas, documentaries, telenovelas, reality TV...
3. Culture: Follow trending themes on social media - feminism, financial freedom, woke...incorporate them into the screenplay, regardless of bias, craft, or message
4. Engagement: As long as we capture user attention and addiction, reinforce this habit via recommendations with AI algorithms
Like Facebook, they are focused on creating an addiction machine for short term gain, and this strategy is reflected on their increasingly low quality shows - this affects the brand, leading to low trust and rising churn
From my point of view the problem manifests in this way: I simply don't bother to invest the time to watch new shows until it's clear that they're going to get a proper run that allows them to finish well (Breaking Bad, Justified; even Sons of Anarchy, which was a real slog for the last 3 seasons, ended well).
I'm tired of investing time in shows that Netflix simply drops: The Expanse (though now thankfully picked up by Amazon), Designated Survivor, and Shooter (although that was total crap, especially after season 1) spring immediately to mind, but there have been plenty of others.
I also won't bother starting to watch shows that I know Netflix have cancelled before they've concluded (e.g., Glow), because what's the point? And this is starting to severely erode the value of Netflix's library to me.
Things that have worked incredibly well on Netflix are shows that tell self-contained stories within a single season, like Narcos or Fargo, or shows that tell have a self contained but are able to tell it in a longer form than feature film would allow. The canonical example of the latter for me is Godless, which is one of the best shows on TV, I think. Genuinely fantastic.
And this last point leads on to another, which others have made: US TV series are too long, typically 18 - 24 episodes per season, multiple seasons, often too bloated with filler episodes, and often suffer from ridiculous over-plotting after the first few seasons, which comes off as aimless thrashing around: Prison Break (season 3 onwards: just utter nonsense), 24 (SPOILER ALERT: I mean, seriously, WTF was that Tony Almeida betrayal storyline all about in, I think, the final season - multiple sharks were jumped and I'm still pissed off about it).
On the flipside UK TV series are often too short: 6 half-hour episodes is still quite typical, so you're only really getting into a show and then suddenly the season ends. With that said, for some shows this has been made to work really well: Line of Duty, or the earlier seasons of Luther.
I do feel like, for many shows, a happy medium would be 10 - 12 hour long episodes. You could then afford to make a much more polished product, whilst still probably investing quite a bit less.
The link to the fake screenshot from the Designated Survivor tv show appears to be just a link to a google image search. For me it just shows a bunch of pictures of people in suits.
There is an episode on the TV show Designated Survivor where the state guard refuses to federalize.
If you look closely, Netflix shows a ‘this tv show contains product placement’ sometimes. This will probably become a lot more common, and it’s not blockable either. I’m ok with subtle versions of it (a laptop on a desk that shows the Dell logo), but there’s also very blatant ways to do it. In Designated Survivor, there’s a scene where one of the protagonists stands in front of her car, starts it with the Ford™ app (panning inside shot of the Ford that shows it starting/booting), she and the passenger get in, talk for 5 minutes and then drive away. It was extremely shoe-horned.
The way they released "Designated Survivor" was similar to "old school" TV shows. With one episode per week being released. So I guess they are testing with that model