The Ghost of a Once Era-Defining Show
Recently, on a week-long vacation with a couple of 2-year-olds who abjectly refused to sleep, and with only limited access to French Netflix, I started watching Designated Survivor, a truly nonsensical television show. The premise is that a terrorist attack during the State of the Union has killed the president, plus almost all of Congress and the Cabinet; the lone survivor left to govern is the milquetoast Housing and Urban Development secretary, played by Kiefer Sutherland. The show is replete with plot, which suited my jittery, exhausted state. So much happens, in fact—armed shooters! bioterrorism threats! insurrection!—that the overall effect is paradoxically soothing. (The antidote to anxiety, it turns out, is the certainty of catastrophe within the next five minutes.)
Shows like sit on the opposite end of the mindlessness spectrum to , the reboot from Max (formerly HBO Max) that’s now back for a second season. I’ve watched the first seven episodes—each a fugue-state-inducing 45 minutes—and it’s almost awe-inspiring how little actually happens. In the first episode, Carrie learns, via YouTube, how to poach an egg. In the second, Miranda loses her phone on the beach. In the third, Carrie pretends she has COVID to get out of recording her own audiobook. The stories are breathtakingly small, as though the original show has been shrunk down into a vivid maquette. A substantial portion of the fifth episode is dedicated to Charlotte and Harry dressing up as Philip and Elizabeth Jennings from for Halloween and getting frustrated that no one gets the reference. “It was on FX for seven seasons!” Harry argues (incorrectly). “It won countless Emmys. And a Peabody!” (No one around him cares, which makes it funny that the writers thought we would.)
