Really? You\'d rather they used up all the \"massive, epic\" material in the first few hours, leaving the rest of the series for \"small-scale, unimportant drivel\"? Obviously, Kirkman and his administration are going to be dealing with a lot more mundane minutiae than normal early on, because the rest of the governmental structure temporarily does not exist and they need to get it back up and running to restore stability.
Upcoming episodes seem to have Kirkman ordering military operations in foreign countries, plus there is the plot of the bombing (and who was behind it) still to unravel and further political maneuvering (leading to an election) on the horizon. Time will also tell if power and politics keep changing Kirkman and his family and administration into the kind of people they used to detest.
It will be a long way off before this series settles into any sort of \"comfort zone\" like The West Wing.
@The Fell Mind: The issue, for me at least, is that the show\'s premise doesn\'t really lend itself to a West-Wing-merged-with-24 style show.
Every time Kirkman\'s family shows up, for example. I get that they\'re supposed to represent a cross-section of America, but I\'d rather spend the ~10 minutes their plots seem to get on stuff like... well, rebuilding the government.
There\'s 100 senators that need to be appointed. Should there be coordination on party affiliation for the sake of unity (1 R, 1 D from each state, for example)? The House is gone too, and those replacements have to be voted on. There\'s basically an entire election that needs to start being planned.
Did Congress have any urgent work that was half done? Is a budget needing approval? Is there a debt ceiling issue to worry about, since there\'s no congress that can raise it?
My point is mostly that, in the show, just about the entire federal government is broken. The \"Who actually dunnit\" plot, the stuff with Kirkman\'s family, who the flippin\' press secretary is... they aren\'t bad stories, exactly. But they kinda pale in comparison to the question \"...could the United States actually survive an attack like that? What would happen next?\"
West-Wing style political maneuvering and 24 style anti-terrorism plots... those don\'t seem to fit.
Question: all that political stuff you just mentioned is certainly important, but is it interesting? And I mean for general audience here - certainly, there are people who find that sort of thing fascinating, but a very large portion of the public finds politics, no matter how important they are...well, boring.
Now, I\'ll grant you that there are aspects of politics that make for good television, but is the national debt, for instance, one of those things? I don\'t think so.
Oh God! Natural light!Leave a Comment:
A Fantastic Premise, a Flawed Execution
Note: This is through Episode 4 of Season 1
The premise of the show is fantastic: The Capitol is bombed during the State of the Union address, killing the President, nearly all of the Cabinet, most of the President's staff, the Supreme Court, nearly all of Congress, and a whole lot of other people too.
Basically: With a handful of exceptions, the entire federal government is gone. The Presidency falls to a low-tier cabinet member, never elected to anything.
This is a premise that could spawn a fantastic, dark series, questioning who should be in command, what we would really be like after an attack like that, how could the nation move forward, would the nation even survive...
...but that's not the show we got. There's some darkness, but the signals are clear early on: We're supposed to believe in the new President. Everyone that sides against him? They're wrong, bad, probably evil, maybe complicit or just cynical. Things get back to "Business as usual" within days.
America never feels truly in danger.
There may be better stuff coming, but after 4 hours? The show is just not taking enough risks, it's not doing enough with the premise. The concept is massive, epic in scale, but so often we fall down into small-scale, unimportant drivel.
And it's a shame, because the pilot was so damn good.