Designated Survivor seems set to return for another odyssey with Season Four.
Starring Kiefer Sutherland as fictional U.S. President Tom Kirkman, the political-thriller series debuted to overwhelming critical and viewer response back in the Autumn of 2016, only to decline considerably in the follow-up season.
Additionally, behind the scenes, the series went through a raft of personnel changes, compelling network ABC to cancel it altogether, before streaming giants Netflix swept up the rights and revived the series for Season Three, which only concluded back in June this year.
While there haven’t been any official announcements as of yet about the series’ future, unsurprising given Netflix’s knack to keep details under wraps until pre-production concludes on any of its properties, fans can almost surely be on the lookout for another hurrah due to a dual-faceted rationale.
Firstly, the time that has passed since Netflix gave the series another lease on life.
It was only in 2018 that the streaming platform confirmed the 10-episode Season Three for this past summer, and it’s highly unlikely that they’d let go of a fairly popular intellectual property, one that attracted an audience of more than 10 million viewers during its pilot episode, after merely spending a year in their vault.
Secondly, whilst not as positive as the first outing, the general response to Season Three was better than that of its predecessors, and featured a plot that left viewers with a panoply of unanswered questions and storyline cliffhangers, with Sutherland’s character having been re-elected for a second term in the President’s office, a tenure that is yet to be entirely explored.
Of course, the announcements for previous seasons too came after the intermittent period of almost half-an-year, so it’s unlikely that Season Four will enter the public conscience in 2019, but one can always hope.