This is why Designated Survivor is really over this time

Kiefer Sutherland has revealed that complicated contract logistics were behind Netflix’s decision to cancel Designated Survivor for a second time.

Designated Survivor follows the political career of Tom Kirkman, who was unexpectedly thrust into the role of the President of the United States.

The show has had a rocky history, but after Netflix confirmed that they would not be bringing Designated Survivor back for a fourth season in 2019, it seems like the show has now really come to an end.

About Designated Survivor

Designated Survivor is a complex political thriller which follows politician, Tom Kirkman (played by Kiefer Sutherland, who is also an executive producer for the show).

In the series, he tries to find his feet after unexpectedly being sworn in as President of the United States, following a bomb attack at Capitol Hill.

Kirkman had only been in the role of the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development before this development.

So he spends most of his time trying to find a balance between grappling with his new role, investigating this attack and winning over the public’s favor.

This is why Designated Survivor is really over this time

Designated Survivor first started airing on ABC back in 2016, and it was actually one of the rare shows which skipped the pilot stage entirely.

However, even though Designated Survivor proved to be fairly popular with critics and audiences alike, the show struggled in its second season, and it was eventually cancelled in 2018, after just two seasons.

Fortunately, as longtime fans of the show will already know, Netflix swooped in at the last minute to rescue Designated Survivor from its doomed fate. The streaming platform did this with the help of the Entertainment One production company.

Netflix picked up Designated Survivor for a ten-episode third season in June 2019. But the show was then cancelled, once again, just a month later in July 2019.

Although fans have been pleading with the streaming service to bring Designated Survivor back since then, even Sutherland has admitted that he believes the show is really over this time.

Sutherland explained in a 2019 interview with Simon Mayo on his Scala Radio show that it was not poor ratings that got Designated Survivor axed at Netflix.

But rather, that “the contracts were so complicated and different from network television to Netflix” that many of the actors had already moved on to other projects and were simply no longer available to film a fourth season.

Why was Designated Survivor cancelled at ABC?

Designated Survivor had a strong start when the show premiered on ABC in 2016, with average of about 12 million viewers throughout the entire first season and a record 17 million viewers in its first week.

However, behind the scenes, the show was struggling, and had actually had five different showrunners throughout its first two seasons.

And by the time that the second season’s finale episode aired, Designated Survivor was only bringing in an average of 8.6 million viewers, which is why ABC ultimately decided that it should not be renewed.

Will Designated Survivor ever return for season 4?

Although many fans, and actor, Benjamin Charles Watson (who played White House digital officer Dontae Evans on the show) have expressed their hope that Designated Survivor will somehow return once again for a fourth season, it seems wholly unlikely at this point in time.

It has now been more than four years since Netflix officially announced that Designated Survivor would not be receiving a fourth season, and it seems like fans will just have to learn to live with all of the unanswered questions which were left at the end of season three.

Fortunately, Netflix did soften the blow of Designated Survivor’s cancellation by confirming that the entire series will be available on the streaming platform “for years to come”.

The projects that the Designated Survivor cast have moved on to

Netflix and Entertainment One reportedly only closed one-year deals with the cast of Designated Survivor when the streaming service decided to renew the show.

And as a result, many of the show’s main cast members, including Sutherland himself, had already moved on to other projects by the time that Designated Survivor’s third season started airing on Netflix.

Sutherland was not only busy filming for a new thriller television series, “The Fugitive” in 2019, but had also recorded a second album with The Kiefer Sutherland Band earlier that year.

Some of the other Designated Survivor actors who had jumped into new roles include Adan Canto, who had roles in both 2 Hearts and Bruised in 2020 and Italia Ricci, who featured in Rome in Love in 2019.