Sutherland excited about new TV series

By Frazier Moore

AP Television Writer

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.

If there’s a clear-cut hit on broadcast TV’s fall lineup, it’s likely to be ABC’s political thriller “Designated Survivor.”

It certainly clicked for Kiefer Sutherland, its star, when he first read the pilot script. The show premieres Sept. 21.

“I had no intention of doing a television show,” he told TV writers at Thursday’s session of the Television Critics Association summer conference. “But I remember getting to the end of the script and realizing I was potentially holding the next 10 years of my life in my hands.”

Sutherland stars a bottom-level cabinet member who is suddenly appointed President of the United States after a catastrophic attack kills the incumbent chief executive and most of his administration.

Sutherland’s character, an appointee with no political ambitions of his own, is in charge of pulling the government, and the nation, back together while keeping his own family intact (Natasha McElhone plays his first lady).

“This guy doesn’t even want this job,” said Sutherland. “Literally, through the first five episodes he’s trying to find an exit.”

The series, said executive producer Jon Harmon Feldman, tells “the journey of a man as he grows into the man he didn’t know he could be, and the journey of a nation that gets a leader it didn’t know it wanted.”

Feldman described “Designated Survivor” as a blend of the aspirational qualities of “The West Wing” with the terrorism whodunit of “Homeland” and the political machinations of “House of Cards.”

More than any TV creator could have dreamed, the series arrives at a cultural moment when “there’s a hunger for outsider candidates,” noted producer Simon Kinberg.