After Netflix revived the show, Designated Survivor decided to make some changes for season three – and one of them should definitely stay for season four.
We're not talking about the increased swearing at every opportunity, but the real-life interviews that appear throughout season three as the show tackled issues including child marriage, increasing medicine costs and drug addiction.
The new storytelling gimmick is integrated so smoothly into the show that you don't even realise its significance. It's only at the end of an episode that has used it that you understand what you were hearing were authentic accounts.
Before the credits, a title card reads: "The interviews featured in this episode are of real people from footage provided by documentary filmmakers. Their comments are unscripted and represent their own thoughts. Clips are edited for content and time."
Talking to TVLine, showrunner Neal Baer explained that the "very different" approach was inspired by a pilot he worked on that never went to series.
"When I was first starting out, I did a pilot with John Wells in 1991 called Night Life, which integrated documentary footage with people who work all night. It was ultimately not picked up by NBC, but I've had this bug in my ear ever since," he recalled.
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Of course, Designated Survivor isn't the first show to explore real-life issues, but by using these interviews, there's another layer of timeliness and authenticity to the stories they're telling.
One example is in episode two, which sees President Kirkman (Kiefer Sutherland) unwittingly pose with a Saudi prince and his child bride. Kirkman goes on to discover that child marriage is actually legal in certain states of the US.
"I haven't met one person who knows that the child marriage rate in the United States is sort of equal to what's going on in Saudi Arabia," Baer noted.
"That was why that episode is about assumptions, like, 'Oh, my gosh, it must be worse', and actually it's not. These are all real facts and figures that are supported by the data we have."
But it's not just highlighting real issues that make this gimmick so effective; it also adds an emotional depth to the show that it's struggled for in the past.
In the third episode, Isabel (Elena Tovar) is tasked with talking to the CEO of a pharmaceutical company with the aim of bringing down the price of insulin. He's against the idea, naturally, but changes his mind after watching a video of a mother talking about her son who died because they couldn't afford the insulin.
If this were a fabricated interview, it wouldn't have the impact it does knowing that it's a mother talking about the death of her son.
"A mother whose child died of diabetes, people addicted to opioids, people who were in a transgender therapy group… It's always real," added Baer. "When there are people saying to Kirkman why they don't vote, those are non-actors telling us why they didn't vote."
Designated Survivor may never go down as one of the greatest shows of all time, but what it did throughout season three is to be applauded.
Whether it's enough for it to get a season four remains to be seen. All we know is that if it does get another run on Netflix, it needs to continue to do more of incorporating real-life interviews into its storytelling.
If it doesn't, then it would be taking a massive step backwards.
Designated Survivor is available to watch on Netflix.
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Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.
