If Designated Survivor season 4 happens, what will the episode count be?
We can’t help but pontificate about the future for Designated Survivor, and there’s a pretty clear reason for that: We really enjoyed the third season! Having people mobilize and go to social media demanding more of a given thing is sometimes the best thing that can happen for a show — it’s a real expression of passion and it shows that you’re doing something great.
We certainly know this in regards to the Kiefer Sutherland series — over the past couple of weeks since the premiere, there have absolutely been cries aplenty for more of the series! We know that there is an audience of people out there eager to get more of it, and we certainly do hope that the folks over at Netflix deliver. We’re going to continue to express as much caution as we can, with one of the primary reasons for that being merely an understanding of how cruel the Netflix world can at times be. We’ve just seen so many examples over the past year of them kicking a show to the curb long before its time; we think that it’s more than feasible that they will continue to do that, but we hope it’s with different shows and not this one.
Our hope right now is a simple one: That we get that fourth season and even if it’s the final one, then there’s an element of symmetry with two seasons at ABC and also two seasons at Netflix. We almost wonder if the show would be in a better spot if it was like how it is now the whole time during its run. There may have been some viewers entering season 3 who expected it to be identical to the first two seasons — and we’ve certainly heard from many of those people! Meanwhile, there were others who may have loved season 3 but didn’t love the first two seasons and decided not to watch. Designated Survivor made the right move in shaking itself up for season 3, but it comes with a certain degree of risk.
Let’s get back to the question in the title
How many episodes could a potential season 4 have? The ball is in Netflix’s court on this one, but we do think that there’s enough tangible evidence out there to render some sort of verdict. Pending a last-minute surprise, we’d say that the likely possibility here is that we get another ten episodes. This is sort of the standard Netflix order for most of their shows — there are a few that are longer and shorter, but ten is what Lucifer received and ten is what Longmire, another saved show, received in the past. While it would be great to have more than ten, Netflix doesn’t rely on having new episodes air throughout the year like ABC does. They’re fine to have a short, tight run of episodes that people can burn through in just a weekend or two. It’s enough to get people subscribing for a month if they aren’t already, and that may be most of what they’re looking for.