President-Elect Elizabeth Keane

Elizabeth Keane arrives as the newly elected outsider president, a senator who ran against the intelligence establishment and won. She is blunt, distrustful of the CIA and the generals who brief her, and determined not to be managed by the national-security apparatus she campaigned against. Her instincts are guarded, her patience for spin nonexistent.

Elizabeth Marvel plays her with a cold, watchful intelligence that refuses to soften into likability, which is exactly the point. The show uses her to ask an uncomfortable question — what happens when the person suspicious of unchecked power actually gets it — and Marvel never tips her hand about the answer.