This review is written by someone who has watched the whole first season of House of Cards on Netflix. If you have not completed the season, some mild spoilers follow.
Netflix aims to completely blow up the traditional TV-viewing model with its new series House of Cards, a loose adaptation of the BBC series of the same name. This is an interesting case that has many implications for the future of TV distribution.
The thing is, at this point it’s hard to even call this TV. House of Cards, like the soon-to-come continuation of Arrested Development, released all 13 episodes of its first season at once. If you are so inclined, you can binge through the season in a day, or you could take weeks to go through it at your own pace. It’s a fully viewer-controlled experience. No timeslots, no commercials, just 13 hours of show at whatever time you want. I guess we might just call it long-form narrative.
But for all its implications for the business, House of Cards is still a fairly conventional cable drama. Kevin Spacey plays House Majority Whip Frank Underwood, a cunning and ruthless Washington wheeler and dealer angling for a higher status in government. This is another antihero story in the spirit of the popularity of shows like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos. Your mileage may vary, depending on your tolerance for this kind of plot retread. House of Cards has all the surface traits of a show like Breaking Bad, but it lacks the dynamic characterization that those shows have. Underwood is a pretty terrible guy who is constantly getting what he wants through less than legal means, but there isn’t a lot of of nuance to his arc–it’s just his rise to power.
None of this is to say House of Cards is a bad series. If it were on a cable network it would be better than about 85% of the cable dramas on. It just fails to reach the heights of the shows it seems to be aping. There are many virtues here, foremost among them Spacey’s performance. Spacey brings a sense of gravitas to the role that only a seasoned theater actor could. Though Underwood’s dialogue is often hammy and on-the-nose, Spacey’s trademark wry delivery saves the failings of the script early and often.
It remains to be seen whether people take to this new viewing model or if it fails to inspire the same devotion in viewers that a week-to-week wait does. Part of the reason TV shows are so fiercely loved by fans is the sheer amount of time viewers spend with the show. Superfans of a show like Community have stuck with the show week to week, enduring long hiatuses and schedule changes, but they stuck with the show–and that likely affects their view of it. Is someone who watched all of season one of House of Cards in one day as likely to wait a year to get the next batch of episodes as someone who watched it week to week?
These questions will flesh themselves out in the next few months with the release of Arrested Development and other Netflix releases coming down the line. For the time being, our viewership model is changing, but the content is more of the same.
Thank you, Adrian. I am stunned at the gushing reviews from even reputable sources like NPR. From the moment Kevin Spacey talked to the camera, to the ridculously cliched and outdated depictions of an2013 squeaky- white D.C. establishment dancing to Strauss waltzes at stodgy balls, it’s oh so 1993 and unimagnative. An Indian actress is passed off as token power Latina and an education bill causes a bleeding- headline, scandal majeur. So many current political issues have been tackled and skewered, instead we get a play-by-the numbers, inoffensive mainstream script . Any comparisons to In The Loop would be an insult to the latter, and a comparison to Beeaking Bad laughable. house of Cards makes Newsroom seem authentic and that’s saying a lot.