“House of Cards” is an original release from Netflix, a DVD-distribution and streaming company that has decided, after several years of selling tickets to the circus, to jump into the ring. Adapted from a British political thriller, and produced by David Fincher, the series stars Kevin Spacey as a mercenary Democratic House Majority Whip and Robin Wright as his wife. This prestigious résumé has turned “House of Cards” into big news—not least because Netflix has cleverly released all thirteen episodes at once. As a model of TV production, it’s an exciting experiment, with the potential to liberate showrunners from the agony of weekly ratings. It suggests fresh possibilities for the medium, feeding an audience that has already been trained to binge on quality TV in DVD form.
As a television show, however, “House of Cards” is not so revolutionary. This isn’t to say it’s bad, or not worth watching, or unmemorable. (Certain lines, such as “Twitter twat, WTF?,” might become catchphrases—for all its elegant contours, the show is marbled with camp.) Over a recent weekend, “House of Cards” acted something like a Scotch bender, with definite highs and lows. I found the first two episodes handsome but sleazy, like a C.E.O. in a hotel bar. Yet by Episode 5 I was hypnotized by the show’s ensemble of two-faced sociopaths. Episode 8 was a thoughtful side trip into sympathy for Spacey’s devilish main character, but by then I was exhausted, and only my compulsive streak kept me going until the finale—at which point I was critically destabilized and looking forward to Season 2.
Sensually, visually, “House of Cards” is a pleasure. Its acrid view of political ambition is nothing new (that perspective is all over TV these days, on shows like HBO’s “Veep” and Starz’s “Boss”), but the series has some sharp twists, with an emphasis on corporate graft and media grandstanding. There’s also one truly poignant plot about a working-class congressman hooked on drugs. Yet, in the days after I watched the show, its bewitching spell grew fainter—and if “House of Cards” had been delivered weekly I might have given up earlier. Much of the problem is Spacey himself, as Francis (Frank) Underwood, a wheeler-dealer who is denied the job of Secretary of State, and then conspires, with his steely wife, to go even higher. Spacey’s basilisk gaze seems ideal for the role, but he’s miscast by being too well cast—there’s no tension in seeing a shark play a shark. It’s a lot easier to buy his opposite number, the investigative blogger Zoe Barnes (the awesomely hoydenish Kate Mara), who strikes up an affair with Underwood in return for access. Her hair slicked down like a seal, her eyes dead, and her T-shirt sexily V-necked, Barnes is like some millennial demon from the digital unconscious, catnip for condescending older men. You could criticize the show’s portrayal of female reporters as venal sluts in black eyeliner, but it’s hard to object too much, since Mara’s performance, which has a freaky, repressive verve, is the liveliest thing in the show. Robin Wright is regal as Claire, Underwood’s charity-running wife, and Sakina Jaffrey makes a quiet impact as the President’s chief of staff, a restrained professional who in this lurid context feels downright exotic.
Fincher’s Washington is full of eerie imagery, such as a homeless man folding a twenty-dollar bill into an origami swan, and it’s magnificently lit (although I don’t understand why a sought-after journalist like Zoe lives in a flophouse full of spiders). But eventually the show’s theatrical panache, along with Spacey’s Shakespearean asides to the camera, starts to feel as gimmicky as a fashion-magazine shoot, with melancholic shots of Claire jogging in a graveyard. The show may be made of elegant material, but it’s not built to last—it’s a meditation on amorality that tells us mostly what we already know.
And, honestly, the more I watched, the more my mind kept wandering to Shonda Rhimes’s “Scandal”—an ABC series that’s soapy rather than noirish but much more fun, and that, in its lunatic way, may have more to say about Washington ambition. “Scandal,” which is inspired by a real-life political “fixer,” started slowly, as a legal procedural blended with a Rielle Hunter-flavored Presidential affair. It took a season to shed its early conception of Kerry Washington’s P.R. bigwig Olivia Pope as a “white hat.” But, once it did—whoa, Nelly. Popping with colorful villains, vote-rigging conspiracies, waterboarding, assassinations, montages set to R. & B. songs, and the best gay couple on television (the President’s chief of staff, Cyrus, and his husband, James, an investigative reporter), the series has become a giddy, paranoid fever dream, like “24” crossed with “The West Wing,” lit up in neon pink. Last week’s episode was such a #GameChanger—that’s the hashtag that the show’s creator used to advertise the episode—that Twitter exploded with exclamation points.
Because “Scandal” is so playful, and is unafraid to be ridiculous, it has access to emotional colors that rarely show up in Fincher’s universe, whose aesthetics insist that we take it seriously. Like Underwood, Jeff Perry’s Cyrus is a Machiavelli who cozies up to the President, but he’s got rage, wit, and a capacity for passion, not just oleaginous asides. During last week’s episode, he and his husband faced off, naked, in a fight about Cyrus’s crimes. (They’d stripped to demonstrate that they weren’t wearing wires.) The scene was absurd, but also genuinely intimate, with all the daring that “House of Cards” lacks. Rhimes’s show is made under the opposite circumstances from Fincher’s: nearly twice as many episodes, ratings pressure, constant threat of cancellation, a ravenous tweeting audience. These forces wreck other network dramas, and Rhimes’s previous shows have flown off the rails, but “Scandal” has only got stronger. It’s become more opera than soap opera, as the critic Ryan McGee observed online. Like much genre fiction, “Scandal” uses its freedom to indulge in crazy what-ifs: What if everyone but the President knew that the election was fixed? What if the President tried to divorce his pregnant wife? What if—well, I don’t want to spoil everything, but you might consider jumping in at the beginning of Season 2. It’s a different kind of binge watch.
After nine seasons, NBC’s once great mockumentary sitcom “The Office” is ending its run. Instead of going out like “30 Rock”—at the top of its game—“The Office” has had a more typical trajectory, staggering to the finish line in a weakened state. First, it was hobbled by the departure of Steve Carell as Michael Scott, the bad boss whose Pinocchio-like transformation concluded when he found real love. In the aftermath, the writers introduced new characters, but they never jelled; potential plots were set up, fiddled with, then abandoned.
Still, the biggest problem has been the relationship that used to be the show’s heart: the one between Jim and Pam, work friends whose unspoken longing fuelled the early seasons. Jim was a handsome prankster trapped in a soul-killing job; as an escape, he poured all his emotions into sweet, plain Pam, who was engaged to a neglectful man named Roy. That primal triangle went fractal, very effectively: the initial model flipped several times, as Pam rejected Jim, then Jim Pam, and it was mimicked in crueller forms (Angela, Dwight, and Andy), sillier forms (Kelly, Ryan, and Darryl), and more grownup forms (Michael, Jan, and Holly), until nearly every character had dealt with some form of unspoken longing or romantic betrayal.
Eventually, Pam and Jim married and had two children. They were soul mates, and the show had the sense not to throw any doubt into that mix—until this season. Now the showrunners have made the bold choice to threaten a perfect marriage, with Jim in Philadelphia, pursuing his dream job at a sports marketing company. He’s distracted, seduced by the free, fun-guy single life he never had, and, as a result, he’s left Pam isolated, with two small kids, furious at the financial risk, her supportive smile cracking. The primal triangle has resurfaced, with a bizarre revelation—Brian, the soundman on the crew that has been filming the show’s implicit documentary for years, has broken the fourth wall and fallen for Pam. And she has clearly, in her Pam-like way, nurtured this emotional affair.
Much of the show’s audience has bridled at this development, but it works for me. I’m impressed by the daring of the writing staff, which has done the unthinkable: set up a realistic challenge to a marriage of soul mates. Pam may be a sweetie, but she has a history of passive-aggressive insecurity, fear of change, and, well, sneakiness. Under pressure, she triangulates. She flirted with Jim while engaged to Roy; when she briefly moved to New York to attend Pratt, she attracted a male friend whom Jim found so threatening that he proposed. (In contrast, Jim wasn’t even tempted by a colleague who threw herself at him.) Jim’s sexy new job is much like the one he dreamed of when he played the online game Second Life, in Season 4. These compulsive flirtations are Pam’s Second Life.
I have no idea if the show will be able to pull this off; on a beloved network sitcom, there’s no way that Pam and Jim will divorce. Who would want them to? But I appreciate this return to the show’s roots, which were always about complicating easy notions of human happiness. As Michael Scott once put it, “Would I rather be feared or loved? Easy. Both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.” ♦
