UPDATED Review (VOD): HOUSE OF CARDS (2013)

UPDATE: After viewing all 13 episodes, the Netflix Original series House of Cards builds to a thrilling conclusion in which all of Rep. Underwood’s machinations, some of which have turned deadly, demonstrate both how far he will go to achieve his ravenous ambition, and how far that naked, amoral hunger will take him. Only an episode wherein he returns to a reunion at his South Carolina military college alma mater ‘The Sentinel’ (get it?) feels like a waste of narrative momentum that’s otherwise maintained at a fairly taut level of tension.

How Netflix measures the success of this series isn’t exactly clear to me, but this viewer for one will be eagerly awaiting the next opportunity to binge-consume the second ‘season’. House of Cards feels very up-to-the-minute in both content and delivery. Impressive and highly recommended.

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EARLIER REVIEW: The streaming video content provider Netflix gets into the original programming game with the highly pedigreed Washington soap House of Cards, which seeks to place viewers squarely in the right-now of cutthroat Washington politics, the decline of old media, and how power is the greatest aphrodisiac of all. With superb big-screen filmmaker David Fincher overseeing (and directing the first couple), it’s a handsome, gripping effort whose worst sin so far is a cold opening that’s so cold and horrendous many viewers may be put off. Don’t worry, though—strangling an injured dog (yes, you read that right) is only an off-camera metaphor, and everything afterwards is played to a level that’s a bit less on-the-nose and shocking.

“I love people—they stack so well,” says Rep. Francis Underwood (d, SC!). He’s played by Kevin Spacey in a guise the respected thespian fits like a glove: an oleaginous, smarmily self-satisfied, 11-term congressional power-lizard who’s the most coldly calculating character perhaps in the history of television. Through five episodes (all 13 original first-season segments are available to Netflix subscribers now), we don’t yet know if Underwood truly has a soul—only his wife (Robin Wright), a nonprofit executive who feeds from and encourages her husband’s power-plays, shows glimmers of humanity beneath her own lizard-skin. By the time the two of them manage to buy off a crowd of angry union protesters with ribs and beer, this series hits its stride in its depiction of a couple who are happy conspirators together in the manipulation of their friends, supporters, and the media.

The major sub-character is Kate Mara as a young Washington blogger who ambitions her way into the White House correspondent slot at the ‘Washington Herald’, though her advancement comes only because Spacey has chosen her to be his principal journalist mouthpiece and tool, and because the publisher of the paper wants a fresh, young face to bolster its flagging readership.

By the time Mara leaves the ‘Washington Herald’ to go to ‘Slugline,’ a new-media news operation in which there’s no ombudsman, only information free flowing and reported right-now, the series takes on a feeling of immediacy that’s beginning to feel vastly more interesting than the soap opera elements that seem to be creeping into the story lines.

Other characters include a young Pennsylvania congressman with a coke and alcohol problem whom Spacey owns lock, stock and barrel, Wright’s dashing photographer boyfriend, and any number of congressional members and staffers whom Spacey moves around like so many chess pieces on his power-map of Washington, DC. That Rep. Underwood is a Democrat from South Carolina helps to erase any sense of partisanship from the proceedings—this is all about power, not ideas. And forget about the ‘real people’ back home—they don’t even exist to these bloodsuckers: the constituents are but a means to an end.

I laughed at many moments in the show so far, but at its heart this is as much an American horror story as it is a Washington-set adult drama. “Now, now,” Spacey says, handing out ribs to grateful protesters who’d only moments before been howling for his blood. “Whatever side you’re on, everybody’s gotta eat.” It’s the only clip the TV news runs, later—all the speeches and protests, positions and ideologies are but an afterthought to the manipulation of the message, and to no useful end except as it relates to the acquisition of personal power. Forget that those union protesters are losing their bargaining rights—have some draft beer.

Thus far House of Cards makes for compelling television that feels fresh and immediate, perhaps most in the nature of its delivery: as a video-on-demand product available for marathon consumption, as has become a habit of subscribers to streaming services like Netflix: discover that you love Breaking Bad? Well, here’s all five seasons, have at it. Certainly, the first five 46 minute episodes of House of Cards went by quickly, and knowing I can continue viewing the saga at any time offers a convenient option. Just as Kate Mara’s reporter is the lens through which we see the changing face of journalism, Netflix’s offering of this exciting new series in this manner heralds a new way of delivering, and enjoying, a television series such as this.

Review to be updated after finishing the entire first season run.