Today Netflix dropped the entire first season of this big budget original series, and you better believe I devoured it whole. What a fantastic thing to marathon in a day, I’m so heartened about the future of quality shows outside of the confines of traditional TV. Highly recommended if you like politics or thrillers or Kevin Spacey or addictive dramas about escalating insanity.
Has anyone else seen this? I’m off to watch the BBC miniseries it’s based on, which also happens to be available for streaming on Netflix.
It is a very faithful remake of a British series by the same name that aired on PBS some years back. It’s a story of political intrigue and gamesmanship. But the new series is Americanized and stars Kevin Spacey as a US Congressman done wrong by his party. It also stars the delicious Robin Wright and the even more delicious Kate Mara.
I agree with the OP. So far, at least, it is excellent, though I’ve only gone through the first 3 episodes. The wife is doing some odd things in her job that have me a bit mystified. I might have missed something as I don’t know whether her actions are somehow tied into the Congressional intrigue or to establish her own ruthlessness credentials.
The original BBC series is also available on Streaming Netflix, and if you like political drama it doesn’t get much better. Though it’s a bit tougher for this American to understand some of the British political system that’s being turned on its ear.
Haven’t heard about thus US remake, must track it down. The original was made back in the 80s and it shows somewhat in the production values but the story and cast was magnificent. There were two more sequels made which were also fantastic, though I’m not sure how the middle one would translate to the US as it heavily focussed on the government’s dealings with a new King (a vague suggestion of Prince Charles in the future) .
I’ve only seen the first episode so far (of the new Netflix version of the show), but I was almost mesmerized by it. I just love Kevin Spacey.
I’m really impressed by the high production values and overall quality of the show. I hope Netflix does more of their own productions in the future. I think they could turn into stiff competition for specialty networks like HBO and Showtime. I really like that there’s more and more new tv shows with shorter seasons (10-12 episodes) that are high quality. Like Game of Thrones, Homeland, Justified, etc…
House of Cards is interesting, because it has a pretty good budget and Netflix committed to two seasons (26 episodes) up front, so there can be good continuity and planning out story arcs properly.
I think it’s neat that they’re releasing all of the season 1 episodes at the same time rather than on a regular schedule like one a week. This way viewers can binge on the episodes if they want to, or they can watch them at whatever pace they like. It will be interesting to see how that works out for them - if viewers prefer it that way and if it has a positive or negative impact on the number of viewers they get.
I’ve heard that Netflix is making the first episode available to non-members during February.
Edited to add: You can see the first episode for free at this link.
I’m going to keep watching it, but the whole time I was watching it I felt like there was something off about the way people were delivering the lines. A bit like they were in separate rooms reciting their lines, even though they were right there on the set. Spacey, Mara, and to some extent Wright were the worst offenders here.
It may be a stylistic choice and I just need to get used to it. Combined with the way that delivery was a bit rapid-fire (especially Spacey’s asides to the camera) there is, objectively speaking, some resemblance to the way people spoke in the talkies of the 40’s, so maybe there’s some intentional influence there.
Some of the writing seems non-ideal as well. I have a feeling the script is taken fairly directly from the original (which I haven’t seen) because a lot of the oddness in the writing gives me the same feeling I get when I watch british TV. I haven’t figured out yet how to articulate what I’m talking about. There’s some kind of unsubtle we-know-we’re-a-TV-show quality to it. (And I don’t mean just because one of the characters talks to the camera). Plus some very clunky lines. “What you’re really telling me to do is fuck off.” Maybe could have been delivered differently but as it stood, it didn’t seem a believable line in that conversation. Like the flash of breasts later in the episode, it seems like a clumsy “ooh aren’t we a tough show with tough characters!” moment.
I understand a lot of what you’re saying, and I felt a twinge of it too at first. A part of the problem is that these darker kind of dramas always strike me as slightly pretentious at the start, usually because they have to immediately carve out a ‘feel’ and sometimes there’s a bit of overreach. The very first scene I wasn’t even certain it was a modern setting with the clothes and the accent, yeah the accent threw me off for a little while too and really added to that ‘talkies’ feeling you mentioned. It’s not that Kevin Spacey’s accent is bad, in fact it quite grew on me, but it is a little strong and jarring at first for someone like me who is quite familiar with the South Carolina accent.
As with a lot of these shows though before long you just get so sucked into the excellent storytelling that the stylistic stuff disappears, and it doesn’t take long for them to find their footing on that front as well. If I were judging by the first episode alone I would call it a good and promising show, but by the end I was convinced that it is every bit as good as Breaking Bad.
This is about as tightly written a show as you’re going to find. Even the pinnacles of serialized drama like Breaking Bad drop storylines left and right, in House of Cards I can’t think of a single thing that was completely dropped by the end. It feels much more like traditional mini-series in that way, which in a way I suppose it is. I’m not yet familiar with the source material so I don’t know how faithful it is, but it must be just in broad strokes because a whole lot of this stuff is extremely specific to the US political system. In any event it is clear they knew exactly where they were going the whole time, and if the second season is a direct continuation of the first in that regard then this will be quite a treat indeed.
Here a couple of examples of stylistic choices that did and did not work for me. The asides to the camera are excellent. Kevin Spacey delivers that dialog with such sincerity, and that’s really important with a character who lies this much. Those 4th wall breaking moments are the only time we know we are getting a real insight to his thinking.
As a cable news addict I really appreciate the attention to detail in how they portray the media. A lot of real news personalities appear as themselves here with their real sets and such. In a lot of political shows and movies the generic news bits take me out of the realism since I know the real news so well, but that part of this show was really fun.
On the other hand they completely dropped another good choice they made early on. A lot of the conversation between the characters is done via text, which is great because it adds a lot of realism. The first few episodes they show the texts as bubbles that float over screen, a perfect choice considering that it lets them maintain long shots of the characters as they text and still lets us easily read them. Unfortunately they soon just revert to showing close ups of the phone screen you have to squint to read, bleh.
I plan on starting tonight. Now I can’t decide If I want to do the marathon method or one a week method.
I so want this to make truck loads of money for Netflix as I’d like to encourage them to do more original shows as well.
Also, I’m trying to think: Has Kevin Spacey ever done a bad movie? I can’t think of one right off hand.
Tangent: I could not find HOC through the Netflix built in on my TV. So I went to my laptop to manually put that show in my queue. Only when you go to Netflix, it doesn’t give you the option to move it to your queue. :smack:
So I had to start the movie, then stop it and then go to my TV and hit the ‘recently watched’ list.
You’d think with all they got riding on this they would be shoving it in your face every chance they got.
I just added it to my queue… you must have run into some kind of bug.
After the first ep, all I can say is that there is no other actor on earth who could deliver the degree of deadpan snark that the lead role requires. Fabulous.
I’ll have to restart my Netflix account so I can watch this new version. Maybe I’ll save it for this spring when I’m stuck inside the cabin in the rain. A little Machiavellian politics to cure cabin fever.