DC DRAMA: Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright and Michael Kelly star in “House of Cards,” a first-of-a-kind series that can be seen only on Netflix. (Patrick Harbron)
DC DRAMA: Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright and Michael Kelly star in “House of Cards,” a first-of-a-kind series that can be seen only on Netflix. (
)
Thanks to big-name talent like David Fincher, Netflix’s first original series, “House of Cards,” pulls off the impossible: It takes DC politics more seriously than DC does.
Theater of the absurd — “Veep,” “Dr. Strangelove” — is really the only way to do Washington.
The pilot of “House of Cards,” an adaptation of a BBC series, thinks it’s revving up the drama when a hard-charging young reporter (Kate Mara) at a Washington Post-like paper demands that a Mephistophelean Southern congressman (Kevin Spacey) tell her whether the new president will push an education, tax reform or immigration bill first. Spoiler alert: It’s education.
The congressman leaks the bill to destroy the barely-visible background character who wrote it. You would have told the press, “Just a rough draft, overeager staffers, not ready for prime time,” yada yada.
But then you’d be far too smart to be a character on “House of Cards.”
Spacey is House Majority Whip Francis Underwood. We know he’s evil because he keeps telling us so, in Hannibal Lecterisms addressed directly to the camera.
This technique doesn’t become insufferable immediately — it takes about 15 minutes — but when he keeps saying things like, “I love her more than sharks love blood” or “I imagine their lightly salted faces frying in a skillet,” you’ll be longing for the comparative restraint of Howard Dean’s flying-spittle “Yeeaaaaggh!” speech.
Series creator Beau Willimon, who wrote the play that became the movie “The Ides of March,” was once a junior Dean staffer, but he seems to have absorbed only the cheap gesturing, not any actual knowledge of politics.
Willimon imagines a congressman’s DUI arrest being known only to Underwood instead of immediately being put out in a press release, and he has a secretary of state nominee sunk by a loony conspiracy theorist living in a shack in the woods — who falsely accuses the would-be Cabinet member of writing an anti-Israel editorial in a student newspaper 35 years ago.
Underhanded Underwood (whose wife, as played by Robin Wright, would give the creeps to Lady Macbeth) leaks the name of a new Secretary of State nominee, which you’d think would cause immediate scoffing from the White House.
Instead the president warms to the idea. That’s the kind of thing that worked on Elmer Fudd, but we’re supposed to be gawping at the devious brilliance of DC.
This series is about as inside-the-Beltway as Fiji, and Fincher’s main plan to compensate for the stupidity level is to have the gentlemen whip off their glasses and the ladies whip off their clothes.
He and Willimon think they’re revealing that DC is a den of thieves or a nest of vipers, but it looks more like a petting zoo of arthritic lambs.
Spacey is so pleased to be playing the wolf again that he doesn’t notice he’s merely gumming his prey.