Spoiler alert: this blog discusses the plot of seasons one and two of House of Cards.
A new season of House of Cards means several different things. It means you’re doomed to lose an entire weekend, slumped unwashed on your sofa, helplessly hoovering up episode after episode. It means you’ll repeatedly curse Netflix as it stops you doing anything more productive with your life. It means, if you’re anything like me, that you’ll probably spend a huge amount of time marvelling at Robin Wright’s magnificent hair and wardrobe.
This will all definitely happen because, if you saw the last series of House of Cards, there’s no way that you’d ever drop out now. That run ended on such a tantalising note, with Kevin Spacey assuming a position of unchecked power and generally making out like Skeletor at the end of the Master of the Universe film, that people are bound to tune in just to see what happens next.
A special message from the White House. https://t.co/YxFcHfA5qy
— House of Cards (@HouseofCards) December 1, 2014
That said, it’s hard to know how excited you should actually be about the return of House of Cards. Because, even if you devoured it in huge chunks like I did, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that the last season wasn’t particularly great. It almost felt like it blew out all its energy in the first episode – with the snarling and the cufflinks and the subway platform – because very quickly after that, it bogged itself down in all manner tedious subplots and endless negotiations that went nowhere.
House of Cards is a chilly, pristine show, and it needs to have something in the mix that can humanise all the machiavellian power games. Season one had the tragic arc of Peter Russo, the idiot who stumbled into Frank Underwood’s web and didn’t realise what was happening until it was too late. Unless you count the couple of episodes about the rib shack guy, season two had nothing of the sort, just a procession of faceless suits all desperately trying to out-Sorkin each other. True, it rallied at its climax, but you can’t make a series out of bookends.
Similarly, it seems as if any successes that House of Cards won last year were quickly undone by Veep, which trod a similar path in a much more overtly ridiculous – and, in all probability, more realistic – way. Veep’s last series came as a sharp reminder that sometimes things just happen; not everything has to be down to the actions of a slippery puppeteer who looks a bit like the bloke from the last Call of Duty game.
Plus, this might mark the point where Netflix’s House of Cards diverges from the original British miniseries. Broadly speaking, they’ve been telling the same story up to this point – Underwood (Urquhart, in the original) slithered to the most powerful job in the country, while seducing and murdering both a young reporter and one of his troubled underlings. Chronologically speaking, the show should now follow in the footsteps of To Play the King, which centred around Urquhart’s mission to force a sovereign’s abdication.
Aside from the arch, campy tone that’s completely missing from the remake, what made that series fun was seeing Urquhart bump up against the one person in the country more powerful than him. Frank Underwood doesn’t have an equivalent figure. He’s at the top of the food chain now, with nobody left to usurp. One way to get around this would be for season three to continue the slightly tedious Frank v China plot of last year, which I really hope it doesn’t.
Finally, and I’m aware that this is a problem that exclusively relates to me, but I’m not that keen on watching the new series of House of Cards, because my new baby will have just been born and I can think of nothing more horrifying that the thought of him turning his head to me halfway through an episode and intoning a conspiratorial parable about the benefits of a PS Vita to me in a weird accent that makes him sound like Foghorn Leghorn having a stroke.
But that’s probably just me. Are you looking forward to the new series of House of Cards? Leave your comments below.
