I’ve seen the first
five episodes of Season Two of House of Cards. I will absolutely be spoiling
the first episode and mention minor things in the next four.
I thought the first season of House of Cards was fine. It had a cool style and fine performances,
but it never lived up to the hype that it was creating for itself. Then
something changed during the premiere of its new season. It decided that it was
going to be crazier.
Sure Frank killed Peter Russo at the end of his convoluted
plan to make the Vice President quit. However that was seen as a dark scary
moment in Frank’s psyche that allowed him to improvise from his scheme and
learned a bit about his psychotic ambition. Yet it still wasn’t that interesting
of character inspection because I never cared about Frank. I didn’t care about
any character on the show; I felt bad about the lack of control in Peter
Russo’s life but now he’s gone.
In Season Two, the show seems to embrace how emotionally
distant the show is and will just let us enjoy the chaos. And this show really wants
to be chaotic. It’s taking the Breaking
Bad big moments without any of the emotional stepping-stones it takes to
get to those moments.
At this point in the show, we have a vice president who is
essentially a serial killer, a wife who is threatening unborn babies, a McPoyle
hacker who will bark like a dog to save his beloved guinea pig and a possible
Christian lesbian—definitely Christian, maybe lesbian—who is converting a prostitute
who can blackmail the aforementioned VP.
This show is silly.
So very silly.
This is a point that is always reminded whenever Kevin
Spacey rejoices in talking to the camera. (I’ve seen his premiere monologue
twice and it never fails to make me pump my fist in the air.) Yet whenever he
talks to us or rolls his eyes in our direction, the tone of the show insists
this is still the finest drama of our generation. Despite all of these goofy
elements, I still feel the show is humorless. It buys into its Kool-Aid so much
that it wants this drink to be in every school drinking fountain because it’s
that good for the next generation.
There’s a moment in the premiere where Frank is recruiting
someone to replace him as the Whip and he wants her because he knows she can
handle what it entails. Why? Because she was a fighter pilot who had to drop
bombs on people. That’s the only equivalent he can think of to compare what he
does. A journalist claims this is the greatest story pretty much in the history
of the news. The score is so dire and the city is so cold. Nobody is winking at
the camera or even suggesting that perhaps these elections aren’t the most
important thing in the world. I don’t think this is satire; it’s fulfillment
fantasy. This tone is so at odds to the type of stories it is telling, that the
result is magical. I’ve never seen a show so serious when talking about people
named Tusk and Feng (pronounced Fang). It’s like if Scandal was made by people who only went to private school. (By the
way, Scandal is without a doubt a
better show.)
I don’t know how this season ends, but I can only assume
that Frank will be president. This will leave Season Three to make him King of
the Western Hemisphere and then by the series finale, he’ll be the rib-eating
Galactic Overlord. We’re essentially watching a show from the point of view of
a 24 villain, but there is no Jack
Bauer to challenge him. I’m sure this new Whip-to-be will pose some threat, but
that won’t stop Frank from murdering her by the reflection pool and then goes
home to exercise on his row machine.
A great show challenges the way we present stories and
creates characters that are fully realized to make us learn more about our own
society. House of Cards is not that. House of Cards is a lot of fun because
it thinks it is The Wire while Frank
talks to war recreationist who insists on only communicating as his dead
relative. There’s room in television for all sorts and House of Cards is finally heading in the right really fun
direction. Just don’t tell the cast and crew.
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