Sunday, March 03, 2013
This House of Cards is Coming Down
Despite being sure that this American version of the superb British series would probably not be as good as the original, I have to admit that all the media hype did get to me. And it was with a great deal of anticipation that I started watching The House of Cards with the wife.
A can be a very skeptical viewer and is very deliberate when it comes to suspending her disbelief. I had a similar opinion of myself in my single days, but she seems to be stricter in this regard. (Maybe I've changed.) So when we start to watch something she is unsure about, it can sometimes be an uphill battle for the show to win us over! Initially, I intercede, defending the show every time she points out a logical inconsistency. A few episodes down the line, I stop trying to defend the show too much. Eventually, when the inconsistencies, both pointed out and self-identified, become impossibly hard to ignore, I completely lose interest in watching the rest of the season of the show. Something similar happened with the second season of Homeland, and something similar is taking place with the House of Cards.
It took me a couple of episodes to warm up to the show. I even kept telling A how I liked the fact that the show was not an exact copy (although, I had no idea that the American legislature also had a chief majority whip), and that Kevin Spacey was not trying to play the character of Uruquat, but a less ruthless one -- the show spends considerable time on tangents that are mostly about illuminating the more humane aspects of our protagonist's personality. I admired the multiple plot lines the show had created -- till I stopped caring for them, when they became too irrelevant to the main plot. They started to feel like soap-opera like digressions which seemed to have absolutely no connection with political intrigue that the show claimed to be about. I mean, who cares about the episode where Underwood goes back to his Military school, and we get shoved, heavy-handedly, towards seeing how absolutely normal his undergraduate years were, for a man who is now supposedly the embodiment of evil and intrigue at Capitol Hill. Who really gives a fuck about Peter Russo who Frank drags out of obscurity only to destroy politically a few episodes later. Who has any sympathy for the plot line about the VP feeling politically impotent -- do you really expect us to believe that the insignificance of his office came as a surprise to him?
If you really must see a show created by Netflix, do yourselves a favor, and watch LilyHammer which although a little low-key, is a delightful, unusual, and intelligent show.
A can be a very skeptical viewer and is very deliberate when it comes to suspending her disbelief. I had a similar opinion of myself in my single days, but she seems to be stricter in this regard. (Maybe I've changed.) So when we start to watch something she is unsure about, it can sometimes be an uphill battle for the show to win us over! Initially, I intercede, defending the show every time she points out a logical inconsistency. A few episodes down the line, I stop trying to defend the show too much. Eventually, when the inconsistencies, both pointed out and self-identified, become impossibly hard to ignore, I completely lose interest in watching the rest of the season of the show. Something similar happened with the second season of Homeland, and something similar is taking place with the House of Cards.
It took me a couple of episodes to warm up to the show. I even kept telling A how I liked the fact that the show was not an exact copy (although, I had no idea that the American legislature also had a chief majority whip), and that Kevin Spacey was not trying to play the character of Uruquat, but a less ruthless one -- the show spends considerable time on tangents that are mostly about illuminating the more humane aspects of our protagonist's personality. I admired the multiple plot lines the show had created -- till I stopped caring for them, when they became too irrelevant to the main plot. They started to feel like soap-opera like digressions which seemed to have absolutely no connection with political intrigue that the show claimed to be about. I mean, who cares about the episode where Underwood goes back to his Military school, and we get shoved, heavy-handedly, towards seeing how absolutely normal his undergraduate years were, for a man who is now supposedly the embodiment of evil and intrigue at Capitol Hill. Who really gives a fuck about Peter Russo who Frank drags out of obscurity only to destroy politically a few episodes later. Who has any sympathy for the plot line about the VP feeling politically impotent -- do you really expect us to believe that the insignificance of his office came as a surprise to him?
If you really must see a show created by Netflix, do yourselves a favor, and watch LilyHammer which although a little low-key, is a delightful, unusual, and intelligent show.
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