Netflix and a Sturdy House of Cards

Netflix and a Sturdy House of Cards

(Spoilers, Spoilers Everywhere)

I can think of two analogies that describe the experience of watching a television series on Netflix. The first compares the show-watching process to witnessing a multi-car pile-up come together on a snowy freeway. Relentlessly, unavoidably, the episodes you watch, the scenes and the characters slide into a binge-induced blur. Stasis is only achieved after everything is delicately, but inseparably crunched together.

The other, maybe more oblique, analogy for Netflix is that it is very similar to eating a multi-course meal while being served by an extremely pushy and very rushed waiter. Also, you’re wearing this funny looking tube over your face that funnels directly into your mouth in order to expedite your consumption of the food. Out comes the soup, and Pierre pours it through your funnel. It scalds your throat, but before you can request a glass of ice water, down comes a plate of salad. That's barely chewed and swallowed before a medium rare steak and mashed potatoes come sliding down into your mouth. Pierre piles on a slab of chocolate cake and leaves you to either gag or choke on your meal.

In the aftermath of this ordeal, it's worth asking whether it was worth it. It's also worth wondering whether you actually technically ate something. You barely had time to chew it, let alone savor it or enjoy it. Maybe you just consumed it, like a car consumes gasoline.

Often I wonder something similar after pounding through my Netflix queue and ending up sweaty and alone in my bed at 3 AM. Was it worth it?

As Andy Greenwald points out in his Grantland piece, the Netflix experience, especially the show binging that it encourages, eliminates a significant chunk of the usual, communal, television experience. Netflix is great for watching old shows, whose plots and nuances you are already vaguely aware of, just haphazardly shoveling food into one's mouth is suitable for cold leftovers. But would you go to a restaurant for that kind of culinary experience?

It is an interesting risk that Netflix took by starting to release original programming. House of Cards might have been the perfect fit for the format. It's a fairly straightforward political drama without much mystery or nuance or suspense. That isn't to say the show wasn't enjoyable, because I found it to be. It was also well acted and directed and written. But it isn't full of mystery and Easter Eggs like Lost, and it isn't balanced, character-driven period piece like Mad Men and it isn't an audience-participatory whodunit like The Killing. It's brutal, like the aforementioned twenty car pileup, like its main character Frank Underwood.

Greenwald points to the series' seventh episode to support his criticism. It is an episode that reveals a lighter side to Underwood, one that shows his complexity and his nuance. While crawling through a decaying library, we see the something resembling a smile on the Congressman's face for the first time since he smirked after wiping the floor with a Teachers' Union representative or since he grimace while strangling the neighbor's mortally wounded dog.

It's an episode that should be savor end and deconstructed. And it would be if the show were on television or if Netflix released the show "traditionally." But it wasn't. And maybe it shouldn't. Underneath House of Cards a relentless engine hums. It drives the show, and its viewers, onward without pause. And though this engine may compromise some of the aesthetic potential of Cards, it is what makes the show nearly perfect for Netflix. Underwood doesn't care, neither does his audience, about the how's or the what's. He (and we) only cares about the that's. he has a goal and he's going to achieve it. We know what he and his supporting cast are, although this makes them a bit one-noted.

Back to episode seven, which I think supports both Greenwald's and my points. The episode reveals this delicate nuance in Frank Underwood, and it culminates in a heartfelt, rambling speech by Underwood. We see some emotion in his face, maybe a tear trembling in his eye while bidding farewell to his former classmates. Then his ADC, Doug Stamper enters the scene and all the emotion disappears. The camera pans out as Underwood and Stamper walk away and leave behind the stage on which Underwood seemed so vulnerable, so different from anything we had seen from him so far. He was choosing to ignore that, to forget that it ever happened. Well before the Netflix software whisked us off to the next episode, Frank Underwood himself was moving on.