Netflix's House of Cards

Today the creation of vast amounts of big-budget, high-profile, "prestige" content by and for the premium streaming services is an established, familiar part of the scene, but a decade ago it was all just getting started--with Netflix's remake of the classic 1990 BBC miniseries House of Cards a milestone in that development.

I have to admit that I was one of those skeptical about the project--in part because I had seen and admired the original and am generally dubious about remakes, but also because I knew that this particular remake brought a whole train of problems with it, not least the transfer of the intrigue from one very different political system and political culture to another, while the intended expansion of a four hour miniseries (and at most, its two similarly compact sequels) into a multi-season show that ultimately ran for well over fifty hours seemed highly questionable.

Seeing the first season of the show (which is all I have seen of it to date) confirmed my suspicions. The translation of Francis' intrigues from British parliamentary politics to the American system was predictably awkward, and the extension of the compact original story into a sprawling soap opera was not an improvement. (Quite the contrary--one of the great improvements the miniseries made over Michael Dobbs' novel was to give a rather loose book a center around which to tighten up the material, and this was exactly what was kicked to the curb in reimagining it on this different scale.)

All of this cost the material the great bulk of its charge. Not the least of these was what it derived from the class dynamics of the original. The show was about "politics, not policy," but all the same, in his own person Ian Richardson's Francis Urquhart was a perfect manifestation of what "FU" represented, the ultra-reactionary blue bloods who had, far from regarding 1688 as the "end of history," regarded 1688 as already progress gone too far; the kind of modernity and egalitarianism-hating people on whose behalf folks like Evelyn Waugh wrote, and were lauded for writing. (Indeed, as Urquhart boasts in his final confrontation with a monarch he despises in the sequel, To Play the King, "My family came south with James I. We were defenders of the English throne before your family was ever heard of.") Any attempt at a real American equivalent would, again, be flimsy, and the writers wisely went in the exact opposite direction with "Frank" Underwood--a move that had some potential here, but alas, the bitterness of a man born far from privilege clawing his way up to the top never seemed to figure much in Underwood's character, the man rarely ever seeming more than a vulgar opportunist.

The narrative's enlargement did mean more room for policy with the politics--but again this failed to amount to much, with this significantly reflected in the decision to make a vague educational reform the center of that policymaking in the first season. The fight with the teachers' unions felt anachronistic, the whole thing a much less "hot" topic than two decades earlier, while the writers themselves did not seem to understand it very well. Blaming the schools, and those who teach in them, for a lack of "competitiveness" has long been a cynical ploy for those diverting public attention from other more consequential factors in industrial decline (like a government preference for the priorities of the service sector over industrial policy)--as well as a handy cudgel for the "privatize everything" crowd. But the writers did not seem to have any perspective on that, out of their depth on this point as they are on so many others.

It may be that the show's later seasons were stronger in these respects, but if so, I have seen little evidence of it in the reviews I have read, what I had actually seen apparently representative of the longer course. However, others took a far more favorable view, making for a virtually rapturous reception to Netflix's creation--helping bring about the business of streaming as we know it today.