House Of Cards TV Series

I'm nine episodes in and Season 4 is so fucking boring.

Does it get better?

I more or less liked the nine episodes you hated. So for you, I'd have to say no.

The final scene is really shocking and awesome and memorable. So if you've begrudgingly made it this far, you might as well stick it out.

I haven't worked up the enthusiasm to get thru s3 let alone s4

the bleakness, darkness of it is really suffocating after a while

Liked this a lot more than season 3, where the Stamper/abduction roadtrip felt like a sadistic potboiler. Glad this one sticks to D.C.

I more or less liked the nine episodes you hated. So for you, I'd have to say no.

I really enjoyed the first half of the season but the presidential campaign and Claire's ongoing rise towards the ticket is dull and seems to have killed off all the intrigue. Might as well stick it out I suppose.

finally finished this; really enjoyed it, in particular the Claire stuff because she's the most interesting character on the show, to me. really at this point they could kill Spacey off and it would probably be better. Also it was nice to see Walker back a bit, it made me nostalgic for his non-existence administration.

I'm mid-way into the current season and am not sure how I feel about it. Francis' and Claire's characters were loosely based on the Clintons, and with the way the 2016 election turned out IRL, the show kind of feels irrelevant now. I mean, I'm not faulting the creators as nobody could have predicted Trump or the sheer lunacy of today's national political scene back when they were writing/filming this season, but it's almost like watching a funhouse mirror version of the WH where everybody at least appears to have their shit together.

I'm five or six eps in and so far, not so good.

The Elysian Fields / Bohemian Grove episode is the worst.

i can't listen to his voice. maria was watching this and i always had to leave the room. in theory, a cartoon about a campy gay southern house cat with a cruel streak would sound awesome to me. and i made it through the first two seasons okay.

but, yeah, trumpworld has kinda made this show seem quaint like a revival of our town.

actually, i think that's what he reminds me of. "well, hello there, things are quiet today in grover's corners..."

(also robin wright is just a beautiful bore who peaked with hollywood vice squad and the princess bride. and she wasn't even that great in those. she has made about 40 movies that nobody really needs to see though. that's an accomplishment.)

I thought this season wound up being ok, about on par with the previous year; nothing is going to match the batshit insanity of the first couple of years though. I'm glad hammerschmidt is closing in on making all of this stuff public. really the show only gets good when it gets dirty and ludicrous, ie: when they start killing people and stamper starts doing shady ridiculous shit. I found Patricia Clarkson and the other dude more interesting than anyone else though.

also, fuck this show for making me start for sympathize with the horrible republican Conway and his perfect wife.

Just started Season 5. Seemed to get zero attention, here and everywhere. Only two episodes in, but already it feels anachronistic. It still looks good, but the tone is very Bush-era, like it got by-passed by Trump. Looking forward to Patricia Clarkson, who I loved in Six Feet Under.

Six episodes in, and the only thing I'm able to make sense of is that Conway's cracking up. The machinations of the election-in-limbo mostly baffle me.

I'd watch a sixth season, so it hasn't lost me altogether. But Season 5 mostly felt far removed from what drew me in the first three seasons--had the same problem with The Leftovers--which was primarily the stories of Rachel Posner, Zoe Barnes, and Doug Stamper. I liked it when all of that returned towards the end. All the contested-election stuff (four episodes' worth?) was rendered pointless when it all got resolved with a couple of incriminating recordings--they could have dispensed with that in a single episode. Patricia Clarkson's character was bizarre. Good bizarre, I think--couldn't figure her out at all. Campbell Scott was good. Whoever played Macallan reminded me of Harry Dean Stanton. The absence of Mahershala Ali and Molly Parker hurt. The very ending made clear what I'd always assumed: the final season, maybe even the whole run, was conceived with a Hillary presidency as a given. I guess Trump's emergence came too late to change that (although a couple of Spacey's fourth-wall monologues had a clear Trump slant to them).

The Claire-Tom Yates affair/arrangement/whatever was such a drag after a while. He was an interesting character when he first appeared, but by 5, every scene of theirs seemed to start with him standing at the kitchen sink looking forlorn and immobile.

I hope they renew for a sixth season, if only to conclude the story.

show has been prophetic, a PG-13 preview of a XXX trumputin putsch. don't know what you're all so blase about. keep it on the air in perpetuity so long as it keeps forecasting accurate impressions of american/russian political connivery

Just finished the Clinton American Experience (on YouTube); I'd never thought about it before, but the name Zoe Barnes is probably meant to evoke Zoe Baird, Clinton's defeated nominee for Attorney General. I believe that was the first thing to go wrong for Clinton in his chaotic first few months, and many of Underwood's problems trace back to Zoe Barnes.

A regular broadcast station here started rerunning the whole thing last night. Watching the very first two episodes really brought home how far things have strayed. The first Underwood-Barnes encounter, where she shows up at his townhouse and he invites her in, is fantastic.

Just finished season 5 and it was OK. Not as good as seasons 1 and 2 but a little better than season 4 and miles ahead of season 3, which was so bad I had to be persuaded to continue. Unfortunately they still seem to lack a certain amount of imagination as to what a genuine psychopath in charge of the country could do, I find it all so conservative for such a supposedly radical, boundary-testing show

Oh, but Patricia Clarkson is brilliant, she is definitely the best thing about it right now.

Unfortunately they still seem to lack a certain amount of imagination as to what a genuine psychopath in charge of the country could do, I find it all so conservative for such a supposedly radical, boundary-testing show

I stopped watching after s4 for that reason. The more into power Frank gets, the more his hands have gotten tied and so the "crazy" things he does resemble actual politics. I think the move away from the outlandishness of s1/s2 was a mistake

claire!

http://deadline.com/2017/10/house-of-cards-canceled-kevin-spacey-scandal-netflix-season-six-1202197604/

Season 5 was definitely a rebound from 3 and 4, but it arrived with so little enthusiasm I'm not even sure why Netflix would bother wasting so much money on a sixth season, unless they think the curiosity of a Spacey-less season would be enough to peak interest (even then I can't imagine people sticking around for another full season of... this).

It's cute that they continue to weigh the possibility of a spin off or w/e, when Spacey was so obviously this show's sole attraction. Maybe that was because he was the only actor allowed to signal he was having fun, though. Every other character is so dreary and miserable.

Rewatching from the start. Great sinister character: Walter Doyle, the guy who vets Peter Russo for his gubernatorial campaign.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VtcPj1fG0dE/U8LmFRzeJnI/AAAAAAAAAx8/fCuXxh1LOUI/s1600/Chapter+7+Season+1+1.JPG

When Underwood's vetting Raymond Tusk (he thinks), they drop a nice Nixon allusion in: we find out Underwood's father was a peach farmer, "not a very successful one."

The episode from season 3 with Corrigan, the imprisoned gay activist, one of the best. Fantastic ending: "What are you looking at?"

The toxicity of Spacey has earmarked this for the dustbin of history, where it was probably headed anyway after the indifferent reaction to Season 5. There’s a trailer out there for Season 6--they’re finishing up without Spacey.

Just finished rewatching the whole thing, something I started before knowing there’d be a Season 6. Liked it a lot the second time through--even most of Season 5.

What I still didn’t like about Season 5. 1) The arc, or whatever you want to call it, is just weird. It starts on Election Day, I think, so you assume the election will happen and then they’ll move on. They stretch that out, though--not for as long as it felt like the first time, but it’s still not resolved midway through. And then, instead of complicating the narrative further and riding that out till the end, the election is resolved with three or four episodes still to go. 2) I don’t like the way they take Conway, initially a sharp contrast to Underwood, and turn him into this sad ghost of a character. I think they could have handled that some other way. 3) Frank’s big soliloquy in the Senate before resigning is one platitude after another about how corrupt the system is. 4) Frank’s “this was all planned” in the final episode. Maybe true, maybe not--he sounds really phony trying to sell the idea to Claire. But either way, there’s just too much to process if you want to test the validity of what he says.

Having said all that, I still found most of it absorbing, and three of the new characters are great: Usher, Jane Davis, and Macallan, the NSA hacker. (Macallan might have first appeared the previous season.) Davis and Macallan are bizarre--I don’t know that I ever understood either one of them. I loved how Davis was constantly appearing out of nowhere and whispering in somebody’s ear: she was a more lethal sidler than the sidler character on Seinfeld. And Macallan was shadowy, a little mad (that scene of him dancing with his headphones on), and tragic, doomed to disappear. I hope Usher and Davis are back for the final season.

It's amazing, not knowing what what was in store for Spacey, how perfectly Season 5 ends if you ever did need to carry on without him. But they'll still need to work in some kind of an explanation for his absence. Which is kind of weird: they'll need to explain something nobody actually needs explained. (If they simply never mentioned Frank Underwood again, it's not like anybody watching would be confused.)

four days before the midterms . . . sneaky sneaky

I think it's going to be you, me, and Robin Wright's immediate family watching.

I'm still going to watch. A glutton for punishment.

That ending was shite.

the "surprises" throughout shouldn't have been so predictable. still i dig robin wright's mika brzezinski impression

Was the whole season released? I can get it from my brother-in-law if they did it that way; if it's week-by-week, I'll have to wait.

whole thing -- eight episodes -- is out

Thanks. Will get hold of this pronto.

First episode had a few effective moments. I wish someone had had enough of a sense of humour to add Kevin Spacey's name to the "In Loving Memory" end-credit, though.

Man this season blew.

Tried the first episode and it was dire. Could be a while before I'm bored enough to get through the whole season.

I loved Tom Hammerschmidt flipping out in the second episode: "Analytics?! What the fuck does that even mean!" He was talking about the newspaper industry, not baseball, but I'd love to have a video clip of that on standby.

I'm not hating it so far. Kinnear-Lane aren't especially compelling as villains, but I did like Wright's "Your brother?" riposte. I don't know...they've been scrambling since at least the third or fourth season, and this just seems like more of the same minus Spacey. It still looks good.

kinnear is good i think. surprised by how poor an actress lane comes off as, at least through the first five episodes (got the last three still to go)

I'm a little confused after three episodes, but I think I've been confused since season 4. (The focus seems to be Claire covering up her tracks...I thought they were past that by now.) I continue to love Patricia Clarkson's character, even though--or because--I've never had a clue what she actually does, or why she has the president's ear. She just pops up here and there, acts distracted and conspiratorial and evil at the same time (great shot of her sitting in the restaurant waiting for Durant), then goes away.

I thought Kinnear and Lane were good, but I had a hard time buying these two people who were never mentioned once in previous seasons were supposed to have been so powerful all along. It's one of several things that felt like a huge disconnect to previous years that showed the rushed nature of the writing.

The point where I suddenly felt like the show had gone too far was when they were all sitting around very openly discussing assassination with what seemed to be mid-level staffers. I realize this show has been preposterous since Spacey threw the woman in front of a train but this seemed like a step too far.

Obviously the show isn't going forward after this, but what the fuck happens to Janice?

Patricia Clarkson is so amazing and beautiful and badass she should have been in it more.

maybe the best parts of the series were when they were talking about erasing francis underwood and it worked as a completely non subtle commentary on Spacey.