House Of Cards TV Series

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.

also it's not clear at all how much time had passed from the last season to this one but why was Tom's body completely fresh when it showed up? Did the VP have it in his private cryogenic freezer?

All good questions, especially the heretofore invisibility of Kinnear and Lane. Plausibility has never been a big concern on this show.

Forgot to mention the subtle incorporation of Rosemary's Baby into Claire's movie night (I thought it was going to be Double Indemnity again). Just the theme song, no visuals. Not sure if there's any symbolic connection there.

Handling Spacey's disappearance as basically an "I have to go now, my planet needs me" kludge was really hamfisted. "oh yeah he died btw".

What the world needs now is robin Wright looking dramatic like I need a hole in my head

The big disconnect for me after five episodes is the sudden reemergence of Rachel Posner. Wasn't that all settled two or three seasons ago? Or is Doug Stamper still on the hook for her? I liked Claire throwing the door open to her new cabinet. They really got fouled up by Trump winning--the show was so clearly aiming towards running concurrently with a Clinton presidency. (When they do try to shoehorn Trump in--the 25th amendment, secret meetings with Russians--it's awkwardly transparent.)

W G A S
G
A
F

You're giving me clues about Rachel's centrality to everything...No you're not--you're asking me why I care. I don't really; I'm watching, trying to figure everything out, posting. That's what we do here.

"Barzini's dead. So is Phillip Tattaglia...Moe Greene...Strachi...Cuneo...Today I settled all family business"--when all else fails, turn to The Godfather.

Loved the end of episode 7. They've gone totally Grand Guignol at this point--along with that previous Godfather flourish, they've now made the Rosemary's Baby connection explicit, and they've even thrown some Night of the Hunter in there too. I think that's all they could have done; I'm glad they didn't get earnest and explanatory (we'll see what the final episode brings).

As much as I liked all the things I singled out above, the finale was quite silly. There's a lot of funny lines in this:

http://www.vulture.com/2018/11/house-of-cards-recap-season-6-episode-8-finale.html

I liked the reappearance of Walter Doyle. Even he couldn't get a handle on what the hell going on.

One thing that was ultimately pointless, I thought, were all those flashbacks to Claire's youth. I expected them to lead up to some crucial revelation--circumstantial, or about her personality--but I'm not sure they added much of anything.

foregrounding rosemary's baby with lysistrata to frame flashback claire and president claire's lone convo was a nice final note on that arc in ways i can't get into without being spoilery and same deal with her final convo with 'douglas'. spotty final season though for sure! spacey may be a creep (and the game they play in the last episode with his voice maybe tasteless?) but it's hard not to hear that southern H sometimes ~ "wHy claire" ~ in the silence where it seems his part's been written out

avocado abortion lmao

Didn't attach any significance to it last time I watched a couple of years ago--other than it typified how progressively crazy the show got the last two or three seasons--but it's very tempting right now to see the Underwoods' attempts to overturn/meddle with the 2016 election through the prism of Trump the last couple of months. Not similar in specifics, but in broad strokes--create as much chaos as you can if you're sure to lose, and hold fast to the premise that the office belongs to you--not all that different. James Poniewozik's Audience of One argues that everything Trump does can somehow be traced to all the TV he has absorbed through his life, going all the way back to childhood. I wouldn't be surprised at all if he's familiar with House of Cards, and that S4 is buried somewhere in his feverish insanity as of late.

(Season 5, I should say.)

I alluded to this exchange a couple of years ago, but I've got quote the whole thing--really enjoying the Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? aspects of the Claire-Annette dynamic this time around.

Claire: "I don't think your brother is gonna let up, Annette. Until he gets his ring kissed directly, I think."

Annette: "Reminds me of someone you were married to."

Claire: "Oh, no. Bill and Francis are very different people."

Anette: "Agreed. You know I slept with him once."

Claire: "Your brother?"

Almost three years--I've got to revisit this every so often.

I bet I asked this above somewhere, but: in S1, Peter Russo's self-implosion sets in motion the events that lead to Frank becoming VP, everything orchestrated by Frank himself. But that all starts with the watershed bill being defeated, and Frank seems genuinely enraged about that (and about Claire's betrayal on the bill). If the bill had passed, though, how does he then become VP? The plan that seems so carefully worked out after the bill goes down, did Frank just improvise everything on the spot?