It’s television upfronts this week, the time every year when the broadcast networks announce which lucky shows have earned subsequent seasons, which unfortunates are getting cancelled, and most importantly, which of the many new projects in development will be going forward—and then try to convince advertisers that they should be excited to buy ad spots in these new and returning shows, and to be part of a new, rearranged schedule.

The enthusiasm the network executives will display at their presentations to advertisers, and the amusing site of actors like Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman dressing up as their dueling liberal and libertarian characters from Parks and Recreation to do schedule announcements, is deceptive. Many of the shows that are being presented as the next great thing will prove to be creative or commercial failures: NBC, for example, cancelled almost all of the shiny new shows it offered up to advertisers and to viewers with such great hope last fall, and is starting over with shows like a sitcom from Michael J. Fox and a drama starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Dracula. And the fancy presentations and celebratory air at the upfronts disguises that the process by which the networks select which new shows they’re moving forward with is hugely expensive and exhausting. The networks may put as many as 100 shows into development, going through the process of writing the pilots, casting actors for them, pulling together sets and wardrobes for those actors to work with (or investing in special effects), shooting said pilots, testing them extensively in front of audiences, and then making their choices. It costs an awful lot of money, and leaves a lot of people waiting a long time to learn if they’ll have jobs.

Last week, when I spoke with Kevin Spacey, who stars as villainous Democratic Majority Whip Frank Underwood in Netflix’s adaptation of the British series House of Cards, one of the reasons he mentioned for wanting to work with Netflix rather than another outlet was the way Netflix approached the development process.

“What was great that they were the only network that said ‘You don’t have to do a pilot,’” he said. “Because David Fincher and I really didn’t want to do a pilot, because when you do a pilot, you’re kind of obligated to spend 45 minutes establishing all of the characters. And we didn’t want to do that. We just wanted to get on with telling a story, and tell a story over a long period of time. And they said ‘We believe in you, we believe in David, we love this series from Britain. How many do you want to do?’ And we were like, ‘Um, two seasons?’ And they were like ‘Okay!’ It was a risk on their part, but they’ve been great partners.”
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If you need a Sunday reminder that Hollywood’s critiques of Washington can be a little too pessimistic, check out this video of Robin Wright and my colleague at the Enough Project, JD Stier, talking about their work together in the Congo on Mitchell Reports with Andrea Mitchell:

One of the most interesting things in Netflix’s adaptation of House of Cards was Wright’s performance as Claire Underwood, the wife of scheming House Majority Whip Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey). In a sharply-observed storyline, Claire ran a non-profit that was initially focused on cleaning up the Washington, DC watershed (something that’s a real-life issue), but that abruptly shifted its focus to clean water in Africa, a trendier cause, as Claire sought to consolidate her influence independent of her husband, even if it wasn’t what her organization best-outfitted to do. But even though that plot was a sharp critique of non-profit cause-shopping, Wright’s real-life work is a reminder that, unlike her character, not everything’s so grim in Washington. Now we just need to sign Wright up for a project that will let her be the dramatic equivalent of Leslie Knope, and remind viewers at home that there are efforts worth investing in.

Veep returned to HBO this season a much-improved show. Where last season, Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) seemed like a talentless flake with nothing but contempt for public service, this year, the show seems to have followed the same path as NBC’s Parks and Recreation, which began by portraying its main character, Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) as an incompetent object of ridicule but found that a more efficient means of ridiculing the problems of government was to make her a champion of right in a blinkered system. This year, Selina turns out to be pretty good at a process she thinks little of, stumping for candidates in an otherwise hopeless midterm election, and that success wins her some real influence in a policy area. And Veep‘s satire is sharper for having a wider target area than the Veep herself.

I’m glad to see the show appears to be hitting its stride, but Veep‘s return also raises a larger question. Given that the presidency is the highest office in the land, the seat of the greatest political and moral dilemmas, and the job that places the most strain and restrictions on the personal life and the family of the person who holds it, why are our contemporary political shows so fixated on the Vice Presidency, a comparatively minor office, instead?

This obsession stretches across comedy and drama. In Veep, the invisibility of the president has become a running, Waiting For Godot-like joke. Parks and Recreation snagged a guest appearance from Vice President Joe Biden, and made it out to seem like Leslie Knope was even more floored by the prospect of meeting him than she might have been to be in touch with President Obama himself. Scandal, the rare show that has the president as a main character, also spends substantial time on his vice president, a social conservative and devout Christian who effectively stages a coup while the president himself recovers from an assassination attempt. And House of Cards featured as its narrative endgame disgruntled Democratic Congressman Frank Underwood manipulating the Vice President into resigning so he could run for his old job as governor of Pennsylvania so he could then maneuver a himself into being appointed Vice President, a job that the show has suggested comes with little real power or influence, and would require Frank to work closely with the President, who Frank has come to despise after he reneged on a promise to appoint Frank Secretary of State. So what is it about this significantly symbolic job that’s made pop culture more interested in it than even the presidency?

For one thing, the Vice Presidency is an interesting place to explore the resentments of people who have finished in second place in the running for their party’s nomination, and the difficulties of building a coalition government within the White House itself. On Scandal, Vice President Sally Langston (Kate Burton) is a religious conservative who has tethered her career to the presidency of a man who is significantly more moderate than she is, to the point that she finds some of his policies distasteful, and finds herself choking down bile in an attempt to wait out the Fitzgerald Grant administration in the hopes of an endorsement when she tries to run again. When Grant was incapacitated by an assassination attempt and Sally became acting president, she functionally organized a coup, acting as if Grant was dead and she’d be occupying the presidency permanently. It was a dark take on the idea that the president’s most difficult foes might actually be in his own party, and an interesting one, given the positive relationship that President Obama and his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton built after an exceptionally bitter primary campaign. But if you’re writing a soap opera, it’s easier to get drama out of continued bitterness and clashing ambition than out of growing mutual respect and comity.
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In The New Republic, Marin Cogan dismantles a central assumption of Netflix’s House of Cards, the idea that all female reporters in Washington are constantly sleeping with sources for stories. The show got Washington Herald-turned-Slugline reporter Zoe Barnes’ arc wrong, she argues, not because no reporter ever succumbs to the personal charms of a staffer or member of Congress, but because the show reverses the dynamic. Instead of throwing on v-neck t-shirts and push-up bras and heading over to Congressmen’s townhouses, the more common dynamic is powerful men in Washington putting the moves on women they assume are interested in them. Marin reports:

As a political reporter for GQ, I’ve been jokingly asked whether I ever posed for the magazine and loudly called a porn star by a senior think-tank fellow at his institute’s annual gala. In my prior job as a Hill reporter, one of my best source relationships with a member of Congress ended after I remarked that I looked like a witch who might hop on a broom in my new press-badge photo and he replied that I looked like I was “going to hop on something.” One journalist remembers a group of lobbyists insisting that she was not a full-time reporter at a major publication but a college coed. Another tried wearing scarves and turtlenecks to keep a married K Street type from staring at her chest for their entire meeting. The last time she saw him, his wedding ring was conspicuously absent; his eyes, however, were still fixed on the same spot. Almost everyone has received the late-night e-mail—“You’re incredible” or “Are you done with me yet?”—that she is not entirely sure how to handle. They’re what another lady political writer refers to as “drunk fumbles” or “the result of lonely and insecure people trying to make themselves feel loved and/or important.”…“I think journalism schools should have workshops for young female reporters on managing old men who have no game and think, because you’re listening to them intently and probing what they think and feel, that you’re romantically interested, rather than conducting an interview,” says Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor at The Atlantic. “Every female reporter I know has had this issue at one time or another.”

Marin’s piece clarified for me the reasons I reacted so viscerally to the element of the show that portrayed Zoe as the initiator of her affair with Frank, and her colleague Janice’s revelation that, despite slut-shaming Zoe, she too was sleeping her way up the ladder. The arc wasn’t just a male fantasy—it was a fantasy that erases an ugly reality by inverting it. It’s not Frank’s fault for stepping out on his marriage, or putting Zoe in a position where she feels like she has to put up with his advances to get a story. An ugly scene between them in which Zoe asks Frank “If you just want the girl who will do your bidding, you have that. Why do you have to fuck me?…Why do you need this? You don’t seem to get any pleasure out of it. I certainly don’t,” is, in the framework of the show, at least partially her due for being naive enough to think that what was going on was something other than, as Frank puts this, “a transaction between two consenting adults.”

What Marin is talking about is a very specific form of sexual entitlement. But this week also saw the debut of Said To Lady Journos, a compilation of the way female reporters have been harassed on the job. “If you got shrapnel in your ass, I’d be happy to take it out,” a contractor says to a reporter in Iraq. “Why don’t we make it a camera, and turn it on you?” a city councilman tells a reporter who is asking permission to tape record their interview. And these are the things that people are saying to female journalists in person.

In combination, it makes the thought of recommending journalism as a career to young women kind of exhausting. Be ambitious? Pop culture will tell people that you’re an amoral blogslut. Get sexually harassed on the job? You were probably Zoe Barnes-ing it up. This is not to say that no woman with a reporter’s notebook and a hard pass has ever behaved poorly, or that journalistic sauciness doesn’t make for compelling drama. But when it comes to sexism fatigue, the Evil Girl Reporter has me particularly tuckered out.

New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum and I got together for a Bloggingheads episode about Scandal and House of Cards, and towards the end of it, Emily made a critically important point that I hadn’t considered before: we’re really at the first moment, post-West Wing, when political shows are emerging as their own form of procedural that can operate in both comedy and drama.

Political shows are everywhere, in all media, and part of what’s striking about them is how varied they are in setting and form. Parks and Recreation, which follows a local city councilwoman and employees of a small-town public works agency, seems likely to get a sixth season, given NBC’s ratings woes. The network took another stab at political comedy with 1600 Penn, a family comedy that happens to be set in the White House. ABC’s Nashville featured a municipal mayoral race prominently in its first season, though it’s an open question whether that plot will remain a significant part of the show, and the network has ridden to ratings success with Scandal, which makes the president an object of sexual desire, and explores the desire of his family, staff, and lover to possess both him and the power that he embodies. CBS is bringing politics into the police procedural with Golden Boy, which tracks the rise of an ambitious young cop to the police commissioner’s office. Starz recently ended its dark political drama Boss, but HBO’s sitcom Veep, which takes a similarly biting perspective on people in power, but from a mocking rather than a grand angle, is returning for its second season this spring. And new media outlets have their own spins on political procedurals as well: Netflix made a big push around its glossy, expensive adaptation of the British miniseries House of Cards, while last year, Hulu debuted a low-budget story about the staff of a midwestern political campaign, Battleground.

Precisely because this is an emerging space, it means that the conventions and values of political procedurals are very much up for grabs. What will the stock cast of characters in political procedurals be? So far, the formula of the West Wing seems to have stuck, with shows focusing on a politician and the relationships of (mostly) his staff and surrogates to that figure. The tone varies: the candidate was more of a distant figure in Battleground than in other shows, and the president is alternately warm and fuzzy in 1600 Penn and an object of intense sexual passion in Scandal. In Veep, the Vice President is risible, in Parks and Recreation, Leslie Knope is kooky but irresistible, and in Boss, Tom Kane was an almost demonic force, as is Frank Underwood on House of Cards. Interestingly, most of these shows have spent more time on governance than on campaigns: campaigns make for a great season structure and allow for a certain number of shenanigans on the trail, but you can’t do them often. Governance stories are harder to pull off, but they can be a way to bring in more characters and set up more complex long arcs, as has been the case with Leslie’s five-years-long fight for Pawnee Commons.

But even though a lot of these shows are spending time on the work of government rather than the process of getting into it, it’s far from clear what their views on government are. In House of Cards, Frank Underwood has no particular attachment to any ideology or policy—the federal government is basically a chew toy for him in his pursuit of self-aggrandizement. Veep wants to satirize the meaninglessness of political ritual in Washington, but spends much more time treating its titular Vice President as an eager flake. In both Scandal and Nashville, the president and the mayor, respectively, are underqualified, pretty-boy stalking horses for other interests. Parks and Recreation is unique in that it’s able to both recognize both the ludicrousness of political ritual and still believe that government can do a lot to make people’s lives better.

As a critic, I often think I’m harder on shows that wade into politics than those that don’t even bother, in part because it’s what I know and what I prioritize, I want badly for those shows to get politics right, and it’s easier for me to spot errors of logic and procedure. I might have graded Golden Boy higher, for example, if it was just a standard police procedural rather than a story about how a rising police commissioner decided what his values as a cop were. But thinking about political shows as an emerging genre makes me want to fight even harder for them to be smart, and to ask good and interesting questions (which is not to say they have to be inherently progressive to work). It would be an awful shame if the conventions of a new style of procedural were getting set and they turned out to be as lazy and cliche as some of what’s on offer today.

Emily Nussbaum, in this week’s New Yorker, argues that ABC’s Scandal, an evening soap opera by Shonda Rhimes about the inner circle of a moderate Republican president, is the more compelling show about politics than Netflix’s remake of the British classic series House of Cards, which follows the machinations of an apolitical but Democratic Majority Whip. “Like much genre fiction, ‘Scandal’ uses its freedom to indulge in crazy what-ifs,” she writes. “What if everyone but the President knew that the election was fixed? What if the President tried to divorce his pregnant wife?”

What she doesn’t say, but what her piece helped clarify for me, is the what-ifs that make all the difference. House of Cards asks us to imagine a tired question: what if the people who run things in Washington were amoral manipulators interested only in the accumulation of their own power? It’s a scenario we’ve considered before, and the results are the same: the show’s conviction that its come to new and enlightening conclusions mostly seems smug. Scandal‘s big what-if, by contrast, is genuinely fresh, and actually advanced by the utterly bonkers conspiracy theory at the heart of the second season. As it’s emerged that President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn) is the beneficiary of the decision by his wife Mellie (a tremendous Bellamy Young) and his top aides, including his now-chief-of-staff Cyrus Beene (Jeff Perry) and his sometimes-lover Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), to steal the election in collaboration with a nefarious billionaire manufacturer of voting machines, Scandal‘s asked, over and over again, what makes someone a good vessel for the talents and ambitions of other people, not what makes a man a great leader in and of himself. It’s a terrific question, and one that exposes the central lie of the presidency, that someone can do it alone and do it well, and that the person who sits in the Oval Office actually has the full capacities to make decisions for the country.

It’s a question that presents a problem for the show, because its main character, Olivia, a fixer of Washington scandals, has no particular political ambitions, or policy convictions—she appears to not have been of Grant’s party, but was talked into working for him—and the main reason she is so passionate about Grant’s ascendency was that she fell for him. Scandal began as a problem-of-the-week show in which Olivia’s genius helped all manner of unsavory Washington types get themselves out of trouble, and occasionally caused justice to be done. But as the show’s become a much more serialized drama, and the problems have moved out of Olivia’s office, she’s become less interesting, even less necessary, to the show that was ostensibly built around her.

But it’s in the supporting cast that the answers to that question of why Fitz, a man with a great head of hair and a corrosive relationship with his politician father, but no particularly discernible mind for politics and a tendency to get distracted by his emotions, is worth supporting even to the point of criminality and utter moral compromise, get truly fascinating. Cyrus, who is gay, believes that living his life openly and honestly with his husband James means that he never could have fully exercised his political talents fully. “I was not made to be chief of staff,” he told James in an agonizing scene in which he confessed to stealing the election. “I was made to be the president.” Fitz’s emptiness, even his distraction by his affair with Olivia, were part of what made him perfect for Cyrus to attach himself to. His lack of interest in policy or judgement in matters of foreign affairs made Cyrus essential to Fitz. It wasn’t merely that Cyrus could ride Fitz’s coattails to the White House—it was that he would have something to do when he got there.
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This post discusses, in its entirety, the first season of Netflix’s House of Cards.

Over the past two days, I watched all of Netflix’s most ambitious original series yet, a remake of the British miniseries House of Cards. While the show raises interesting questions about both television business models and narrative structures, and while it’s deeply entertaining to watch Kevin Spacey, as Democratic Majority Whip Frank Underwood, chomp scenery and occasionally on Kate Mara’s ambitious young reporter Zoe Barnes, I couldn’t help but feel that House of Cards has a fatal flaw. For all that the show looks attractive, and even half-authentic to the District sometimes, and for all House of Cards is trying its darndest to replicate the repellant chilliness of the British original, it’s actually far too nice to the people and institutions the show would like to skewer. And that’s because House of Cards itself falls prey to some of the kinds of thinking that are most pernicious in the nation’s capital.

Part of the problem is House of Cards‘ insistence that there’s a grandness, rather than a grandiosity, to Frank—while the show believes he’s malign, it’s still convinced that he’s Milton’s Satan rather than Dostoyevsky’s, who Arturo Perez-Reverte once described as “petty. A civil servant with dirty nails.” He declares in the first episode that “My job is to clear the pipes and keep the sludge moving,” and House of Cards seems largely to agree with his assessment. Frank may hold up an education bill to get a version that suits his ends, or derail the nomination of the man who was chosen to be Secretary of State over him, but he does get a bill to the President’s desk roughly on deadline, and once the other man is out of the way, speeds the confirmation of his hand-picked replacement. What really distinguishes him from his colleagues, however, and what the show portrays as the source of Frank’s efficacy, however unattractive it may be, is his treatment of power as a higher good than policy. “Leave ideology to the armchair generals,” he says in one of his many editorial asides to the camera. “It does me no good.”

House of Cards is full of acid portraits of people whose conviction has made them weak or duplicitous without being excellent at it. Even if the show has some sympathy for their dedication to and principal on the issues, it never gives them triumphs over Frank, and frequently suggests that passion makes them obvious, slow, or otherwise unfit to play the game that Frank has mastered so well, his competence overriding our moral calculus. During a subplot that involves the passage of a major education reform bill, Frank’s partner on the legislation, a life-long liberal reformer who’s a stand-in for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy turns out to be a naive patsy without the stomach for compromise or maneuver. “I could put my mind to policy, but I’m no good at this brand of politics,” the man tells Frank in agreeing to take the fall for a leak of his proposed bill that garners negative press coverage, and to let Frank take over writing the next draft. His actual ideas about the issues are never mentioned, simply summed up by Zoe as “very far left wing” for a headline. Somewhere in Massachusetts, Kennedy is rotating in his grave fast enough to dislodge the dirt above him so he can haunt House of Cards writer Beau Willimon for this perfidy.
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Apparently, David Fincher is telling Netflix that $100 million isn’t enough for him to produce 26 episodes of his remake of the British masterpiece House of Cards. It’s not entirely clear yet whether MRC, the company that is producing the show for Netflix, will ante up or whether the project will collapse. But either way, the debate over that project–and the news that Netflix is considering picking up another expensive project, Fox castoff Terra Nova, illustrate the challenges of original content upstarts like Netflix, Hulu, Yahoo and Amazon as they seek to create hit shows.

The logic of the House of Cards remake is more in its constituent parts than as a whole. Fincher is an immensely talented and acclaimed director with fans who will follow any project he’s involved with, and he is very buzzy after the success of his Facebook origin story The Social Network. House of Cards is a venerable project with a pedigree that could appeal to fans of British-inflected drama, particularly riding the coattails of the Downton Abbey craze. I get why Netflix would want that prestige. Like Lillyhammer, the House of Cards project has names attached that make people sit up and think, and production values that are frankly much better than Hulu’s Battleground.

But taken together, I’m not sure the project ever made sense. There’s no particular creative mandate for the remake, no equivalent to the Afghanistan war that makes Sherlock feel like a fresh update on Arthur Conan Doyle’s character. The original show was 12 hour-long episodes, and the American order would more than double it, for no particularly discernible reason other than Netflix’s desire to have a show as long as a standard American television order. Fincher has a well-established reputation for being prickly and not particularly cost-conscious, which may not be great qualities for a company that, as it gets into the business, wants a hitch-free success.

Then, there’s Terra Nova, which has approximately nothing in common with the other shows in Netflix original content pool. It isn’t a resurrection of a show with huge cultural cachet that was killed before its time and could bring in a rabid pool of long-time fans, like Arrested Development. It doesn’t have a hook with an actor or a director, like Steven Van Zandt in Lillyhammer or Fincher with House of Cards. America’s basically just indicated that it doesn’t much want an incoherent and dull science fiction show decked out with the occasional dinosaur, and Fox has indicated it doesn’t think it can make money off the concept. So the appeal for Terra Nova is nigh-unfathomable, unless it wants a reputation as a company that dats off network castoffs.

All in all, these are weird investments for Netflix when it could be spending some money, say, following Game of Thrones‘ success and adapting a popular book series, or buying a show from a beloved auteur like Dan Harmon, or any one of a number of options. I get that Netflix is reaching for everything at once. But there’s nothing wrong with spending less and being slightly less grand if the project the company ends up funding is actually the sum of its parts.