House of Cards and the Narrow Imagination of Dramatic Television

Over the course of the past few months, since whenever it showed up in Netflix on instant watch, I have been slogging my way through Aaron Sorkin's early aughts drama The West Wing. I really have enjoyed the show. It is a liberal fantasy land, in many ways, (one scene where my smug meter nearly exploded was when the president dressed down a conservative radio host in a room full of radio hosts for her use of Leviticus to object to homosexuality) but an entertaining one. There is something thrilling about getting a look behind the scenes--however skewed that look might be--in the halls of power for our country. I am only a couple of seasons in so far, so I really don't know where it goes from here. I can safely assume, given its seven season run, that President Bartlet is reelected. I don't imagine they spend the final four seasons following the gang as they fan out to various lobbying agencies and sit on the boards for big campaign contributors to finally cash in on their years of overwork on Pennsylvania Avenue. But one thing about the show, something that strikes me as nearly entirely different from the great shows currently on television, is that it is positive. There is an occasional shady deal and sometimes bad stuff happens, but in the end it is hopeful. The people who staff the west wing believe in this country and believe in the policies they will spend their time in office fighting for. 

By contrast, during my recovery from surgery a couple of weeks ago I used part of my time to watch David Fincher and Beau Willimon's very different Washington drama, the freshly released House of Cards. Cards is the first full-fledged production sponsored, owned, and produced by Netflix. It stars Kevin Spacey as a completely immoral Machiavellian politician. The majority whip for the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives, the series begins by Spacey's character, Frank Underwood, being denied the cabinet post in the new administration he was promised. His pride hurt, he kicks in to revenge mode, seeking to run over everyone who has spited him, anyone else who might hinder him, and one unfortunate junior member of Congress with a substance abuse problem.

I don't really want to delve too deeply into Cards. I finished it Sunday night and am still forming thoughts--at this point it seems like another extremely well done show with a main character who I hope dies sometime soon. But I think the prominence of shows like Cards, and here I would lump in Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Walking Dead, says quite a lot about how we think of heroes today. In short, we don't really think they exist anymore. We are no longer believers. Our heroes are antiheroes. 

It has been instructive to watch these shows side by side. I don't know what Washington is really like, but I imagine it is neither The West Wing nor House of Cards. But it seems to me as if people these days take the more negative interpretation of something as the truth of the situation. I have had people tell me, for instance, that Mad Men is an accurate reflection of the early 60s. But this is ridiculous. Mad Men is just as much of a caricature of that period as Leave it to Beaver. We just like the darker spin these days. It is somehow gratifying to think that all of those family men we at one point in collective history were encouraged to admire were really just cheating assholes. Sorry, well-dressed cheating assholes.

I don't know what to make of all of this, if anything. The only reason I bring it up is because I imagine that the audience that would have watched The West Wing in the early 2000s is roughly the same crowd who is watching the much different brand of TV today. The West Wing functioned as a sort of liberal escapism from the Bush years, though I don't imagine Jed Bartlet has anything in common with Al Gore. As easy as that is to mock, at least the escapism was tied to what people viewed as noble causes. What are these new shows helping us escape from? The boring world where most people are nice and nondescript? Does Walter White or Don Draper or Rick Grimes or Frank Underwood have any nobility, any quality which is worthy of emulation?

Maybe that is not the point, but to me Draper and Underwood especially are so bad they are no longer even interesting. The best character on Cards is/was (spoiler alert) the now deceased congressman Peter Russo. Russo wasn't a great man, but a good one undone by demons and played upon by a disgusting mastermind. There is nothing interesting about Underwood, he is one-dimensionally bad. And, as Grantland's TV writer Andy Greenwald pointedout, his wife Claire, a thinly-veiled Lady Macbeth, is the result of a character emerging fully formed from a "fire in a metaphor plant."

These bad male leads are all intended to shock, but shock can only be sustained for so long. How surprising is it to see Don Draper womanizing? It might have been somewhat shocking in Season One (I think of that great carousel scene in the final episode of the season), but by now it is beyond tired. Cards started with Underwood choking a dog to death: how can we be shocked by anything else he would do? Walter White went from mild-mannered chemistry teacher to murderer in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. While it was horrifying to see him complicit in the death of a child in the first half season of Season Five, it was not shocking or outside of his character. He has no character left. His descent from pushover teacher to criminal mastermind to sociopath wasn't the slow burn fans of the show, including me, liked to believe. It all happened rather quickly. The past few seasons have just been the aftershocks. Walter hasn't changed. He has been presented with new, sometimes increasingly harrowing situations, but his response has always been the same: calculated self-preservation. That the stakes are higher doesn't reflect a change in character; Walter is simply all-in at this point and will do what needs to be done to try and avoid the ignominious death he deserves.

Reading back through what I have written, it strikes me how disparate the comments are. I think my larger point, and what bothers me most about the current state of TV (and, really, there is a ton of great television out there; I hardly ever watch a movie anymore), of which these bad boy lead men are only an indicator, is that the two main traction points for drama on the avant garde television shows are infidelity and murder. Both are dramatic, yes, but only in a limited way. There are things in life that are dramatic that don't involve cheating or killing. I think this is why I loved the small screen version of Friday Night Lights so much, despite its myriad flaws. The most absurd moment of FNL was when they tried to interject a bit of good old-fashioned killing into the show. It is also why, at the end of a long day when Owen is in bed and Clara and I are tired, we fire up an episode of Parenthood, perhaps my favorite show these days, on Netflix and trust that, money problems aside, Adam Braverman will never resort to manufacturing drugs to make ends meet. Crosby, on the other hand. . .