Time To Cast Another Vote For House Of Cards

As much as I enjoy road-tripping -- which is a lot, by the way -- I can't pretend it isn't hard for me to be away from my DVR. You never know which channels your hotel is going to get -- how many anguished tweets did you see last summer from travellers belatedly realizing they weren't going to be able to watch Breaking Bad live because they'd checked in somewhere without AMC? And when all you want is a nice 30 Rock to fall asleep to, doesn't it seem like every other local channel dropped all their syndicated shows other than The Big Bang Theory? When my esteemed colleague David T. Cole and I road-tripped up to Portland, Oregon last year, we could have faced all the usual travelling people problems, but we happened to have planned our trip at exactly the right time: the day after our arrival, Netflix gave us the gift of House Of Cards, and that was the rest of our vacation TV viewing sorted.

A remake of the beloved British series of the same name, House Of Cards follows House Majority Whip Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) as he maneuvers his way through Washington, advancing his own agenda through back channels and...well, murder, also, sometimes. Periodically, he turns to the camera and addresses us directly to give us a glimpse at his reasoning/process/endgame -- a device imported from the British original that, because it's the showiest element, got a lot of attention when the show first dropped; Spacey even spoofed it at the Emmys last fall. If you haven't seen it, this might sound like the kind of self-conscious nonsense that would distract you from the proceedings, but you kind of forget that this is unusual for a TV character to do, maybe because the nature of the series's distribution model means you may watch a whoooooooole bunch of episodes of it in a row without taking breaks for anything else.

The nature and subject matter of the show make it kind of perfect for Netflix, actually: the plot is so propulsive and scandalous that it's perfect to binge on. As the first season starts, Frank is watching the inauguration of a new President whose election he was instrumental in securing. He's been promised the post of Secretary of State for his troubles, but soon learns that he's going to be screwed over, so Frank has to start enacting a new plan to get where he wants to go -- which requires him to cultivate both a troubled Congressman and an ambitious journalist. Meanwhile, Frank's wife Claire, who runs a charity, has Machiavellian plans of her own.

The fun of Cards is in seeing politics dramatized closer to the way they probably actually are, as opposed to the amber glow that bathes the characters of, say, The West Wing. Any character might do any thing at any time to get ahead and/or scramble over another -- which is also true of Scandal, I suppose, but unlike Scandal, Cards doesn't have to pique our attention with a pre-commercial mini-scandal every ten minutes. Also, there's swearing! And boobs!

The first season, no one really knew how to cover House Of Cards, because (presumably) everyone watched it at a different pace -- some racing through like a congressman on cocaine, others nursing it like an elegant Washington wife nurses a glass of white wine. But the excitement that seems to be attending Season 2 -- you probably follow at least one person on Twitter who lives on the eastern seaboard and has implored Netflix to drop the season a day early so that they can spend their snow day watching it -- seems to suggest that we're all going to gobble it up like a web reporter gobbles ramen in her shithole of an apartment. I'll be spending the next eleven hours counting down.

House Of Cards Season 2 is on Netflix starting February 14, 2014.