Tuesday, June 9, 2015

House of Cards Indeed

The first season of House of Cards was plausible and entertaining, like a real house of cards, the second season was implausible but entertaining, like a dramatically positioned, fantastically piled house of cards, and the third season was stupid, foolish and unentertaining, like fallen cards, flat and splat.

It was gloriously brazen reckless to kill Zoe Baird shortly in the second season, since she had charisma, did the actress have another opportunity?

In the third season the major addition was the plagiarist biographer with crazy hair, but why?  The hair and its actor were unwatchable.

Season Three President Underwood says nobody cares about Social Security, he wants to take money from it to fund job subsidies, for jobs like washing dishes.  The cynical Frank Underwood I knew from the first season would never consider touching the third rail of American politics!  This is just crazy plotting, something went terribly wrong in the arc of season three.  Then the stupid showrunner wants us to thing this wouldn't cause an outrage.  This is a shark jump of record breaking breadth.

The main problem seems to be that the great Sarah Treem, who wrote season one, left to write the intriguing, nuanced, and adult first season of "The Affair".

Season one Underwood sweet talked and bamboozled people, it was a lot of fun, but season three Underwood just yells and bullies and gripes and mopes.

The worst of all this putrid decaying corpse of a once-great series was the Doug character, who spends the whole season either blank-faced or enraged and crying and destroying cellphones and laptops, thoroughly miserable and unlikeable, not a good looking actor to begin with, he was like Gollum without the charm and warmth.

I may sue this wretched showrunner Beau Willimon with ruining once great characters, Frank Underwood and Claire Underwood.

Clearly this yet another case of an American show that is closely modeled on a European show, but going completely off the rails when it has used up all the ideas from the original.  All of season three's drama were standard soap opera junk tropes.

"Veep" is a delightful comedy that is firmly grounded in the reality of Washington, but this decrepit senile "House of Cards" is just shitty cornball melodrama conceived by some Hollywood Bubble pinhead.

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