a lot of thoughts on television political drama
A reviewer at.....Slate? I wanna say Slate, in an argument that the US House of Cards doesn’t count as political drama, compared the show to Game of Thrones. In my lingering irritation at the article - um, spoiler alert, the titular game is not musical chairs - I started to condense some thoughts about what, exactly, political drama is, and how it works when it works.
I go by a broader definition than I think folks tend to have. “Political drama” is not limited to horse-race election year stories, because politics is not limited to electoral politics. Elections come prepackaged with narrative convention - there’s a well-defined time frame, there’s high stakes that conveniently don’t need to be explained, there’s definitely going to be a winner and a loser (eventually) - and therefore they tend to make for the least interesting drama. The real stuff of policy can make for engaging cable news viewing if you care about policy, but it’s rarely good for fiction.
All narratives have political messages, whether or not their characters hold office or even whether they ever cast a single vote. Mad Men is political enough to get a shout-out from the actual president. The L&O franchise has a political line to sell us about crime and punishment in major urban centers. The politics of Sex and the City wouldn’t map onto the conventional American l-r spectrum, fifteen years ago or now, but the characters’ embrace of capitalism and sex positivity in equal measure is a twentieth-century take on classical liberalism, a politics of honest, even joyful, expression and development of the self, and that the selves in question were female was (and remains) a charged political statement. The distrust of all authorities ( including, indirectly, Western religion) that’s built into Pretty Little Liars is political. Breaking Bad’s farcical effort to insulate its protagonist from societal context was a political statement. There is much in the world that cannot be altered by public policy and ought not be subject to a popular vote, but there is nothing that can transpire between human beings which is not, on some level, political.
So, somewhere in between. The best way I can describe the cluster of media that I think of as political drama is this: “a story largely concerning, or centered around, power brokers in the upper echelons of a recognized and/or self-declared sovereign group or territory.” Counterintuitive borderline cases which I hope illustrate my point: (1) while Parks & Rec is quite a good show about public service and municipal government, I don’t really consider it political drama, (2) The Originals, as a credible clash of kings - and consorts and princes and heads of other occasionally-hostile sovereign groups - with distinct philosophies and ruling styles, is a political drama.
Being as emphatic as I am on the idea that “politics” extends past the occasional head count, I am a huge fan of narratives which contextualize your more conventionally-recognizable political establishments with other social institutions which we like to pretend are apolitical, such as Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones, and The Wire. This is an extraordinarily tricky thing to pull off. It not only strips the narrative of the ability to rely on some very powerful subconscious narrative, moral and, yes, political expectations, but it in fact must work against a whole host of conscious and subconscious beliefs that much or all of the audience expects to have reinforced.
Among the strongest of those beliefs is the way that on some level, most people still think “our democracy is a Good Thing, therefore all legitimate results and byproducts of our democracy must by definition be Good Things, and anything that is Not Good is the result of individual moral failings or a perversion of the process that is a Good Thing.” The Wire demonstrates, or even earns, its Greatest Drama Ever candidacy by its ability to do something that sounds so obvious: recognize that modern social and political choices are, in fact, political choices, some of which are made, and all of which are permitted, by duly elected holders of public office. Even among those who feign worldliness by a vague but sweeping denunciation of “all” politics as corrupt and useless, the naïve beliefs that politics can be neatly cordoned off from everyday life and that all political decisions are made with malicious intent by theatrically vindictive sociopaths are extremely uncomfortable to challenge. The Wire methodically stomps on each of these assumptions. Royce, Davis, and Carcetti, whatever else they may or may not be, are legitimate holders of public office; they’re no saints, but they’re no monsters, either; their influence over the BPD is banal, insidious, and, in the long run, likely more constraining than principled hardlining or showy extortion.
It’d be a mistake to expect that kind of perspective from all political drama. Game of Thrones/ASOIAF takes a different tack in removing its analysis of power and politics as far as possible from Western liberal democracies. While (because?) their Overton window looks nothing like ours, but the epic is built on political philosophies, styles of governance, and even personalities translated from real life, often with surprising modernity. Varys the ruthless statist spymaster wouldn’t be out of place at the NSA. Tywin’s grasping consolidation and compounding of his social privilege, nursing of old grudges, and desperate macro- and microlevel exercise of a core belief that the weak exist to receive the abuse of the strong aligns him squarely with key players in any number of modern hard-right movements. Dorne’s uncomfortable relationship with the Westerosi federation, the North’s provincial conservatism, the weird, hypocritical sexual mores scattered across the Seven Kingdoms and their warping of the players and the game - these political tensions, and the way they tie in with larger Westerosi society and even the individual psychological development of the characters, are what makes the series work, not Puff the Magic Barbie Princess.
BSG’s occupation of that tense middle ground between “total metaphor” and “overt relevance” is a big part of what made it possibly the most ambitious show I’ve ever seen. And a lot of what it did best, I’m actually fairly certain was unconscious. Roslin, for example (what are you, new here?) was a really smart examination not just of someone with political skill, but why that skill usually goes unused in people like her. I actually do think that, if asked, most of the PTBs would have initially said that she was not merely sincere but objective and thorough when she insisted that she had never wanted anything to do with politics but she just happened to trip and fall into the inner circle of the President of the Twelve Colonies, and then she discovered her previously completely untapped knack for running a government single-handedly. But - as loath as I am to agree with Romo, of all characters - she reads much more to me like someone who learned early in life that the things she was capable of were out of her reach, and so worked hard to clamp down her ambitions. She resents the “not smart” backdoor gladhanding because it’s the kind of thing that would’ve shut her out if the worst-case scenario hadn’t happened; she chafes so badly over actually running for office because she (correctly) anticipates being judged on style rather than substance, and style is a game that is stacked against her hard, even in her world.
BSG struggled the most with political drama when it attempted to address specific 21st century American political ~issues within the fictional Colonial government. I’d argue that this was partially a…good problem? The more foreign and fantastic elements of the world were, generally, quite solid and consistent enough that they couldn’t support the particulars of issues like class and choice in a way that’d be recognizable to the intended audience. While I get, and to some extent agree with, the criticisms that those episodes were narrative weak spots, I don’t know that this is the only way to evaluate whether or not this was, for lack of a better word, a good thing. I think the attempt to engage in cultural conversation was a brave choice, and an interesting one. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it bombed, but BSG shot high.
Part of the problem was the same problem as the one that became particularly glaring in the post-Sorkin seasons of The West Wing: Moore et al, like Wells et al, were highly uncomfortable applying the necessary critical perspective on their own world. They had great rote knowledge of the talking points on an extensive but finite list of current events, but they just didn’t get, or want to get, politics in terms of the practice and philosophy of medium-to-large-scale power. This leads to a lot of technical narrative problems, but the most specific one is that if you take those superficial buzzwords and you try to apply them as sincere motivations for actual people, you get a whole lot of logic holes. (As is true IRL, ofc: if homophobes are so devoted to Leviticus, why do they eat shellfish? &c.) In order to write well-rounded characters that are credible as politicians, it’s necessary to consciously grasp not only that everybody lies, but that within the political arena there are a decent-sized handful of reasonably predictable factors which influence the shape of untruths both deliberate and unconscious.
The least solid aspect of this for me is the way the show evoked the War on Terror. As I said above with the social stuff, I do think that the show’s acknowledgement that it was a part of a cultural conversation is a worthy artistic goal. At the time, there were certain things that just Were Not Said, some conversations that just would not be had straightforwardly. The problem, though, with translating 21st-century American politics to a post-apocalyptic survival situation often meant accepting and backhandedly validating a lot of rhetoric about a zero-sum choice between liberty and safety, as if our post-9/11 military actions happened in some hermetically sealed vacuum from a Reagan-vintage obsession with consolidating and exponentially inflating executive branch military capabilities. Sometimes it worked - the S1 episode featuring Roslin, Kara, and Two appropriately presented and brutally undercut a hypothetical that was particularly popular at the time - but often it didn’t.
DC drama is a formidable subset of political drama, not least because these shows often have little in common besides location. On House of Cards, power comes from being skillful. In The West Wing, power comes from being right. On Scandal, power comes from being indispensable.
Scandal’s placement of its narrative priority’s locus of power (and numerous other loci of power) outside of public office is, perhaps counterintuitively, a pretty radical political statement on the nature of who can acquire power in the US, and who can be seen as having political power. Drawing our eyes away from Fitz and toward the people whose labor and support those of his station are expected to take for granted is in and of itself a pretty intense political statement. Scandal is, rightly, noted for being leagues ahead of most network dramas in terms of diversity; Rhimes is, rightly, side-eying decision-makers for whom a spectrum of American faces and experiences isn’t a given. Scandal is about players who look like America, not like the American traditional power structure. It’s about the people who, if we were the meritocracy we claim to be, would stand a solid chance of being the ones running shit. But that meritocracy doesn’t exist, and because the show is told from the POV of people without any illusion that it does, Scandal can take for granted certain political truths that most Serious Political Dramas can hardly bear to look in the eyes. As Cyrus says, it’s not fair, it’s America.
One of those truths is about the power of appearances. Scandal is particularly insightful about not just about politics and power, but about the power of political perception. Olivia has built a career around being substantively indispensable to people who need her to repair their image. Image matters not because it is an objective reflection of existing reality, but because the presentation of certain information, whether true or false, has very real consequences. This, in turn, implies another truth: that information can be controlled, that, as Harrison says, there’s a level of Washington that most players don’t even know about, and it wields a power that’s all the more terrifying for all that we know we can’t see it.
This puts an interesting twist on the power plays where the underrated-by-everyone wild card is the man in the Oval Office. Command relishes Fitz’s purported irrelevance; the Defiance conspirators, including Olivia, patronize and coddle Fitz as a can’tidade who’s too inspiring and precious up on his pedestal to actually get out and fight his own battles, due as much admiration and as little respect as THE REPUBLIC!!!! in whose name they spin their lies and scheme their schemes. And no matter how many times he gets off his ass and reminds them all he’s just competent enough to be dangerous, they’re all shocked when it happens. The Oval Office itself sits right at the fulcrum between the soft power of appearance and the hard power of B-613, and none of the players get how important the President himself is. L’ÉTAT, C’EST FITZ, and if that thought doesn’t give you nightmares you’re probably a Terminator.
In some meta way, the narrative-creates-reality perspective of Scandal harkens back to the dorky know-it-all granddaddy of American political dramas, The West Wing. TWW itself, of course, was desperately earnest, but the narrative was in and of itself part of the general political experience of the time frame as it aired. I’ve seen a lot of reviewers, and I honestly don’t know if I’m skewing my interpretation that this is a more popular view among non-Americans, that the election in S4 was heavy-handed, that Ritchie was too obviously a buffoon, that it was too clearly a sop to moderate and liberal coastal- and/or city-dwellers feeling sore about the Bush years. To which I say: yes, and you have NO IDEA how badly we needed it. Even this paternalistic, limited, dumbed-down, false-equivalence-packed sop was a goddamn lifeline when we couldn’t turn on the television or sit down at Christmas dinner without hearing about how we were treasonous weak-willed bleeding-heart morons who were so determined in our crafty sabotage of poor baffled Rull ‘Murkans that mass summary execution was the only reasonable course of action. I’ve seen viewers who seem to be under the impression that Ritchie was an unfair caricature of GWB, and OH HOW I WISH THAT WERE TRUE. Look, it’s true that the anger from the Tea Party types is a lot about people funneling their desperate anxiety over the economy into paranoid racism, but they didn’t come out of nowhere. They were all voters ten years ago.
Moving to some quick, slightly spoilery thoughts about the newest of DC political dramas, House of Cards, and why if you haven’t watched it yet you should.
As a show, House of Cards has embraced the lurid, pulpy potential of the modern antihero trend, plus a deliciously bleak worldview. Frank is a theatrical, even Shakespearean, character, with his dry, overwrought observations to the audience on his catapult to power. It’s certainly a fair observation that Underwood is in a whole other league as most of his opponents. But I really disagree with that as a way to objectively assess artistic merit. I think it’s a fun thought experiment to see what happens when you set Cyrus Beene on the Bartlet Administration.
And it certainly fits into the “political drama” genre. Hill staffers seem to love House of Cards. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the show is a documentary-quality civics lesson. The best way to frame it, I think, is that House of Cards:DC politicos::HIMYM:that last cohort of well-off white urban Gen Xers. It’s OTT, warped around our lead character’s perspective even more than most, to a point where we hear his inner monologue; it’s not objectively accurate, but it’s caught onto something real and cut off all the ordinary boring aspects.
It’s hinky on China-US relations, it’s silly on Social Security negotiations, but House of Cards truly shines in that which it treats as unremarkable. Frank and Claire, in different ways, are characters whose stories most narratives attempt to soft-pedal or justify.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/328582.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.
I go by a broader definition than I think folks tend to have. “Political drama” is not limited to horse-race election year stories, because politics is not limited to electoral politics. Elections come prepackaged with narrative convention - there’s a well-defined time frame, there’s high stakes that conveniently don’t need to be explained, there’s definitely going to be a winner and a loser (eventually) - and therefore they tend to make for the least interesting drama. The real stuff of policy can make for engaging cable news viewing if you care about policy, but it’s rarely good for fiction.
All narratives have political messages, whether or not their characters hold office or even whether they ever cast a single vote. Mad Men is political enough to get a shout-out from the actual president. The L&O franchise has a political line to sell us about crime and punishment in major urban centers. The politics of Sex and the City wouldn’t map onto the conventional American l-r spectrum, fifteen years ago or now, but the characters’ embrace of capitalism and sex positivity in equal measure is a twentieth-century take on classical liberalism, a politics of honest, even joyful, expression and development of the self, and that the selves in question were female was (and remains) a charged political statement. The distrust of all authorities ( including, indirectly, Western religion) that’s built into Pretty Little Liars is political. Breaking Bad’s farcical effort to insulate its protagonist from societal context was a political statement. There is much in the world that cannot be altered by public policy and ought not be subject to a popular vote, but there is nothing that can transpire between human beings which is not, on some level, political.
So, somewhere in between. The best way I can describe the cluster of media that I think of as political drama is this: “a story largely concerning, or centered around, power brokers in the upper echelons of a recognized and/or self-declared sovereign group or territory.” Counterintuitive borderline cases which I hope illustrate my point: (1) while Parks & Rec is quite a good show about public service and municipal government, I don’t really consider it political drama, (2) The Originals, as a credible clash of kings - and consorts and princes and heads of other occasionally-hostile sovereign groups - with distinct philosophies and ruling styles, is a political drama.
Being as emphatic as I am on the idea that “politics” extends past the occasional head count, I am a huge fan of narratives which contextualize your more conventionally-recognizable political establishments with other social institutions which we like to pretend are apolitical, such as Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones, and The Wire. This is an extraordinarily tricky thing to pull off. It not only strips the narrative of the ability to rely on some very powerful subconscious narrative, moral and, yes, political expectations, but it in fact must work against a whole host of conscious and subconscious beliefs that much or all of the audience expects to have reinforced.
Among the strongest of those beliefs is the way that on some level, most people still think “our democracy is a Good Thing, therefore all legitimate results and byproducts of our democracy must by definition be Good Things, and anything that is Not Good is the result of individual moral failings or a perversion of the process that is a Good Thing.” The Wire demonstrates, or even earns, its Greatest Drama Ever candidacy by its ability to do something that sounds so obvious: recognize that modern social and political choices are, in fact, political choices, some of which are made, and all of which are permitted, by duly elected holders of public office. Even among those who feign worldliness by a vague but sweeping denunciation of “all” politics as corrupt and useless, the naïve beliefs that politics can be neatly cordoned off from everyday life and that all political decisions are made with malicious intent by theatrically vindictive sociopaths are extremely uncomfortable to challenge. The Wire methodically stomps on each of these assumptions. Royce, Davis, and Carcetti, whatever else they may or may not be, are legitimate holders of public office; they’re no saints, but they’re no monsters, either; their influence over the BPD is banal, insidious, and, in the long run, likely more constraining than principled hardlining or showy extortion.
It’d be a mistake to expect that kind of perspective from all political drama. Game of Thrones/ASOIAF takes a different tack in removing its analysis of power and politics as far as possible from Western liberal democracies. While (because?) their Overton window looks nothing like ours, but the epic is built on political philosophies, styles of governance, and even personalities translated from real life, often with surprising modernity. Varys the ruthless statist spymaster wouldn’t be out of place at the NSA. Tywin’s grasping consolidation and compounding of his social privilege, nursing of old grudges, and desperate macro- and microlevel exercise of a core belief that the weak exist to receive the abuse of the strong aligns him squarely with key players in any number of modern hard-right movements. Dorne’s uncomfortable relationship with the Westerosi federation, the North’s provincial conservatism, the weird, hypocritical sexual mores scattered across the Seven Kingdoms and their warping of the players and the game - these political tensions, and the way they tie in with larger Westerosi society and even the individual psychological development of the characters, are what makes the series work, not Puff the Magic Barbie Princess.
BSG’s occupation of that tense middle ground between “total metaphor” and “overt relevance” is a big part of what made it possibly the most ambitious show I’ve ever seen. And a lot of what it did best, I’m actually fairly certain was unconscious. Roslin, for example (what are you, new here?) was a really smart examination not just of someone with political skill, but why that skill usually goes unused in people like her. I actually do think that, if asked, most of the PTBs would have initially said that she was not merely sincere but objective and thorough when she insisted that she had never wanted anything to do with politics but she just happened to trip and fall into the inner circle of the President of the Twelve Colonies, and then she discovered her previously completely untapped knack for running a government single-handedly. But - as loath as I am to agree with Romo, of all characters - she reads much more to me like someone who learned early in life that the things she was capable of were out of her reach, and so worked hard to clamp down her ambitions. She resents the “not smart” backdoor gladhanding because it’s the kind of thing that would’ve shut her out if the worst-case scenario hadn’t happened; she chafes so badly over actually running for office because she (correctly) anticipates being judged on style rather than substance, and style is a game that is stacked against her hard, even in her world.
BSG struggled the most with political drama when it attempted to address specific 21st century American political ~issues within the fictional Colonial government. I’d argue that this was partially a…good problem? The more foreign and fantastic elements of the world were, generally, quite solid and consistent enough that they couldn’t support the particulars of issues like class and choice in a way that’d be recognizable to the intended audience. While I get, and to some extent agree with, the criticisms that those episodes were narrative weak spots, I don’t know that this is the only way to evaluate whether or not this was, for lack of a better word, a good thing. I think the attempt to engage in cultural conversation was a brave choice, and an interesting one. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it bombed, but BSG shot high.
Part of the problem was the same problem as the one that became particularly glaring in the post-Sorkin seasons of The West Wing: Moore et al, like Wells et al, were highly uncomfortable applying the necessary critical perspective on their own world. They had great rote knowledge of the talking points on an extensive but finite list of current events, but they just didn’t get, or want to get, politics in terms of the practice and philosophy of medium-to-large-scale power. This leads to a lot of technical narrative problems, but the most specific one is that if you take those superficial buzzwords and you try to apply them as sincere motivations for actual people, you get a whole lot of logic holes. (As is true IRL, ofc: if homophobes are so devoted to Leviticus, why do they eat shellfish? &c.) In order to write well-rounded characters that are credible as politicians, it’s necessary to consciously grasp not only that everybody lies, but that within the political arena there are a decent-sized handful of reasonably predictable factors which influence the shape of untruths both deliberate and unconscious.
The least solid aspect of this for me is the way the show evoked the War on Terror. As I said above with the social stuff, I do think that the show’s acknowledgement that it was a part of a cultural conversation is a worthy artistic goal. At the time, there were certain things that just Were Not Said, some conversations that just would not be had straightforwardly. The problem, though, with translating 21st-century American politics to a post-apocalyptic survival situation often meant accepting and backhandedly validating a lot of rhetoric about a zero-sum choice between liberty and safety, as if our post-9/11 military actions happened in some hermetically sealed vacuum from a Reagan-vintage obsession with consolidating and exponentially inflating executive branch military capabilities. Sometimes it worked - the S1 episode featuring Roslin, Kara, and Two appropriately presented and brutally undercut a hypothetical that was particularly popular at the time - but often it didn’t.
DC drama is a formidable subset of political drama, not least because these shows often have little in common besides location. On House of Cards, power comes from being skillful. In The West Wing, power comes from being right. On Scandal, power comes from being indispensable.
Scandal’s placement of its narrative priority’s locus of power (and numerous other loci of power) outside of public office is, perhaps counterintuitively, a pretty radical political statement on the nature of who can acquire power in the US, and who can be seen as having political power. Drawing our eyes away from Fitz and toward the people whose labor and support those of his station are expected to take for granted is in and of itself a pretty intense political statement. Scandal is, rightly, noted for being leagues ahead of most network dramas in terms of diversity; Rhimes is, rightly, side-eying decision-makers for whom a spectrum of American faces and experiences isn’t a given. Scandal is about players who look like America, not like the American traditional power structure. It’s about the people who, if we were the meritocracy we claim to be, would stand a solid chance of being the ones running shit. But that meritocracy doesn’t exist, and because the show is told from the POV of people without any illusion that it does, Scandal can take for granted certain political truths that most Serious Political Dramas can hardly bear to look in the eyes. As Cyrus says, it’s not fair, it’s America.
One of those truths is about the power of appearances. Scandal is particularly insightful about not just about politics and power, but about the power of political perception. Olivia has built a career around being substantively indispensable to people who need her to repair their image. Image matters not because it is an objective reflection of existing reality, but because the presentation of certain information, whether true or false, has very real consequences. This, in turn, implies another truth: that information can be controlled, that, as Harrison says, there’s a level of Washington that most players don’t even know about, and it wields a power that’s all the more terrifying for all that we know we can’t see it.
This puts an interesting twist on the power plays where the underrated-by-everyone wild card is the man in the Oval Office. Command relishes Fitz’s purported irrelevance; the Defiance conspirators, including Olivia, patronize and coddle Fitz as a can’tidade who’s too inspiring and precious up on his pedestal to actually get out and fight his own battles, due as much admiration and as little respect as THE REPUBLIC!!!! in whose name they spin their lies and scheme their schemes. And no matter how many times he gets off his ass and reminds them all he’s just competent enough to be dangerous, they’re all shocked when it happens. The Oval Office itself sits right at the fulcrum between the soft power of appearance and the hard power of B-613, and none of the players get how important the President himself is. L’ÉTAT, C’EST FITZ, and if that thought doesn’t give you nightmares you’re probably a Terminator.
In some meta way, the narrative-creates-reality perspective of Scandal harkens back to the dorky know-it-all granddaddy of American political dramas, The West Wing. TWW itself, of course, was desperately earnest, but the narrative was in and of itself part of the general political experience of the time frame as it aired. I’ve seen a lot of reviewers, and I honestly don’t know if I’m skewing my interpretation that this is a more popular view among non-Americans, that the election in S4 was heavy-handed, that Ritchie was too obviously a buffoon, that it was too clearly a sop to moderate and liberal coastal- and/or city-dwellers feeling sore about the Bush years. To which I say: yes, and you have NO IDEA how badly we needed it. Even this paternalistic, limited, dumbed-down, false-equivalence-packed sop was a goddamn lifeline when we couldn’t turn on the television or sit down at Christmas dinner without hearing about how we were treasonous weak-willed bleeding-heart morons who were so determined in our crafty sabotage of poor baffled Rull ‘Murkans that mass summary execution was the only reasonable course of action. I’ve seen viewers who seem to be under the impression that Ritchie was an unfair caricature of GWB, and OH HOW I WISH THAT WERE TRUE. Look, it’s true that the anger from the Tea Party types is a lot about people funneling their desperate anxiety over the economy into paranoid racism, but they didn’t come out of nowhere. They were all voters ten years ago.
Moving to some quick, slightly spoilery thoughts about the newest of DC political dramas, House of Cards, and why if you haven’t watched it yet you should.
As a show, House of Cards has embraced the lurid, pulpy potential of the modern antihero trend, plus a deliciously bleak worldview. Frank is a theatrical, even Shakespearean, character, with his dry, overwrought observations to the audience on his catapult to power. It’s certainly a fair observation that Underwood is in a whole other league as most of his opponents. But I really disagree with that as a way to objectively assess artistic merit. I think it’s a fun thought experiment to see what happens when you set Cyrus Beene on the Bartlet Administration.
And it certainly fits into the “political drama” genre. Hill staffers seem to love House of Cards. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the show is a documentary-quality civics lesson. The best way to frame it, I think, is that House of Cards:DC politicos::HIMYM:that last cohort of well-off white urban Gen Xers. It’s OTT, warped around our lead character’s perspective even more than most, to a point where we hear his inner monologue; it’s not objectively accurate, but it’s caught onto something real and cut off all the ordinary boring aspects.
It’s hinky on China-US relations, it’s silly on Social Security negotiations, but House of Cards truly shines in that which it treats as unremarkable. Frank and Claire, in different ways, are characters whose stories most narratives attempt to soft-pedal or justify.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/328582.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.