a lot of thoughts on television political drama

[pocochina]

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

Comments

[sunclouds33]

I tried looking for the article that said that House of Cards isn't a political drama but I couldn't find it. I don't know the author's reasoning but it seems like one of those unsubstantiated "shocking" lines that critics use to punch up an article. Note: I've just watched the first ep of the second season of House of Cards. I don't binge-watch.

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.I agree with your expansive definition of political drama and your analysis that most shows involve

[sunclouds33]

ETA: I don't know if you watch Homeland but it's difficult to categorize for me because it embodies a political drama with its DC location and focus on the CIA and I guess it has power-brokering among the members of the CIA set....but that's by far its weakest part. I roll my eyes at the power-brokering and just want the show to get to its more cop-show element of the mechanics of spying/catching terrorists and my mixed-feelings of interest and derision at the soap-opera element of the character's personal lives. But the political stuff is a non-event on what should be a political show.

[pocochina]

I have seen s1 of Homeland. I'm vaguely aware of some developments since then, but nothing I can really analyze with confidence. I didn't get the idea that it is a political drama in the more direct sense, either, even when it started involving holders of public office more directly. However, I do think that there's a political aspect to the presentation of the CIA as being basically apolitical, or in how it talked about post-9/11 era terrorism.

[pocochina]

aaaah, the article, I remember stewing about it for long enough that I'm fairly certain it exists, but maybe it wasn't Slate? I read a lot of reviews the week after S2 was released and they all blurred together.

The Sopranos and Breaking Bad become political dramas for the power-brokering within that small sovereign subset of criminals but it's ALSO political drama because it's NOT really a sovereign group.Agreed on both layers. Even the characters' respective understandings about what kind of politics they were involved in, I thought, was very telling, how the guys all know Machiavelli as a touchstone that props up their Italian identity and also inflates their sense of being ~important players, but Tony (illustrating the clear-eyed unsentimental pragmatism that let him get to the top) knows that they're in a street fight and the politics of warfare is what's most useful to them

[local_max]

I feel like I'm not very good at thinking in political terms? Or, more precisely, I lack the knowledge of history and the current political landscape (...especially US political landscape, as a non-American) to write about things with the same degree of intelligence that you do

[local_max]

THE WIRE SPOILERS: One of the things that The Wire gets right is that in a society, especially a capitalist society though I think that it's not actually down to capitalism-qua-capitalism alone, is the way in which people fill vacuums. Certainly it's true of the politicians, but it's also true of everyone who takes any job or role, whether legal or illegal, or someone like Omar who is ostensibly not part of the system at all; people are able to hold onto positions only insofar as those positions represent some need that other people have that is not fulfilled by everyone else. Carcetti can't institute grand sweeping political changes that are going to be unpopular, which means that whatever his initial ideas are that run counter to the way things are done eventually get ground down into almost nothing. The system (which is really a matter of statistics -- numbers of people, as well as certain powerful players, who themselves are generally beholden to the numbers of people) demands that people behave a certain way, under threat of

[pocochina]

ooooh, yes, this analysis is so up my alley, though I've never really fleshed it out to that extent.

[pocochina]

Yeah. I feel like there's this weird reactionary tone to a lot of House of Cards critical response which does not actually rely upon reason? There was another post - this one I do have on hand - that rested on the claim that the US version is inferior to the UK version because Underwood is not as much of a one-dimensional villain protagonist as Urquhart? "It's enjoyable though it's not The Wire" is not going to fill up any column inches, lol.