Oline Eaton,
biographer and pop-culture aficionado, indulges her straight-to-streaming needs with:
House of Cards I’m of a generation that has been spoiled by TV on DVD, powering through shows as though there were a medal to be earned upon completion. Netflix totally indulged this impulse when it gifted us the entirety of its new straight-to-streaming show, House of Cards. The 13 hours of this Othello-esque drama pass—increasingly chilling, increasingly cynical—as a blur. The last three episodes in particular are so intense that I had to remind myself to breathe. House of Cards is a political drama not unlike The West Wing in that it’s about politics, and totally unlike The West Wing in that it’s unrelentingly distrustful of human ambition and full of, in the words of one reviewer, “sleek, oily pools of darkness.” But it’s not just the plot twists that compel; the characters in House of Cards are extraordinary. Power may be corrupting but, given a southern accent, it goes down smooth as gin.
Correction: This has been updated to reflect the correct closing date of There Is a Happiness That Morning Is.
