ABSTRACT
All thirteen parts of House of Cards, series two, arrived on Netflix on Valentine’s Day in February 2014. This televisual event brought back familiar feelings of pleasure first experienced during series one of this tale of amorality. Some people watched four-in-a-row. Others created their own appointment TV with Francis Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey. The Machiavellian character of Francis is not new to the small screen: Francis has an English predecessor, Francis Urquart. He, too, uttered the shrewd words, ‘You might think that. I couldn’t possibly comment’. House of Cards is a television format; the first version, based on Michael Dobbs’ book, was broadcast on the BBC in the UK in 1990. The freshly re-versioned House of Cards is a television format that has been put at the head of a battering ram, to repurpose Rupert Murdoch’s phrase about accessing new televisual markets. Outside the gate is former DVD-by-post company Netflix; on the inside is distinction-soaked HBO. It has much to lose. The goal, stated Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos, ‘is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us’ (in Hass, 2013).
