House of Cards

Downton Abbey is a guilty pleasure. 
The Wire is not.

Downton Abbey is buttered popcorn, or, at best chocolate covered raisins, perhaps just a whiff of iron but mostly sugar and substantially bereft of a lack of substance, beyond the presentation of a clear picture of what makes the British less vital and less competitive--that insufferable disposition to cleave to values which are not based in reality, the things they call "standards" like placing trust in someone because he has been anointed as an honored and accomplished knight of medicine or law rather than basing judgment on what you can see and measure yourself. Thus, the obstetrician who is knighted is to be trusted where the local G.P., who knows the patient well is not, because, well, he is not ranked as high on the pecking order. 

The Wire is difficult to watch because it is written by people who know of what  they speak and they present it without sugar coating it. It is what makes Hemingway readable: You know he's been there. You know you are reading truth. It may be fiction, but it gets closer to the truth than any non fiction can because it doesn't have to worry about lawsuits or nitpicking critics, it just lays out what the author knows, and the author does not have to footnote or prove or fact check. His facts are pre checked. 

House of Cards, the American version is so vastly superior to the unwatchable British version it is not worth comparing them, other than to note the difference.

One of the things which makes HOC so enthralling is the language.  The narrator, Francis Underwood, speaks in that sly Southern way which only Southerners can, understated, full of vivid imagery and metaphors, which would sound affected if it were not spoken with that accent, full of blarney and acid, delivered with a mild smile and sense of irony which assumes you understand.

When Francis looks at you, as he peers into the camera and tells you about his people, when he says you can manipulate his people only by appealing to their demand for humility, he is not denigrating his people; he is simply stating a fact, a fact which somehow endears them to him, but which he finds useful, if not a little bit peculiar, and which he knows you will find risible. But he's not laughing. He respects his people, even if he has shown you a side of them he knows you will not respect.

What makes HOC so remarkable is you know this is not written the way The Wire was, by men who lived the story.  HOC is written by people who, at most, talked with a lot of people who lived the Washington story, or maybe by people who observed from two steps removed, but they did not live it. Despite that, the writer of the episode which sends Francis Underwood back to his district in South Carolina on a mission prompted by that absurd American sense of having been wronged when the injured person was not wronged by anyone, was injured by her own foolishness, is brilliant in a way which really good fiction can be good: This episode and it's key scenes advance so many ideas on so many levels simultaneously it leaves you breathless.

There is the idea that a girl who is driving 60 miles an hour, texting about a water tower that looks like a scrotum( or something vaguely genital) and loses control of her car and dies, can be the source of a law suit by her parents, claiming the people who erected (pun intended) the tower were responsible for fatally distracting their daughter. That this is wrong does not enter the equation. Underwood returns to his district to work out a solution, without judging right or wrong. He is only interested in what works.

He is the focus of undeserved resentment and blame, but he does not complain: He simply defuses it by addressing the deep, underlying source of the blame, the agony of loss. He does this by framing it as a part of religious experience and redemption. He delivers a sermon of extraordinary power and insight. It is a sermon of double entendre, which clearly says, "You are angry at me, but you are really angry at God. You cannot allow yourself to be angry at God, so you are looking for somebody it's okay to be angry at.  I will do, and I accept the blame, in God's behalf."
 And he follows up in a meeting with the parents in a masterpiece of understanding of the psychology of loss and healing.

And he does all this while managing, long distance, a terrifically tense meeting about the most important bill of his Congressional career, and the other ball he keeps in the air is a text message flirtation with a female reporter.

And while doing all this, he literally takes time to smell the flowers, to gather his "rosebuds" while he may--actually they are tulips--and to deliver them in an astonishingly effective way to his wife, all the while thinking about initiating a sexual adventure with the young woman he has been manipulating.

And when he makes his overture to the young woman, he begins with a warning and as honest a disclaimer as any man has ever made in the process of seduction.

He is a character of depth, enormous talent, who you have to like, admire, enjoy and yet you are repelled even as you are drawn into his web. He asks for no forgiveness. He is a sinner, and he smiles at that, knowing that all men are sinners and that is simply a part of being human, so he accepts this about himself, without rancor, agony or apology.  He has told you he adores his wife, but he need not tell you why he may stray now and again. He assumes you'll know. 

This is way better than anything, including Homeland, which has come our way for years.  So add this to Games of Thrones, Treme, Downton, Newsroom.

We have been seeing now, for some years, the best fiction not between covers of a book, or in e books, not in feature length cinema, but in long form television series. 

What an age we live in.