Archive for February, 2015

The Winning Hand of Netflix’s House of Cards

People who’ve worked at the White House have a special gift. They can turn themselves into the biggest bores in the room by announcing to their fellow viewers of The West Wing or Scandal or House of Cards that what has just happened is (a) absurd; (b) ridiculous; (c) implausible; or (d) absurdly, ridiculously implausible.

To which the only appropriate response is: Will you please shut up?

I worked at the White House for two years in the 1980s, as a speechwriter to Vice President George H.W. Bush. So I possess this “special gift”—in spades. My wife is so fed up with my nitpicking that she no longer says “please.” In fact, she no longer says “shut up.” She just hits me. Who could blame her?

Politics can be—this will come as a shock, so brace yourself—a grubby business. But grubby business makes for splendid entertainment. After I left the White House, I wrote a bunch of satirical novels about politics and Washington, D.C. One, Thank You for Smoking, about a tobacco lobbyist, was made into a movie. In retrospect, these books may seem to pluck low-hanging fruit. It’s not that hard to make fun of politicians. They manage to do that all on their own.

But politics can also be—bigger shock coming, strap yourself in tightly—dull. So it’s no surprise that novelists, screenwriters, and TV scenarists often find themselves amping things up a mite.

My wife and I recently watched the first six episodes of Season 3 of Netflix’s House of Cards. And you know—she didn’t have to punch me once. Which isn’t to say that the series has suddenly taken a turn for the realistic. Far from it. But the fact that I’m able to watch it without grumbling tells me that I have achieved some sort of Zen-like satori, or enlightenment. It’s liberating, really. Go ahead, jump the shark. The bigger the shark, the higher the jump.

It would be churlish to give away too much, but I must mention one detail from an early episode: A Russian president who is the spitting, minatory image of Vladimir “the Terrible” Putin comes to D.C. for a state visit. And whom does he have sitting at his table at the White House state dinner? Pussy Riot.

You remember Pussy Riot—the Russian female punk-rock group, some of whose members were thrown in jail for daring to question Czar Putin’s idea of democracy? In an inspired bit of casting, two members of Pussy Riot play themselves. The premise behind this seating arrangement is that President “Petrov” has actually requested to have Pussy Riot at the table. And even to have a photo op with them, so the serfs back in Russia will think him broad-minded (as it were). Hmmm. Let us pause to ask ourselves: How likely is this? The point of having Petrov come to Washington, by the way, is to get his cooperation in a Middle East peace initiative.

But wait! I’m having another moment of satori! Now I get it: The real implausibility is the whole concept of peace in the Middle East! That sound you hear is my one hand, applauding House of Cards.

The episode is dramatic as can be, and wonderfully satisfying, even as it pirouettes from one oh, puh-leeze implausibility to the next. The subsequent episode centers on a reciprocal visit by President Francis Underwood and First Lady Claire. Its conclusion will leave you gobsmacked, as they might say in the original British version of House of Cards—muttering to yourself “Whoa!,” even as your Inner Implausibility Meter is going, “Weeooweeoo!” like an amok carbon dioxide detector.

The president and first lady are—of course—played by the unimprovable Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright. Spacey is without equal as a villain. We met him in Season 1 as a South Carolina congressman, and by the end of Season 2, he had connived and murdered his way to the presidency of the United States. (Is this a great country or what?)

Spacey’s Underwood may be the role of his lifetime, but Spacey is still young (55), so this prediction seems, happily, unlikely. His performance is nothing short of mesmerizing. You find yourself cheering him on, even as he sinks to bathyspheric lows. Here is Faust, eatin’ ribs.

And why is it that Southerners seem to make the most entertainingly venal politicians in political dramas? Remember Sen. Seabright “Seab” Cooley from the 1962 film of Allen Drury’s Advise & Consent? He was played to rumpled, seersucker perfection by Charles Laughton. Most famously, there was Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s masterpiece All the King’s Men, based on Louisiana Gov. Huey P. Long. Broderick Crawford portrayed him in the 1949 film with hearty, convincing menace—and very human vulnerability. We loved these guys even as we raised our eyebrows and murmured, “Oh, dear!”

I don’t know the answer. Maybe it’s the zest these good ol’ boy scoundrels bring to their roles. They just seem to revel in their wickedness. Yankee politicians at least take the trouble to look guilty.

The original British House of Cards, from 1990, was notable for breaking the fourth wall: The lead character turns and addresses the viewer directly, with the other players unable to hear what he’s telling us. It created an intimacy between us and Ian Richardson’s chilling Francis Urquhart. Urquhart was a silkier villain than Spacey’s earthy (if slick) Underwood. When he spoke to us, it felt as though we were being addressed by Mephistopheles himself.

The elimination of the fourth wall in the American House of Cards makes the intimacy all the more intense. The very first scene in Season 1 begins with Underwood addressing us as he strangles to death a mortally wounded dog on the sidewalk. This takes “You had me at hello” to a whole new level. Right away, we—and poor Toto—understand we are a very long way from Kansas.

Spacey once told an interviewer, “I think people just like me evil for some reason. They want me to be a son of a bitch.” Before he began shooting Season 1, he was on stage at the Old Vic in London in the title role of Richard III. House of Cards executive producer David Fincher told Spacey that would be “great training” for playing Francis Underwood. Yep, I’ll bet it was.

Spacey won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance as a middle-aged husband and father who develops a sexual obsession for a teenage girl in 1999’s American Beauty. But he’s essentially a good man who is redeemed in the end by paying a terrible price. There’s a core of decency inside Underwood, but the way things are going, by the time House of Cards folds its final hand, we’re going to need an MRI to find it.

I relish Spacey most when he’s playing an SOB: the vicious movie studio boss in Swimming With Sharks; sadistic office manager in Glengarry Glen Ross; small-time con artist Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects; and killer antiques dealer Jim Williams in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, where his Southern accent was more bourbon than Underwood’s barbecue.

What all of Spacey’s bad boys have in common is self-knowledge: They know they’re naughty (and worse) but haven’t a qualm in the world. It’s an essential element in any tragic hero: He knows. I can’t imagine any of Spacey’s villains summoning a priest on their deathbeds. Voltaire, no bad guy, was asked to renounce the Devil on his. He’s said to have replied, “This is no time to be making enemies.” So might Francis Underwood remark as he prepares to depart this vale of tears. He’d probably use saltier language.

It is impossible to sufficiently gush over Robin Wright’s performance as President Underwood’s better half—and yes, I am being sardonic. Here is Lady Macbeth, wearing Prada. Actually, I don’t know if it’s Prada, but whatever she’s wearing, Ms. Wright is a stunner in every scene. (President Petrov sure thinks so!) She evinces the malign sexuality of a dominatrix. You wouldn’t be surprised if she showed up at that state dinner for the Russkies in black latex. And she’d look fabulous.

Weirdly, this marriage between an American Richard III and Lady Macbeth manages to be—touching. Francis and Claire have been together for more than 20 years. They may stray a bit, but they’re devoted to each other. I suppose two Gila monsters could also be “devoted to each other.” But this is one political marriage that works.

Of course, it’s much more than just a marriage. Their vows must have consisted of “Scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” I won’t dwell on the fact that House of Cards’ showrunner and principal writer, Beau Willimon, worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign as well as campaigns for New York Sen. Charles Schumer and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. I wonder: Do his three former employers trumpet their connection with Mr. Willimon? Do they draw attention to it, now that he’s famous for making Machiavelli look like Captain Kangaroo?

Michael Dobbs wrote the novel that inspired the British House of Cards. He had been an adviser to Margaret Thatcher before she was prime minister and, later, was the Conservative Party chief of staff. It was not a warm and fuzzy experience, and it came to an unhappy end. Dobbs and his wife flew to the Mediterranean to chill out. He forgot to pack a book, so he grabbed a paperback off the shelf at Heathrow Airport.

He found it to be complete trash and complained to his wife. She said, “Then why don’t you write one yourself?” He got out a legal pad. By the time the trip was over, the pad contained all of two letters: F and U. When I heard him tell the story, Dobbs hinted that this might have been an unconscious coded message to his wife, from whom he shortly separated. But it was also the initials of Francis Urquhart, the amoral Conservative parliamentary whip. When Urquhart crossed the Atlantic, he became the Democratic whip in the House of Representatives.

As every American television viewer knows, many of our best shows originate in England. When Norman Lear’s fine memoir, Even This I Get to Experience, was recently published, we were reminded that even Archie Bunker of All in the Family had his roots in a British TV comedy called Till Death Us Do Part.

Not all British TV travels across the pond. It’s hard to imagine an American Downton Abbey. But political machination and skullduggery are universal themes. How lucky we are Mr. Dobbs (now Lord Dobbs, if you please) forgot to pack his copy of Middlemarch or Little Dorrit when he bolted for Heathrow that day. How luckier still we are that his accidental novel has been so brilliantly adapted in the U.S.

It’s interesting that the original Urquhart was Conservative. Perhaps the most implausible aspect of all about the American House of Cards is that its hero (as it were) is a…Democrat. I say this as a jaundiced consumer of political TV drama who has sat through one too many shows in which the bad guys are inevitably Republican—villainous versions of It’s a Wonderful Life’s Mr. Potter who chortle and cackle as they gleefully cut welfare benefits to the poor; despoil the environment; reverse Roe v. Wade; enable felons and lunatics to purchase machine guns; and gut financial regulation even as they hustle campaign contributions from Gordon Gekko and the Wolf of Wall Street.

President Underwood, may I say, sir—you are my kind of Democrat.

Graphic Content: How Comic Books Took Over TV

No on seems more surprised by the success of The Walking Dead than Robert Kirkman. The creator of the top-rated show, which returned from hiatus on February 8, as well as the writer of the Image Comics series on which it’s based, had watched as his zombie-apocalypse saga was optioned, and ultimately passed over, by a slew of broadcast and cable networks, beginning with NBC in 2005. Kirkman thought he understood the networks’ reticence. “Zombies are essentially people who eat people, so it’s a cannibal show,” he says. “I was like, ‘I can’t foresee a cannibal show on television.’”

That wasn’t the only problem. Comics were doing big business on movie screens in 2005 (Marvel’s X-Men and Spider-Man franchises were well-established box-office juggernauts, and DC would reboot Batman with director Christopher Nolan to great critical and commercial success), but TV execs still viewed them with skepticism. Superman, Batman, and the Hulk had had successful live-action TV iterations between the 1950s and the 1980s, but by the mid-2000s, the only long-running series with comic book roots was Smallville, a hit for The WB (and later The CW) that chronicled Superman’s early years as Clark Kent. For networks, comics were seen as niche. “Historically,” says Kirkman, “everyone who adapted comics had the notion, ‘We have to make this more appealing to a wide audience’ or ‘We have to get rid of some of the silly elements.’”

So when The Walking Dead finally landed at AMC, where it debuted—in all its gory, twisted glory—in 2010, its success would ultimately play an integral part in opening TV to the vast comic book universe. Today, there are six other live-action shows based on comics: The CW’s Arrow and The Flash, ABC’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Marvel’s Agent Carter, NBC’s Constantine, and Fox’s Gotham, centering on Batman ally Jim Gordon. And at least five others are slated to premiere in 2015, including The CW’s iZombie, PlayStation’s Powers, and Netflix’s Marvel’s Daredevil, with a dozen or so in development.

Kirkman—who is adapting Outcast, one of his comics from his Skybound imprint at Image, for Cinemax, as well as executive producing Syfy’s Clone, based on David Schulner’s Skybound/Image comic, and developing a Walking Dead offshoot tentatively titled Cobalt—says attitudes have undergone a sea change in the last few years. TV executives no longer think they “know better when adapting a comic book,” he says. “There’s a reverence and respect for the medium showing through in these adaptations. That’s one of the things leading to their success.”

For a long time, even film studios regularly fumbled comic book adaptations. Although several small-press titles like The Crow, Spawn, and The Mask became successful movies, during the ’80s and ’90s, DC Comics had a hit-and-miss record with marquee superheroes Superman and Batman, and Marvel showed little interest in bringing its characters to the big screen, as evidenced by its licensing of Captain America for a 1990 straight-to-video clunker and Fantastic Four to B-movie kingpin Roger Corman for a 1994 film that was never even released. Steven DeKnight, who was a writer and producer for Smallville and is the showrunner for Daredevil, traces the roots of TV’s current comics craze to a moment in 1996. “The huge cosmic shift came when Marvel started their own studios,” he says. “Now they weren’t going to a third party that was translating the material. You had people who actually knew the canon and respected the work.”

According to David S. Goyer, a writer and exec producer on Constantine (based on Vertigo/DC’s Hellblazer) who has worked on several movie adaptations, including The Dark Knight and Blade trilogies, Man of Steel, and the upcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the move from film to TV was inevitable once it proved profitable. “The TV industry saw what was happening in features and thought, ‘Why not try to replicate that success?’” says Goyer, who’s also developing the Syfy series Krypton, focusing on Superman’s grandfather.

Arrow, based on DC’s Green Arrow, was the first comics adaptation to break through on TV post–Walking Dead. When the show premiered in 2012, The CW was still smarting from the loss of Smallville, which finished a 10-season run the year before. “When Smallville ended, The CW lost a lot of men 18 to 34, and men in general,” says network president Mark Pedowitz. “We realized we needed to do something to bring them back. Arrow was the first real attempt.” The story of billionaire rake Oliver Queen’s transformation into a vigilante quickly found an audience, and two years later came The Flash, a spinoff that’s now The CW’s most watched series. The shows “brought men back,” says Pedowitz. “It broadened our audience, which made us more interesting to our affiliates and to many advertisers.”

There’s an element of corporate synergy to the current wave: DC, which publishes Green Arrow and The Flash, shares a parent company, Time Warner, with The CW; Marvel, which puts out the comics in which Agent Carter and the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. feature, is owned by Disney, as is ABC, which broadcasts both shows. Still, that wouldn’t make much difference if not for significant technological advances. “We’ve gotten to a very sophisticated place in terms of visual effects,” says Jeph Loeb, Marvel’s head of TV. “You’re able to produce the kind of quality people expect not just for the budget you have but also the amount of time you have.” This is reflected not only in making more stuff explode, explains Agent Carter coshowrunner Tara Butters, but in subtle ways too: “In the pilot, when Howard Stark gets in the boat and starts motoring off, [1940s] Manhattan in the background is a visual effect. We couldn’t have done that even five years ago. The cost would’ve been astronomical.”

These developments are all the more powerful because viewers today are spoiled for choice. “At any given moment, when you’re flicking around channels at home, Thor is on, Man of Steel is on, so you’re competing against those movies too,” says Andrew Kreisberg, a TV and comics writer who was cocreator and co–executive producer of Arrow before undertaking the same work on The Flash. “If you’re not delivering the spectacle you see in a feature, it’s always going to feel less than.”

While the movies began exploiting comics’ potential nearly a decade before TV did, the latter is perhaps a more natural fit for the medium. Pedowitz calls comics “gigantic serialized soaps. You have a treasure trove of material and the ability to look at the characters and what makes them tick.” Comics also offer ready-made storyboards. “Comics are a very low-cost way to explore new concepts, just like novels,” says The Walking Dead’s Kirkman. “But they have a leg up on novels because you can see more clearly how they’d translate.”

Balancing a fidelity to the source material with the creative license to veer from it is a delicate dance. Walking Dead star Andrew Lincoln sees this struggle as one of the defining dynamics of his show. “It’s an eternal wrestling match between the extremities of the comic and making this other thing,” he says. “I think tonally, and possibly emotionally, they try to walk the same path. But direct replicas, facsimiles, trying to be too faithful, that doesn’t work.” For any show, getting the mix wrong can have immediate, and often withering, consequences. Comic book fans tend to be, as Goyer puts it, “disproportionately vocal on the Internet. Bad buzz can really impact what the larger audience thinks, so it’s important to not stray too far from the core concepts.”

On The Walking Dead, some of the comic’s panels find their way into the show itself. Michael Cudlitz, who plays ex–military man Abraham Ford in the series, says showrunner Scott Gimple frequently references images from the comic. “Me and Rosita having sex in the store, and Eugene’s looking through the bookcase—that visual is lifted directly from a [panel],” he explains, referring to a scene from the first half of the current season. Matt Ryan, who plays the title role in Constantine, says reading Hellblazer was a revelation: “With comic books, you have the character’s inner voice written in the panels, so it’s very helpful in terms of getting inside his head.”

Taking in the broad swath of comic book shows either on air or in the pipeline reveals a notable focus on second-tier characters and comics. A recent deal will bring to Netflix four Marvel shows featuring what Loeb calls “street-level heroes”—Daredevil, A.K.A. Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist—as well as a miniseries based on The Defenders. “What makes those characters unique is if the Avengers are here to save the universe, [these four] are here to save the neighborhood,” he says. In part, this “street-level” focus is just business. “If a character is being exploited in a big way in features, they’re not going to exploit the same character simultaneously on TV,” says Kreisberg. In other words, Marvel is not about to let audiences get their fill of a live-action Spider-Man on a weekly basis, thus endangering his ability to pull $800 million the next time he hits theaters. That said, a Flash feature scheduled for 2018 and Fox’s potential X-Men TV series suggest comics have become such a gold mine that caution may be thrown to the wind.

Nonetheless, on TV, second-tier characters also free up producers from the expectations that come with iconic superheroes and allow them to tell stories that feel more relatable. “In order to do a Batman TV show that will appeal to a mainstream audience, you have to focus on real characters like Jim Gordon,” says Kirkman. “Comics that focus more on who the people are and why they’re doing what they’re doing—as opposed to what they’re actually doing—are more tailor-made for TV.”

Not surprisingly, a hit TV show does wonders for comic book sales. Kirkman estimates that he moves 10 times as many copies as he did before The Walking Dead aired, but he tries not to let this success affect his creative choices. Although Daryl Dixon, who has never appeared in the comic, has, in the hands of actor Norman Reedus, become arguably the most popular character on the show, Kirkman has resisted the temptation to put him in the book. “I try to block all that stuff out and stay the course, because the existence of the comic is what led to all of these things,” he says. “If I allow these things to change what the comic was originally supposed to be, then I’ll feel like I failed.”

With so many comic books on TV or headed that way, how much is too much? Viewership remains strong for Gotham, Arrow, and The Flash, but second-season ratings for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. were down slightly from the first, the early returns for Agent Carter have been so-so, and, after a strong start, Constantine has struggled. Are audiences burning out? “That’s like saying there’s a danger of burnout from people adapting novels,” Kirkman says. “Certainly there’s a danger of burnout on superheroes specifically, but there’s a wealth of non-superhero material that’s able to be adapted into television very easily, and people are starting to wake up to that.” In addition to Kirkman’s Outcast, which chronicles a man possessed by a demon, and iZombie, about a medical student with a taste for brains (premiering March 17 on The CW), others in the pipeline include the political parable DMZ, the Western/crime drama Scalped, and Preacher, the story of a reverend with supernatural powers on a literal hunt for God, which Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are developing for AMC. Add to that DC’s Supergirl, Static Shock, and Titans projects, and it seems like TV is doubling down on comics.

“Honestly, I think this trend could be here to stay,” Kirkman says. “Comics are idea-generating machines, and once that starts going, it doesn’t stop.”