The Washington that majestically unfurls in the credits for “House of Cards” is recognizable to anybody who has spent time there. But even though it can be a monumental kingdom filled with portent, it can also be a fairly quotidian and sometimes ugly small town — but that’s not the kind of place you make a huge, expensive television show about.

An original series picked up and distributed by Netflix, “House of Cards” is a great looking, lavishly made 13-episode series based on a BBC mini-series. It was developed and produced by Beau Willimon, a guy steeped in politics as an aide to Charles Schumer, Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton and who also wrote “The Ides of March,” a film directed by George Clooney that got high marks from politicos for its verisimilitude.

“House of Cards” revolves around Frank Underwood (played with lizard-like glory by Kevin Spacey), a Democrat and House majority whip, who, when passed over for a promotion to secretary of state wreaks revenge on all who would lay him low. His willing partner is Zoe Barnes (played by Kate Mara), a reporter/blogger at The Washington Herald, a fictional establishment newspaper in the capital.

Given that the series seems intended to pull back the blankets on the “real” side of both politics and media — two professions held in profoundly low regard by the rest of the world — we thought it might be fun to go argue about what the series gets right and wrong. We decided a New York/D.C. and politics/media division of labor might yield a worthy discussion: Ashley Parker currently covers Congress and has covered a number of campaigns. David Carr writes about media for the business section and writes about pop culture as well.

A cautionary note: Netflix began streaming the entire 13-episode season on Feb. 1 so our cadence in reviewing the episodes — every two or three days over the next month — is an entirely artificial one. If you haven’t started watching “House of Cards,” know that spoilers abound here. Read at your peril.

Episode One

Synopsis: Frank Underwood, confronted by the broken promise from the president, begins laying down track to run over those who wronged him. Zoe Barnes, frustrated by her lowly status at the newspaper, seeks to form alliances that will allow her to prosper professionally.



Carr: I am struck by the visual vocabulary of the show. Politics, no matter how sleazy, go off in rooms and halls that could well have hosted Louis XIV. In spite of the fact that Mr. Underwood says he is there to “clear the pipes and keep the sludge moving,” the sheer marbleness of his environs suggests that the plumbing is kept carefully out of view.

Journalism gets very different art direction. The lighting in The Washington Herald is brutal, irradiating the pasty face trolls who are trapped in cubes there and the furniture looks like it came from a V.F.W. hall. (To be fair, the director David Fincher filmed the newsroom scenes in part of the offices of The Baltimore Sun, so it’s not like the general aesthetic came from nowhere.)

Zoe Barnes’s apartment is one of the saddest places on earth — a second floor walk-up on a grubby commercial strip full of water (or worse) stains, pizza boxes and windows so dirty they don’t function as such. The only thing missing is an underfed cat with an untended litter box who hates her guts, but you can almost smell it anyway. The dreary, humble backdrop seems meant to establish her cred as a blogger. This revolution will come from people on laptops who have no furniture.

That dissonance extends to fashion. While Mr. Underwood and the women and men who click behind him as he patrols the corridors in search of souls to snack on are impeccably turned out, Ms. Barnes is a walking pile of laundry. I edited a weekly newspaper in Washington, D.C., staffed by very talented young people. And I also encountered many young staffers on the rise on the Hill. I didn’t see the two groups of young people as fundamentally different: They were ambitious and idealistic in equal measure while Ms. Barnes’ desires seem more inchoate and epically shallow.

Oddly enough, it is Ms. Barnes’s wardrobe and not her enterprise as a reporter that opens up the gates to Mr. Underwood’s world. She attends the symphony on a random date in a little white dress that etches her figure and catches a backward glance from Mr. Underwood. When she is sent a photo of the congressman checking her out, she takes that as permission to show up at his home at 10:30 at night — and she is invited inside. The pair proceed to have a conversation about her breasts, framed in a push-up bra and V-neck shirt. After she leaves, Mr. Underwood’s wife (played with frozen precision by Robin Wright) wonders aloud whether that gambit actually works on anyone. The answer out in the real world is not for long, while the answer on the show is yet to be determined.

I’m glad the show exists, I care about the characters and am eager to watch more. But I’m still going to need some convincing, particularly in terms of the characters’ motives. Mr. Underwood’s desires are vividly stated in his winking asides to the camera. What does Ms. Barnes want? She tells her editor and anyone else who will listen that she is tired of covering Fairfax County and wants to be moved “online,” where she will go “underground.” Why? To what end?

Given that you’ve started covering Congress and have been around politics for much of your career, Ashley, I’m wondering what clanked and what connected in the series so far?



PARKER: The show seems to get the micro and macro right, but it’s those brush strokes in the middle — where the story is really being told — that sometimes blur.

On those tiny details that no one but the most in-the-weeds of Washington stalwarts pay attention to, “House of Cards” is dead on — the opening credits, with the colorful but faded row homes and the shot of the Kennedy Center glowing translucent silver at night; the paper visitor’s badge that the White House chief of staff wears when she pays Mr. Underwood in his House office; the hand sanitizer dispensaries that serve as sentries throughout the Capitol; the pristine copy of Roll Call casually set out on the table in Mr. Underwood’s office; the security detail assigned to the majority whip. All exactly right.

And in terms of capturing the broad truths about the city, the show comes pretty close, as well. It gets at the ultimately transactional nature of much of the nation’s capital — the former governor of Pennsylvania who delivers his state in exchange for the vice presidency, or the way Mr. Underwood expects a plum assignment for his role in helping the president’s campaign. And it gets at the perpetual striving. “I’m better than what they have me doing,” Ms. Barnes says, a lament that I imagine nearly every Washington staffer/aide/journalist/human being has felt at one time or another.

When Mr. Underwood, talking about his plan to discredit the president’s pick for the Secretary of State job believes he should have been his, says, “Nobody’s a Boy Scout, not even a Boy Scout,” he might as well be channeling a political truth as old as time. Willie Stark told Jack Burden the exact same thing in “All the King’s Men,” with his classic, “There’s always something.”

But there are things I take issue with, Zoe Barnes, for starters. I have a feeling that, going forward, we’ll be talking a lot about this young reporter who seems more than willing to trade sex for scoops. But for now, I’ll just say that the overtly transactional — not to mention sexual — nature of Ms. Barnes’s first approach to Mr. Underwood seems a bit too, well, overt, transactional and sexual.

“I protect your identity, I print what you tell me, and I’ll never ask any questions,” she says, offering to be a virtual transcription monkey after her sexy outfit and picture gets her literally through the front door. (I can’t imagine many publications — dead-tree, online, or otherwise — scrambling to hire a reporter whose opening pitch is that she’ll ask no questions.)

And, as Politico’s Jake Sherman rather aptly pointed out to me this week: “The only way I would ever show up at the majority whip’s door at 10:30 at night was if we had evidence he had murdered someone and I needed to track him down A.S.A.P.” Presumably, a few other news developments would do the trick for an at-home stakeout, but you get the idea.

Coming soon: Episode 2, in which Mr. Underwood snacks on fellow politicians and Ms. Barnes’s appetites draw suspicion from her colleagues.