NETFLIX Presents....

The Future is Now. Welcome fellow viewers and voyeurs. On February 1, 2013, the online streaming website Netflix made available the first season of “House of Cards” directed by the acclaimed director David Fincher (Social Network, Fight Club) and starring two time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey (The Usual Suspects, American Beauty). The profundity of the moment has less to do with the fact that this is Netflix first stab at original content and more to do with how it was made available, all thirteen episodes on the same day for the express purpose of giving subscribers the ability to consume the product when, where, and how they wished. It is the next victory in that triumph of capitalism and democracy known as the Internet. The winners: The People (i.e. audiences and movie-makers). The losers: the Man (i.e. corporation and politicians etc.)

You think I am being overly dramatic perhaps. Let me explain. First, I pose this question to you: What is the difference between a movie and a television show? The obvious answers are length, content restrictions, and quality. Movies have always generally had more of all of these. But these are merely the symptoms of the main fundamental difference: who pays for the program. Movies are sold directly to an audience. Television however does not sell programs to audiences. Television sells audiences to advertisers. And these advertisers influence the programming. They interrupt with advertisements, they influence its availability, and they censor and influence the content. This is why the great subversive 1976 movie about television Network is a movie and not a television show. It is great entertainment but no advertiser in its right mind would pay for it.

There will always be movies shown at movie theaters. A movie theater focuses the viewer’s imagination and attention for drama. The size of the screen provides the opportunity for action spectacle. The crowd engagement via laughs or cheers makes the most out of comedy. But you can’t show long form narrative in a theater for the same reason you would not bring out a novel at a poetry reading. We like each other’s company but let’s not push it. We’ve all got shit to do.

Long form narrative has always been the domain of television but since it was the audience being sold and not the movie, it has always been done in an inferior manner. The most obvious is the need for networks to drag out a good show till the point where nobody wants to watch it anymore. As long as there is an audience to sell, it won’t be going anywhere. This is very much apparent in series that have romances introduced in the first episode that do not get resolved until the last minute of the finale of the actual series years later after the couple has split up and got back together for ratings reasons many times over. Think Ross and Rachel from Friends. And just when the hell is he finally going to meet the mother? It has been eight seasons already. This may not be a big deal as the seasons are progressing but who in their right mind would go back and watch all 11 seasons of MASH or 10 seasons of Cheers. I’m sure there were some good episodes in there but I’m not wallowing through the muck to get to them. Also TV episodes need to be in uniform lengths. In some cases this calls for some scenes or jokes to be cut (especially in syndication), but more likely it means that an episode with a half hour of plot is told in an hour format needlessly. Think of all those episodes of The Walking Dead where nothing happens until the last ten minutes and then it ends with a cliffhanger. Yeah I said it. That television show is crammed with filler, most of it annoying crying. In House of Cards, the length and number of episodes is set according to plot requirements not network schedules. The result is a series that is exceedingly and enjoyably dense. By dense I mean that every scene and episode matters whether it is to further the plot, to provide comic relief, or to exploit dramatic suspense. You are never waiting around for things to happen. It is invigorating. 

The second difference is the quality of content and I do not simply mean lack of ordinary censorship, although yes that is absent in House of Cards, which contains all sorts of swearing and some sex. I mean the entertainment value of the shows themselves. In television, the main product being the audience and not the show, it does not matter whether the show is any good as long as the ratings brought in bring in enough advertisers to make the show profitable. This can have a sort of race to the bottom effect. For if just enough people like watching cheap trash than there is no reason not to make it. Have you ever had the sensation while flipping through hundreds of channels that absolutely nothing is on? This helps to explain the proliferation of game shows and reality TV on networks and cable. Some of these shows have very good ratings yes, but that is not the only reason they are made. They also happen to be very cheap to make. You aren’t paying writers or directors or even actors. You only need one built set for a game show and depending on the program might not need any for reality TV. So why keep producing a great niche show like Arrested Development with its great cast, director, and writers, when you can put on American Idol as much as possible. Why produce a niche show at all when the purpose of television is not to entertain but to bring in the biggest possible audience? Arrested Development by the way is coming back for thirteen more episodes via Netflix this May. Why? Because the audience is paying to see it and main purpose for them is to be entertained not to be apart of the biggest possible crowd. 

No, audiences are not stupid and they enjoy and will pay for quality programming. This year saw six out of nine Best Picture nominees breaking the 100 million dollar box office mark. The democratization made possible by digital movie-making (see fantastic documentary Side by Side) is allowing more people to get more skin in the game, making it possible for movies to be made for, by, and about even the poorest amongst us. (Think Slumdog Millionaire and Beasts of the Southern Wild.) And the explosion of Internet streaming allows the rest of us to see these movies. The proliferation of blogs and websites and apps spreads the word about which movies and shows are worth watching. Brave New World.

And there is such a wealth of material waiting to be adapted into long-from narrative: all those comic-book serials and thousand page novels that were routinely savaged to fit into three hour movies. George R.R. Martin, the author of Game of Thrones, repeatedly turned down offers to adapt his books into movies. It would have destroyed the book. He felt only the long form narrative structure provided by HBO whose subscriber model allows it to be unrestricted by censorship and uninterrupted by advertisers could do the story justice. So far he has been proved completely right. 

Combine all of this with the fact that long-form is necessarily more expensive and intensive than the average summer tent-pole blockbuster and you have the perfect storm of elements. After all what is the easiest way to get viewers to pay to watch 13 hours of television (as I happily this past weekend with House of Cards): provide quality characters and story. You can’t bluff a huge opening weekend box office number of an inferior product with huge special effects and an expensive marketing campaign with streaming long form narrative because there is no opening weekend box office and the risks inherent in making such an expensive product with no concern for quality are unnecessarily large. In Conclusion: Quality entertainment on purpose not by happy accident as it has too often been during the course of cinematic history. You know, the way HBO, the first subscription based channel, has done it and thrived. 

This brings us to the next question: how do you critique long form narrative like House of Cards?

Not the way we usually critique television shows, in episode recaps. That ignores the most fundamental attraction of long form narrative: a series whose sum is greater than its parts. Let’s take the best example possible, The Wire. Here is a show that moves along very methodically. The creators, led by David Simon, were putting together their version of Baltimore very carefully with purposes in mind that were not completely clear until the last episode of the last season. At that moment the viewer could take a step back, survey the entire work, and be struck by its sheer perfection. If the show had been judged by episodically or made anywhere but HBO it would have never survived production. On the other side is the ABC show, Lost, which was totally worth watching while it was on TV, but once the final season reared its ugly head, an impending sense of disillusionment crept in as the bullshit piled up and kept piling. Having seen the entire thing I can’t recommend it to anyone and wish the whole thing could have been made available all at the same time like House of Cards so someone could have written a review telling me not to bother.

I won’t advise you to watch House of Cards right now. The first thirteen merely set up, dare I say a “House of Cards,” (nyuk) and it will be up to the second season to knock them or keep them up in a satisfying way. It might be a good idea to wait until it’s all over, read a review then, and make a decision whether it is worth 26 hours of your life at that time. From what I’ve seen, it probably is, but you will hear a definite answer when the second season shows up. You won’t be missing anything. Every single episode will still be at Netflix should you exercise you’re newly found TV show consumer’s right to choose exactly when and where to watch your shows at that time. How convenient!