House of Cards Review

The first two seasons are genuinely good television. David Fincher directed the opening episodes and set a house style of cold symmetry and low light that the series never abandoned, the asides to camera are used sparingly enough to feel conspiratorial rather than tiresome, and the mechanics of committee horse trading are dramatised with real precision. Robin Wright is the best thing in it from the beginning, playing a woman whose ambition is colder and more disciplined than her husband's. After the vice presidency the show loses its subject.

Once Frank Underwood holds power there is nothing left to scheme for, so the plotting substitutes ever more implausible conspiracies, a fictional Middle Eastern crisis, a hacker subplot and eventually a whole invented terror group. The dialogue curdles into aphorism, with characters announcing their own philosophies in the middle of scenes. The removal of its lead after serious allegations left a final season that had to be rebuilt around Wright, and it plays exactly like the salvage job it was.