House of Cards (2013)

Like Walter White, she's the antihero we love to love--conflicted, intelligent, seductive, and human-all-too-human. Claire will be done in just eight episodes. A shame because she was just getting started. Claire's turn and she makes it count.

House of Cards does not suffer from the lack of Kevin Spacey; anyone who has stayed with the Underwoods this long knows Wright is more than capable of carrying the action as the show’s anti-hero. ... Wright brings more humor to Claire than ever before as the President exploits sexist stereotypes about female hysteria.

Following Robin Wright through this season as she reveals Claire slowly and deliberately is worth a binge.

While serving up a new batch of so-so operatives (Greg Kinnear and Diane Lane play tech billionaire siblings with a right-wing bent) to vex Claire, the best thing about the final episodes of House of Cards is the return of several ghosts of Underwood administrations past.

In this truncated season (only eight episodes as opposed to the usual 13), Wright remains outstanding. But “House” suffers from the same problem as HBO’s “Veep.” Both started as daring satires of the highest office in our land and both have been surpassed by our current reality in which every day brings a new tweet storm of chaos.

Serious weight is given to mundane moments with other, seemingly more substantial ones ending before they began. Everything just feels a little… off. And yet, amid the choppiness, I found myself mostly engrossed in what was happening--and the reason for that is Wright. ...The actress now goes it alone and more than rises to the occasion.

Wright’s reserve, unlike Spacey’s bombast, helps keep some of the writing’s mania in check. ... The self-serious drama hasn’t just morphed into a Ryan Murphy fantasy sequence; it appears to have thought more holistically about what promoting women should actually look like. ... Generally speaking, the show feels knowingly ludicrous, so in on its own jokes that it can occasionally transcend them.

A lot of the subplots revolve around established and new characters trying to hold Claire to whatever arrangement they had with Frank and learning that the solid ground they thought they were standing on has turned to quicksand. This is explored most elegantly through Claire’s relationship with former White House chief of staff Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly) and battles against siblings Annette and Bill Shepherd (Diane Lane and Greg Kinnear), a couple of tech billionaires turned right-wing influencers.

House of Cards also can be a victim of its own excesses, which are now built up into a heavy goo of previous evil and investigations of same by the sometimes ridiculously dogged Tom Hammerschmidt (Boris McGiver). ... Wright’s performance reflects all of [Francis's] cynicism, calculation and deep, unhealed wounds that powered his engine, and now hers as a President who pledges allegiance only to herself and her gender.

The hammy wink Mr. Spacey brought to these breaking-the-fourth-wall moments was fun in the beginning, but they grew tiresome and predictable. At this point, it’s probably better to breathe fresher air into the proceedings, which Ms. Wright does. Claire as the lead offers a different perspective, a worthy way to end a series that launched hundreds of other shows.

There's no escaping the awkwardness that surrounds permeates this sixth and final season -- an inevitable byproduct of having to shuffle the deck, creatively speaking, after discarding one of its aces.

The shift in focus from Frank to Claire Underwood finds House of Cards somewhat reinvigorated through its first five new episodes. It's a change that comes far too late for the show to escape many of its worst narrative instincts, or a surplus of flat recurring characters, but for the first time in years House of Cards has something new and frequently interesting to say.

While the sixth and final season of House of Cards is as mixed a bag as the thrilling but uneven Netflix drama has yet produced, the good news is that Robin Wright is up to the task of anchoring the show.

Five of the eight final episodes over-emphasize [Frank's] importance and fail to create arcs worthy of Wright’s talents or Claire’s individuality. Worse yet, they weaken the show’s conscious effort to highlight the discrimination facing female politicians.

The performances are excellent, maybe better than ever before. But Cards has always been a show whose plot contortions could confuse and whose incremental intrigue could bore, and those problems are worse now that everyone seems to be whispering. There are interesting ideas at play, though. ... Unfortunately, it isn’t until more than halfway through the eight-episode season that Claire’s big plan becomes clear.

House of Cards never quite maintains momentum, again; the first five episodes sent to critics are sometimes promising, sometimes plodding.

The series still suffers from the same issues it has in past seasons. For a show with as many dastardly, dark, thrilling subplots--more than can even really be kept track of--it’s ever-confusing that it can seem to move so slowly. Robin Wright is characteristically hypnotizing in the lead, regally stalking the Oval Office as she cleans up messes without a hair moving out of place.

Robin Wright is many things, but possessed of a light touch she is not. Her grim addresses--to the camera, and to anyone within camera range--are steely and unceasing, with very little variation in tone or emotion. It doesn’t help that the dialogue--for nearly every character, but especially for Claire--is stilted. ... The show has gotten rid of its biggest troublemaker without replacing him with new trouble that would be more entertaining.

By the time the last three episodes roll around, House of Cards’ final season has abruptly buried itself in a whole host of weird, borderline anti-feminist tropes. ... Every time season six starts to build some momentum behind either of its other two major ideas, it lumbers backward to ponder what Frank would have done, or what Frank would have wanted, and it kills that momentum immediately.

Even with the topically on-point crisis--some would say gift--of having to fire its star, Kevin Spacey (amid allegations of sexual assault), and replace him with the show’s far more interesting co-star and character (Robin Wright as the newly sworn-in, stainless-steel President Claire Underwood), House of Cards had already drifted hopelessly away from any kind of resonance or plausibility. Even as a hate-watch it had stopped delivering.

They are smothered by the ghost of Frank/Spacey, as well as a stifling atmosphere that’s partly a combo of the weightless writing and Netflix’s digital gloss. It was already stuffy with Spacey around, but without his Foghorn Leghorn hamming to distract us, it has become even more unbearable.