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.