Why the first episode of House of Cards Season 2 was so damn smart
Serious spoilers here. Seriously…
Netflix is starting to popularize the available-all-at-once seasons of TV shows with its original programming like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. There’s an inherent issue with these shows however, where discussing them is difficult when they first come out (and are most likely to be in the popular mindset). With a traditional TV release format (one a week for 24 weeks), there’s always a new episode to watch and talk about at the “water cooler” at work. However, when shows are immediately available to consume at once, different people have different amounts of availability to binge watch a show.
You probably know this already, but it brings me to why the first episode of the second season of House of Cards is so well written.
When her character Zoe Barns is suddenly and explicitly thrown onto the train tracks by Kevin Spacey’s Francis Underwood, it came as a complete shock to, I would imagine, most viewers. This is just the sort of show event that people will keep talking about for a whole season. Its placement in the first episode allows even someone who has only seen the first episode to participate in 90% of the discussion going around in the wake of the release of the second season. Netflix has kept the show as a discussion point for when people meet and talk about TV. It still doesn’t have the same lasting staying power of conversation as a well made long-release TV series, but I think that was an amazingly smart move to keep anyone who was able to watch any of the show in on the conversational loop.