{"id":76,"date":"2014-02-22T06:31:18","date_gmt":"2014-02-22T06:31:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alexsikora.com\/news\/?p=76"},"modified":"2014-02-22T06:47:47","modified_gmt":"2014-02-22T06:47:47","slug":"why-the-first-episode-of-house-of-cards-season-2-was-so-damn-smart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/alexsikora.com\/news\/2014\/02\/22\/why-the-first-episode-of-house-of-cards-season-2-was-so-damn-smart\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the first episode of House of Cards Season 2 was so damn smart"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Serious spoilers here. Seriously&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;s always a new episode to watch and talk about at the &#8220;water cooler&#8221; at work. However, when shows are immediately available to consume at once, different people have different amounts of availability to binge watch a show.<br \/>\nYou 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.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nWhen her character Zoe Barns is suddenly and explicitly thrown onto the train tracks by Kevin Spacey&#8217;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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Serious spoilers here. Seriously&#8230; 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&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,30],"tags":[32,31,42],"class_list":["post-76","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts","category-tv","tag-house-of-cards","tag-netflix","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexsikora.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexsikora.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexsikora.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexsikora.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexsikora.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/alexsikora.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexsikora.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexsikora.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexsikora.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}