I just finished the last episode last night, and waited to read Kevin's review until this morning. Kevin has done a very good job putting this in context, though I seem to have enjoyed the Netflix version significantly more than he did. I think this is a homerun for them. I was really impressed with the quality of the entire production - as Kevin notes it is beautifully shot and wonderfully acted. Kevin may quibble with plot and character development issues (for the most part I liked what they did), but the scriptwriting is professional, and there is nothing really cheesy about it. In terms of quality I think it is better than any drama seen on broadcast television in the last year, and I can't think of any prestige cable show that looked better, from a production standpoint, than this. I liked HBO's "Game Change", but it had long sections of clunkiness in both writing and acting that HOC never has. I think it looks like 13 hours of a high quality feature film.
Netflix does not have a policy against gratuitous nudity (I watched the classic "Nude Nuns with Big Guns" there over the summer) so I was interested to see if they would give HOC the HBO boob treatment. Interestingly (and wisely I think) they did not. There are a couple of sexy underwear scenes, a couple where we see people having sex but none of their private parts. Monday I was telling a friend that the series had even avoided the mandatory plot device requiring a character to go to a strip club so it could show some bare breasts - then they actually did indulge in that, I think in one of the last 3 episodes. But I believe those were the only bare boobs to appear in the entire series. I think most of the differences in the Netflix Francis are a function of real or at least realistic differences between the UK and the US. The UK version had their Francis in a plausible post-Thatcher world, and the US version puts its Francis in a plausible Obama-like world. The Majority Whip in the US House is never going to have the same power or characteristics as the similar character in the US (interestingly, the last Democratic Majority Whip was Jim Clyburn, who is also from South Carolina). I was actually worried that they were going to try to make the US Francis as powerful as the UK version, which just would not be plausible. Instead they re-imagined the character given the nuances and limitations of our system and culture of government. Making him a southerner is as clase as we get here to the courtly British manners, so that was a no-brainer, though an American politician is just not going to be as Shakespearean. I don't think the problem is that the US Frances is not bad enough (he is plenty bad), if anything the problem is that he is not likable enough. I never really hated myself as much as I did with the UK version for rooting for the villan, because while I was interested in him, I never was really as invested in him (partly this may be because I don't really like Spacey that much as an actor, although I think he does excellent work here). Similarly the re-imagining of his wife and mistress make sense to be 20 years later and an ocean apart from the original. The reporter in particular was I thought very well drawn (as Kevin points out, Mara is fantastic) - she is exactly the kind of smart and ambitious young person who we see all too much of in the US media - they are inpatient and, not naive, but ignorant in the sense of not having a deep sense of history or context. What they have a nose for is how to get a headline or get noticed. I am a huge fan of the British version of this show, and I am not going to say that I liked the Netflix version better than the original. One reason is that Ian Richardson's Francis Urquhart is such a delicious, marvelous character, and it literally would not be possible to improve on that (Fincher was very wise to give us one shout out to Urqhart's signature phrase but not attempt to duplicate it). But this show stands in its own feet, and compares favorably with most of its competition. I thought I was going to be distracted by comparisons to the UK version, but instead I was occasionally distracted with comparisons to the recent "Boss". I think this HOC is much the better effort, but Boss had some elements of an American version of the show. -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
