Robin Wright and Kevin Spacey in the House of Cards remake
If you’re interested in television, and you spend a lot of time on the internet, there’s a good chance that you’ve been hearing about House of Cards.
It’s the most talked-about new show on American television. It’s the subject of blog posts and Twitter hype. It has a star-studded cast, and a big-time Hollywood director. But the most interesting thing about House of Cards is that it’s not showing on any television channel. Instead, this series — which was produced on a massive $100-million budget — is available exclusively on the internet. If it succeeds, it could upend the entire business of television.
House of Cards is a thoroughly modern television series, but it’s based on an old story. In 1988, Margaret Thatcher had been in power in the United Kingdom for nearly a decade. Michael Dobbs, a member of the British Conservative Party, began wondering what might happen after her departure. He wrote a novel called House of Cards, in which Thatcher is succeeded by a devious politician by the name of Francis Urquhart. Hiding his ambition beneath a veneer of a gentlemanly charm, Urquhart uses a combination of blackmail, extortion and murder to take control of the party. At the end of the book his misdeeds catch up with him, and he dies.
Dobbs’ novel captured the zeitgeist of the Thatcher era, and the BBC decided to turn it into a miniseries. Ian Richardson, a stage actor, portrayed the role of Urquhart with Shakespearian flair. The miniseries was a hit with audiences, and it acquired a sense of prescience when Thatcher’s government collapsed in real life. Most of its success, however, stemmed from Richardson’s magnetic performance, which transformed the irredeemably evil Urquhart into a highly appealing character.
The series became so popular that Dobbs had to go back and rewrite the ending so that Urquhart could live, in order to satisfy the BBC’s demand for two more seasons.
Two decades later, an American film studio decided to remake the series, and bought the rights to the story. This is not unusual: lots of high-quality British programmes end up getting an American remake. However, to everyone’s surprise, the series was picked up by Netflix, a company that is not a TV network and had no experience whatsoever in producing television shows.
Netflix is a company most South Africans are unfamiliar with. It started out in the late 1990s by renting out DVDs through the mail, and it grew tremendously rich at a time when more traditional video rental franchises were going bankrupt. Then, in the 2000s, it got out of the rental business and reinvented itself as an internet streaming company. It offers its viewers an irresistible deal: pay a flat-rate subscription of $8 (around R75) a month, and Netflix will let you watch anything in its huge catalogue of movies and television shows, whenever you want.
When Netflix announced its intention to remake House of Cards, fans of the original series reacted with a mixture of delight and fear. American remakes of British television are a tricky balancing act at the best of times, and Netflix was an unknown quantity. But Netflix signalled early on that it was serious about the project. It waged an expensive bidding war to acquire the rights, and persuaded Kevin Spacey to take on the leading role. It also brought on David Fincher, the director of movies such as Fight Club, Se7en and The Social Network, to oversee the project. This sort of talent doesn’t come cheap, and the budget for the series started pushing up towards the $100-million mark.
A pointless comparison
Now the series has arrived, and fortunately the investment seems to have paid off. Spacey is delightfully menacing, the production exudes quality, and the script has interesting things to say about politics and journalism. It can’t quite top the BBC original, but Netflix’s reimagining feels so different that it almost seems pointless to compare the two.
The more interesting question is why Netflix would choose to make this series in the first place. Netflix has always been a middleman: it buys content from producers, and resells it to its subscribers. This strategy has been enormously successful, so why would Netflix go through the effort and expense of producing its own content?
The answer is that the television business is on the cusp of some big changes. Over the past decade, American cable channels such as HBO have produced increasingly high-quality television. But for all their on-screen innovation, they have a surprisingly old-fashioned business model. They refuse to sell their content directly to consumers. Instead, viewers have to buy a “premium cable” subscription, which gives them access to channels such as HBO, but also forces them to pay for hundreds of other channels they might not want. (DStv subscribers can probably sympathise with this predicament.)
It seems inevitable that this will change. Household internet connections are now fast enough to stream high-quality video in real time. So why can’t viewers simply buy whatever programming they want directly from the companies that make it? If such a world becomes reality, middlemen will be steadily squeezed out of business.
Netflix realises this, and so it no longer wishes to be a middleman. By producing House of Cards, it has made a bold, expensive bet: a bet that the television industry will soon become dominated by companies that produce content, rather than companies that resell it.
For South Africans, this transformation is further away. Netflix does not operate in our market, and there is no local service that is remotely comparable. The fact that South African internet connections are relatively slow and expensive is partially to blame for this. But even in South Africa, the relentless drive towards cheaper internet access will eventually allow viewers to buy content in ways that circumvent the satellite networks.
In the meantime, it might be possible to watch House of Cards the old-fashioned way. Netflix has announced that the series may be shown on regular broadcast channels in countries where its streaming service does not yet operate. If House of Cards does appear on South African screens, do yourself a favour and watch it. It seems destined to go down as an important milestone in the history of television. It also happens to be very, very good.