House of Cards: Can the fictional show compete with the real-life events?

Back in the ill-starred reign of George Bush II, America’s liberal elites consoled themselves that at least things were OK in Jed Bartlett’s White House. The alter-administration that Aaron Sorkin created on The West Wing served as a progressive wish-fulfilment fantasy, where the President always had the best of intentions.

It was tempting to see the inverse dynamic playing out with Netflix’s House of Cards under Barack Obama’s presidency. Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood was Machiavellian whereas Obama was idealistic; he could manoeuvre where Obama was hamstrung. But as Beau Willimon’s deliciously evil series returns for a new season under an evil new administration, its status seems more problematic.

Does Claire Underwood saying “we need to dial up the terror” push the same fun-buttons? Will audiences have the stomach for another knife-edge election? Donald Trump, as actress Robin Wright recently lamented, has taken all of their good ideas.

We will find out which ones on May 30, when the fifth season drops on Netflix in its entirety. (It seems fitting, somehow, that Netflix’s method of delivering the series should mirror the “document dump” procedure of modern political scandals: MPs’ expenses, the Panama Papers, the John Podesta emails, etc).

The 12 new episodes were written before the 2016 election. However, Netflix’s producers clearly hope to take advantage of the political moment. The season was announced on the day of Trump’s inauguration.

Obama’s old photographer, Peter DeSouza, has been hired to take “official” shots of the Underwoods. And the trailer marks up the parallels in ALL CAPS, a bit like an intelligence agent briefing President Trump about something important. “The American people don’t know what’s best for them,” murmurs Underwood in that charming Southern drawl. There are cutaways to a protest where the signs say “NOT MY PRESIDENT” and “NEVER UNDERWOOD”.

The first episode picks up with the Underwoods’ mid-election campaign, with Clare standing on Frank’s ticket as the vice-presidential candidate. A (fictional) terrorist organisation, ICO, has beheaded an American journalist and shared the footage online. The administration is bypassing usual protocol in some baroque ways. And Congress is calling for Frank to respond to damning revelations in the newspapers. Frank stops short of yelling: “FAKE NEWS” as he rips up the report.

It seems that the writers have gone all out to pre-empt reality. Political dramas always tack close to real events — otherwise, what’s the point? And sometimes the timing is fortuitous. The 1990 BBC series of House of Cards, which opened with Ian Richardson’s Francis Urquhart overturning a photo of Margaret Thatcher, happily aired just as a Conservative plot to oust Thatcher was making headlines. One of the pleasures of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian sci-fi Black Mirror (Channel 4/Netflix) is just how uncannily it has pre-empted reality.

But it’s a risky business if you’re actually aiming to do so. The latest season of the French political drama Spin (More4) opened with an IS-style attack on the leader of a Front National-style party in the middle of a radio broadcast in the middle of a French election campaign. It crescendoed on British TV just as Emmanuel Macron faced Marine Le Pen in the presidential run-off.

“We were exhausted after we created it,” confesses Emmanuel Daucé, the series’ co-creator. “We had to keep re-writing the scripts as reality was just too chaotic and extreme.” Daucé’s main worry was not just creating the right frisson of vérité but actually ensuring viewers got to see his creation. “Our show is about politics and violence. But in real life it was always bigger. When you’re writing it and trying to imagine what the situation will be like when it airs in one year’s time, it’s scary. You fear that something will happen in real life that will mean it can’t be screened for some reason.”

FOR dramas on subscription channels, a more humdrum risk is that audiences voluntarily switch off. The shows aren’t just competing with one another but with Politico.com, MSNBC, Louise Mensch’s tweets, your mate’s Facebook rant, etc. And yet in recent years, writers of “premium TV” have made ever greater demands on our attention spans. House of Cards is written for people who actually want to follow its intricacies — and debate them online — as opposed to people who are presumed to be doing the ironing at the same time.

But if you’re going to be spending your free time piecing together complex narratives and debating them — well, there’s no greater conspiracy than the one unravelling at the moment. The most recent series of Homeland featured a fake news plot that was widely cooed over for its real-life synchronicity. Personally, I lost patience — why have fake, fake news when you can have real fake news? I care about certain dramas because of the characters involved, not because I want to get a better handle on some contemporaneous issue. Likewise, no one watches Macbeth to further their understanding of the monarchy in 11th-century Scotland.

Still, it’s undeniable that it’s thanks to shows such as House of Cards and the West Wing that we feel a sense of familiarity with the interior of the Oval Office and a sense of what’s at stake. And the premium TV drama, with its season arcs and multiple strands, has created an imaginative framework that helps us see House of Trump as its own morality tale. Jared and Ivanka’s pact; Steve Bannon’s rage; Kellyanne Conway’s corrosion; Paul Ryan’s bargain; James Comey’s sacrifice … Has a richer cast ever been assembled? It wouldn’t even have to be a “premium” drama: The best piece of political commentary I’ve seen this week was a tweet thread by author @VictoriaAveyard characterising all of the main players as GIFs from Real Housewives and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The art of storytelling is choosing what to omit, so a random-seeming series of events can gain shape. The current frenzied news environment presents you with everything all at once. But we’re all getting better at shaping them into our own narratives.

All the same, most Washington insiders will tell you that the show that most closely matches reality is Veep, which evolved from Armando Iannucci’s Westminster satire, The Thick of It. “Our show started out as a political satire but now feels more like a sobering documentary,” as its star Julia Louis-Dreyfus said last year. Its depiction of politicians as hapless narcissists tossed about like trash in a hurricane of events feels particularly pertinent today.

“My biggest concern after the election was: would people want to watch a show about Washington DC? Is this even fun any more?” says David Mandel, who took over from Iannucci as chief showrunner. “But people still want to laugh. You’re inundated by the news during the day. And then, once a week, you have Selina Meyer, who can be very Trump-like, but at least she’s poking fun at things.”

The fifth season (Sky Atlantic) sees former President Meyer attempting to launch her post-political career. While no one in the writer’s room foresaw Trump’s election, Mandel believes the decision to move the action away from the White House has helped ensure its relevance. “Sean Spicer is even worse at his job than our own press secretary Mike McLintock — Mike never tried to deny the Holocaust or hide from reporters in a bush. We used to spend a lot of time thinking: ‘What’s the worst thing a press secretary could do? What’s the stupidest thing a president could do?’ And now that these things seem to be happening on a semi-daily basis, you just can’t compete.”

My hope is that House of Cards at least will remain in the domain of fantasy. There are promising signs. It features a competent-seeming Republican in Underwood’s adversary, Will Conway (Joel Kinnaman). And as the Underwoods plot out a quarter of a century of hegemony, you can’t help but admire their sheer vision. And perhaps that brings us back to the old West Wing paradigm.

With the US under the sway of a spoilt six-year-old who insists on being served two scoops of ice cream at a White House dinner while his guests get one — that’s actually true — there’s escapism in imagining it being messed up by a competent adult autocrat. If democracy is doomed, let it be doomed by a man with class.

House of Cards starts on Netflix on May 30