House of Cards is the story of U.S. Rep. Francis Underwood of South Carolina who starts out as a ruthless politician seeking revenge when elected but someone tries to change his mind.
It's only a matter of time before they make at least one misstep and others start catching on to their game -- and it's hard to decide so early on whether it is a game we should be cheering for them to win.
The production values are lush, the pacing tight, the dialogue razor-sharp ("I love that woman," Underwood says of his wife at one point. "I love her more than sharks love blood"), the tone dark and delightfully nasty.
It's a very promising start, at a minimum. The distribution model for House of Cards may be looking to reinvent how we watch TV, but the show itself feels very much of a piece with what we've been seeing for the last 10 or 15 years.
Long story short, you owe it to yourself to watch House of Cards, simply because the horrors that are about to follow promise to be interesting enough to sign up for a NetFlix Instant account.
A middle section of six episodes gradually took hold, but only the final four instalments really made me want to keep watching, thanks chiefly to Corey Stoll's portrayal of self-destruction, a real tragedy, followed by growing tension in the plotting.