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{"id":17053,"date":"2015-02-23T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-23T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1878"},"modified":"2015-02-23T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-02-23T00:00:00","slug":"political-melodrama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2015\/02\/political-melodrama\/","title":{"rendered":"Political Melodrama"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

Writing at the\u00a0Atlantic<\/a>, Christopher Orr complains that American political satire collapses easily into the standard American genre, melodrama. He puts the British and American versions of House of Cards<\/em> in the balance, and the latter comes up wanting:<\/p>\n

\u201cTonally . . . the two shows are like night and day, except the BBC version is simultaneously lighter and darker. [Ian] Richardson imbues [Francis] Urquhart with a Mephistophelian glee. There is a winking naughtiness in his frequent asides, when he breaks down the fourth wall to bring viewers into his venal confidence. The glint is there, too, in his knowing refrain to the media: \u2018You might very well think that. I could not possibly comment.\u2019 But Urquhart is not to be mistaken for a rootless schemer. A bred-in-the-bone conservative, he is the embodiment of an ancient and ominous sensibility\u2014a force as much cultural as political, and at war with modernity itself. This is a man who goes so far as to rebuke the king of England: \u2018My family came south with James I. We were defenders of the English throne before your family was ever heard of.\u2019 Urquhart\u2019s shadow looms over Westminster like Smaug\u2019s over the Lonely Mountain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kevin Spacey\u2019s Frank Underwood \u201chas no such cultural gravity. He\u2019s an up-by-his-bootstraps conservative Democrat\u2014a reasonable choice given the differences between British and American political ascension, but a diminishment nonetheless. In place of Urquhart\u2019s Shakespearean asides, Underwood delivers cornpone homilies that tend to be funny in precisely the wrong way\u2014not witty, but ridiculous. . . .\u00a0He frequently comes across, to borrow the memorable term deployed by John J. DiIulio Jr. following his brief stint in the George W. Bush White House, as a kind of \u2018Mayberry Machiavelli.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Orr suggests that British do better political satire because they are more cynical about politics. Even now, for all our pretense of jadedness, we Americans remain too hopeful, too idealistic about the possibilities of politics to hold it up to the cold scrutiny it deserves. We are not nearly Augustinian enough to be good political satirists.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"