Political Melodrama

Writing at the Atlantic, 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 in the balance, and the latter comes up wanting:

“Tonally . . . 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: ‘You might very well think that. I could not possibly comment.’ 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—a 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: ‘My family came south with James I. We were defenders of the English throne before your family was ever heard of.’ Urquhart’s shadow looms over Westminster like Smaug’s over the Lonely Mountain.”

Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood “has no such cultural gravity. He’s an up-by-his-bootstraps conservative Democrat—a reasonable choice given the differences between British and American political ascension, but a diminishment nonetheless. In place of Urquhart’s Shakespearean asides, Underwood delivers cornpone homilies that tend to be funny in precisely the wrong way—not witty, but ridiculous. . . . He 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 ‘Mayberry Machiavelli.’”

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.