House of Cards: Season 2 (2014)

Season 2 of House of Cards is every bit as fascinating as season 1, opening with the shocking incident that closed the first season of the original – one of the many ways in which the Netflix model changes the pace and position of climactic sequences – and building to an extraordinary, cinematic finale at Camp David. This time around, Frank Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey, is making a bid for the Presidency, and he’s every bit as Machiavellian and Shakespearean as ever. However, the season really belongs to Claire, his wife, who’s played by Robin Wright. She was stunning from the very beginning of the show, but she eclipses even Frank here, drawing on her consummate PR skills to become the public face of the relationship as his political star starts to soar. Part of what makes Claire so compelling is that she’s never presented as a contradiction – there is no tension between her exquisite sympathy and her mercenary neoliberalism, between the non-profit organisation where she spends most of her time and the lengths she’s prepared to go to get what she wants. Like Robert Pattinson in Cosmopolis, she exudes an alien subjectivity reared on corporate charity, incapable of distinguishing – or needing to distinguish – between her most cultivated and brutal intentions. That makes her quite sublime, suddenly remote when she seems to be most immediate, and strangely intimate when she seems to be most mercenary. Unlike Frank, she is devoid of even the slightest trace of duplicity, conscious or otherwise – there is no sense that she is concealing a better or worse self beneath her sleek, streamlined surface, no sense that she is dissembling or even registers any need to dissemble. Instead, she is all surface, and that works perfectly with Wright’s extraordinary face, which has reached just the right pitch of angularity to throw its natural beauty into stark relief, to the point where a single stare or glance seems to offer both infinite sympathy and infinite indifference. Even Frank is in awe of her, while the series is even more fascinated with the rites and rituals of their relationship than the first. That, in turn, means even more attention to their brooding house, which is reconstructed in the aftermath of a serious security threat, and starts to populate itself with their peculiar idea of family. And this season’s fixation with family, longevity and legacy is perhaps what sets it apart from the first, which felt more like an extravagant experiment, an audacious gesture to redefine television and cinema as we know it. Season 2 is more confident in its achievements, but it's also more anxious to build them into a spectacular third season, and to cement one of the most incredible television experiences in recent years.

House of Cards: Season 1 (2013)

If the Netflix distribution model repackaged the television series as a quasi-cinematic event, then House of Cards is the Netflix event par excellence. Fresh from playing Richard III at the Old Vic, Kevin Spacey brings a Shakespearean grandeur and gravitas to disgruntled Whip Frank Underwood, who sets out for revenge when he’s overlooked by the Democrats for Secretary of State. Like the British series, it’s full of direct addresses to camera, moments of disclosure that are as titillating as Underwood is chilling, if only because they work more to contour everything that can’t be disclosed, everything that remains shrouded in ineradicable secrecy. Twenty years ago, that made it a series about the closet, and about being closeted – and it still is, in a way, if only because Spacey has so thoroughly resisted every effort made by the mainstream media to out him, or to force him to deliver up the peculiar secret of his singledom. But his position is more exceptional now than it would have been in the early 90s, with the result that the series often feels like a recloseting, a recourse to the darkest, dimmest recesses of Washington D.C., which emerge and recede with all the ephemerality of a live feed, just as Frank seems able to eradicate all traces of his passage across the city, seeking out its niches and glitches as if by smell. It’s interesting, then, that Frank is a Democrat, and that the series is so cloaked in Democrat affectation, since it’s usually Republicans that are supposed to be obsessed with policing and exposing secrecy, both within their own ranks and without. That’s not to say that it’s a Republican series either, but that its paranoid palette presupposes some secret suffusing Washington that even Democrats are in on, a secret that sustains the city even as it corrodes it from within, a secret so systemic that you have to throwback to a closet mentality to even come close to grasping it. And that’s the perfect backdrop to Frank’s paranoia, as well as the perfect way for David Fincher to make his television debut – his recent films have been obssessed with the dark opacities of a world that has supposedly moved beyond secrets, dismantling transparency with a surgical precision worthy of Frank himself. Over the last few years, there’s been a great deal of acclaim for film actors discovering or rediscovering their televisual selves, but House of Cards truly is Spacey’s masterpiece, or one of his masterpieces – it is at once his most personal and elusive project, and fuses his cinematic and theatrical ambitions into a single, staggering spectacle, making all his previous performances feel like mere dress rehearsals for this megalomaniacal moment.

Orange Is the New Black: Season 2 (2014)

Season 2 of Orange Is The New Black opens in quite a disorienting way. Virtually nobody from the first season apart from Piper appears in the first episode, while she’s almost absent from the second. In the first season, she always felt on the verge of being decentred – in fact, being displaced into the wider community of the prison almost felt like a lesson she had to learn, the best way for her to stop regarding herself as the protagonist of whatever situation she happened to fall into. In some ways, season 2 makes good on that promise, sketching a much broader and more systematic vision of prison life than season 1, as well as fleshing out a number of characters who felt tantalisingly underused the first time around. At one level, that change was necessitated by the departure of Laura Prepon, who plays Piper’s ex-girlfriend Alex, from a top-billed role. Their relationship was almost the best thing about the series, so it’s fortunate that Prepon has agreed to return for every episode of season 3, but in the meantime Piper is a little too denuded without Alex – or fiancee Jim, played by Jason Biggs – to sustain the show on her own. Instead, she slips even further into a deadpan or dissociative counterpoint to the world around her, which feels much more relaxed and laidback this time around, ebbing and flowing with the slow sombience of low-security lockup. That also moves it much closer to sitcom, one of the most reliable and time-tested genres for dissociating different species of domesticity from the reassuring fantasies of middle-class whiteness, something Piper still finds impossible to resist. And the indefinite time of sitcom works quite well with the indefinite time of Netflix’s series-events – in fact, this whole season has enough of a break from the main story to really allow it to luxuriate in that odd sense of time, heightening its attention to the quotidian rhythms and gestures of the inmates, their odd ways of deferring waiting for a reprieve that may never arrive, until it feels a bit like a portrait of the precariat, dispatches from a new world order that pivot the story around generous, profoundly comic gestures of solidarity and support. Perhaps that’s why the flashbacks never grate, even though they’re even more prevalent than ever – they haunt the series like echoes from a pre-apocalyptic past, as does pretty much every sequence shot outside FCI Litchfield, especially Piper's episode-long furlough. By the end, you can see how season 3 will return to the main story – there’s the first murmurs of an investigation into the prison’s management structure – but for now season 2 is a delicious interlude, distilling some of the most intriguing moments in season 1.

Orange Is the New Black: Season 1 (2013)

The latest series from Jenji Kohan, the creator of Weeds, is based on Piper Kerman’s 2010 memoir of the same name, which details her experience as an inmate of FCI Danbury (here FCI Litchfield) over 2004-2005. Kerman was born and raised in one of America’s richest families – a  member of the 1% - and her crime was committed some time before her sentence, when she briefly and incidentally participted in an international narcotics ring by way of her then-girlfriend. By the time she was brought to trial, she had returned to America, got engaged and returned to her privileged roots, meaning that incarceration was perhaps even more shocking than it would have been had she been arrested at the time. And Orange is the New Black derives a great deal of its drama, discomfort and comedy from that shock, as Piper, now Piper Chapman, finds herself inserted into an exploitation prison drama that she never entirely distinguishes from a series played for her own benefit, wandering through an astonishing number of charismatic subplots and character actors in a deadpan, dissociative haze. At the most basic level, it’s the shock of a privileged white aristocrat being forced to live among African-American and Hispanic populations for the first time in her life – whiteness registering itself as a minority – and that means that Piper is as irritating as she is sympathetic, entitled as she is endearing, which helps keep the series on its toes, jumping from high drama to bathos in a single breath. It’s also what prevents the prison, and the peculiar palette of the prison, feeling too circumscribed – if anything, the confinement and claustrophobia works well with the Netflix distribution model, serving up Piper’s supposedly interminable sentence in one go, making you feel how efficiently prison time erodes any attempt to episodise it, or to break it down into manageable segments. For the most part, the incredible ensemble cast gives itself over to prison in much the same way that Netflix demands you give yourself over to its series-events – even more so than House of Cards, it operates as a thirteen-hour movie rather than television per se, extending and modulating exploitation drama in ever more ingenious, insidious and irreverent ways. That might sound like a female version of Oz, or Prison Break, but Kohan’s sensibility is too wryly attuned to sitcom to allow that level of gravitas to last for very long – as in the early seasons of Weeds, you sense a sitcom somehow lurks beneath it all, waiting for the right moment to come into its own.

Cedar Cove: Season 1 (2013)

One of the fascinating things about the recent resurgence of television has been seeing certain channels and platforms producing scripted series for the first time, crystallising their particular atmospheres and demographics into longform narrative. Cedar Cove falls into that mould – based on the bestselling romance books by Debbie Macomber, it is the first scripted series to be commissioned by the Hallmark Channel, which previously only screened telemovies and miniseries, alongside infomercials and daytime talk programs. More than most other channels, Hallmark deals in experiences – and its experiences are generally shortform, bursts of warmth, comfort and safe harbour that are designed to be as dependable as they are disposable. Translating that into a television series is a challenge, just because comfort, like sentimentality, is one of the most difficult tonal registers to control over an extended period – it needs to be soothing without being soporific, like the steady momentum of a slowly moving stream. That Cedar Cove manages to achieve that balance is partly due to Andie McDowell in the lead role as Olivia Lockhart, a judge in a small fishing town just north of Seattle. All the show’s plots and suplots revolve around McDowell, who’s an inspired choice for this part – she’s always seemed to bathe in a more mellifluous timeframe from the films in which she’s been cast, a timeframe perhaps glimpsed in her sultry Maybellene commercials, but utterly perfected here; in Hallmark’s hands, Cedar Cove is a town which proceeds at the pace and lilt of Andie McDowell, and that’s saying something. Adding to the languour is the gorgeous cinematography – and while these glassy vistas are very much the Puget Sound of the Lifetime universe, there are still moments when it’s like glimpsing a unique Hallmark topography, a landscape made up entirely of greeting-card establishing shots, as the series creators seem to have sought out the most airbrushed harbours and hillsides they could find. If there’s anything that ruptures that mood, it’s a certain hostility towards the younger generation – at some of its most jarring moments, it feels designed to affirm 50-somethings that every life decision they ever made was the right one. Still, that affirmation is part of the wider Hallmark brand too - in the end, it feels aimed at anyone, really, who wants to receive a beautiful card from their younger self convincing them that they haven’t lost their way, or, if they have, that there’s still time and space to find it again.