Regardless of what I feel
about Netflix’s approach to television in the past decade as well as whatever
problems I might eventually have towards its breakout series House of Cards,
I still remember how thrilled I was by the first episode.
I had been a huge fan of
the British series the show was based on and did not believe an American
version was possible. The Pilot changed my mind on that. Kevin Spacey perfectly
brought us into Francis Underwood’s confidence the same way Ian Richardson had
in the British version. We got a sense of just how manipulative and ruthless he
could be as we saw him begin to work to put up an alternative Secretary of
State to replace the one the President had named in his place. We saw him work
to undermine the President’s agenda by going to an enterprising female
journalist – and those of us who loved the original got to hear him say that
classic line: “You might very well say that. I could not possibly comment.” We
also got to see the brilliant work of Claire, who in her scenes at her charity
project began to show that she was as ruthless as her husband. It was a superb
pilot, worthy of the Emmy David Fincher received for directing.
But apparently I long
forgot what the most shocking thing about was, according to both critic Peter
Biskind and a New Yorker article about his most recent book on the subject. According
to both men, what really made Underwood dangerous, apparently far worse than
every antihero we’d met over the last fifteen years was that in the opening
minutes he…killed a dog.
I’ll be honest; I’d seen
the pilot three separate times by that point and each time I forgot Underwood
had done that. Is it because it hadn’t an impact on me? Not compared to the
other things he did. Is it because I’m not a dog lover? I prefer cats to dogs,
but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be shocked by it if Underwood had done
something that a young Dexter Morgan had done or that Freddie Highmore did when
he played Norman Bates for five superb seasons. There is a good argument to be
made, in hindsight, that what Frank does in this scene is one of the most
humane and compassionate things he does in the entire series (I’ll get to that
later on.)
But apparently that should
have been the giveaway that Frank Underwood was a monster, not you know all the
other things he does in the pilot which I guess both Biskind and the New Yorker
consider little more than ‘politics as usual’. Indeed, it made such an
impression on the author that he bemoans the end of Peak TV by saying that in
the future we will ‘no longer see a lead character kill a dog.”
It is sentences like this
that truly make me question the priorities and intelligence of not only Biskind
but critics at large. I don’t want to think I was numb to the point that
Underwood’s actions didn’t leave an impression on me, but I do question the
sensibilities of people who think that Underwood’s decision to put a dog down
is somehow more shocking than anything they’d seen to that point. And since these
books are about Peak TV, it’s worth reminding some readers and these critics
some of the truly horrible things I’d seen in pilots to that point.
OZ: We see a prisoner getting
stabbed among new arrivals in the first minute. Tobias Beecher, a corporate lawyer
who is our everyman for the show, gets a swastika burned into his naked ass in
real time and is apparently sodomized off-screen. Dino Ortolani, who the
viewer thinks is the lead, suffocates an AIDS patient to death, and is doused in
gasoline and set on fire in the final minutes.
The Sopranos: By comparison to OZ, Tony Soprano’s actions in the Pilot are almost
benign – he won’t kill a man with his bare hands in real time until the fifth
episode of the series. Here we only see him chasing down a man who owes
him money in a car and runs him over, breaking his leg and has one of his
closest friends’ restaurants blown up so that a hit that is going to be carried
out by his uncle there does not take place. Baby steps.
Six Feet Under: We see the patriarch of
the family, driving a hearse, get hit by a bus in the opening minute to “I’ll
Be Home for Christmas.” Nate, who is coming home for the holidays, has sex in a
restroom with a woman he met on the plane. Claire gets high on crystal meth and
learns about her father’s death that way. At the wake, Ruth confesses that she’s
been having an affair for years with a hairdresser. We see the ghost of the father
talking to Claire throughout the funeral. For those who might have forgotten,
this was the ‘light-hearted’ show of the four series that started HBO’s revolution.
Deadwood: When a lynch mob comes to
string up a rustler, Seth Bullock carries the prisoner out and tells the mob: “He’s
hanging under letter of the law, you goddamn cocksuckers.” He then makes sure
to just that as the dying man yells: “F---you!” for his last words. In our introduction
to the Gem, Trixie has shot a john who fell asleep when they were done and woke
up and tried to strangle her. Al nearly kills her right there. The poor soul is
the first of many to be fed to the pigs. Swearengen ends up killing a man who
helped him in a confidence scheme that we see later in the episode. The episode
ends with Trixie standing before Swearengen, taking the gun out and then
getting into bed beside him.
The Shield: Vic Mackey takes out a
group of weapons before a pedophile who is suspected to be holding a child
hostage. He offers a daughter as trade. The pedophile says: “What is this, good
cop, bad cop?” Mackey says: “Good cop and bad cop went home for the day. I’m a
different cop.” He then beats the suspect within an inch of his life. This was
done, for the record, with the backing of even the detectives who loathe him.
The episode ends with Mackey shooting a member of his strike team in the face.
Breaking Bad: Walter White, diagnosed
with cancer, decides to start cooking crystal meth in a trailer. His handiwork is so good that the
two men who are buyers try to kill him. He mixes chemicals that kill them both.
When this ends, he delivers a frantic video message to his family that ‘is not
an admission of guilt’ and then steps out on the highway to sirens, apparently
about to commit suicide by cop. When this doesn’t happen, he goes home and has
very rough sex with his wife (the least of the indignities Skyler will face
during her time on the show)
And as an added bonus, one
of my favorites:
Damages: We hear an elevator door
open. A woman covered in blood walks out. She is arrested by the police and hands
a card for a different attorney. We flash back six months, and see her get
hired by Patty Hewes, who we learn very quickly only did so in order to get
access to a witness who is vital to a class action lawsuit she thinks she might
lose. She also pretends to fire her closest associate when he broaches a
settlement offer without her consent and uses him to manipulate this same woman.
The episode ends with us being told by Ellen “Someone tried to kill me” and
closes with that happening.
I could give some more
pilots that have shown equally shocking moments to that point in time – Battlestar
Galactica, in addition to nuking the human race, shows a female Cylon
snapping a baby’s neck in the streets; Dexter, of course, shows the
title character stalking his prey through the streets of Miami, killing him and
then going to his job as blood spatter analyst, and Lost has at the end
of its first half, an unseen force ripping
the pilot of a crashed plane out of the cockpit and being torn in half. All of
which is to say by 2013 it took a lot to raise my eyebrows.
And it’s not as if, for
the record, Frank killed a dog that was still healthy. The dog, as these writers
forget, had been hit by a car and was going to die anyway. Frank used to argue about
the two kinds of pain and said what the dog was going through was useless. It
was in the strictest definition; this dog was not going to be alive much
longer. I won’t lie it say was compassionate, but if you’re going to call it
monstrous compared to the things that I’ve listed above – certainly in the case
of Vic Mackey or Al Swearengen – then I truly must wonder about your priorities
when you are ranking the suffering of a dying animal above a living human being.
By the end of the season, of course, Frank had done exactly that to a man that
even though he was using him, he still considered a friend.
For the record I’ve seen many more shocking
and bloody things done by protagonists in many series since House of Cards –
the opening of every season of Fargo starts with a hideous death,
usually unintentional; Yellowjackets opening scene involved a teenage
girl being hunted and dying in a pit -
and later being cooked and eaten by her friends, and while I’m far from
Shonda Rhimes’ biggest fan, How to Get Away With Murder opening with
four law students throwing their professor’s husband’s dead body on a bonfire. To be sure, no major leader of a new series
may kill a dog in the pilot in year’s to come but don’t pretend that Peak TV still
has not lost its power to shock and awe over the decade since.
Peak TV has been built on
the evil that men and women do and we are first-hand witnesses to their
bloodthirsty behavior. Such will likely be the case for years to come. But if
we’re supposed to believe that the opening scene of House of Cards represents
the worst in human behavior, well, to paraphrase Buffy the Vampire Slayer “maybe
it’s just all the horrible things we’ve seen the last few years, but somehow a
dog being put to sleep just isn’t as shocking as used to be.”
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