CARDS

assault), and replace him with the show's far more interesting co-star and character (Robin Wright as the newly sworn, stainless-steel President Claire Underwood), the series had already drifted hopelessly away from resonance or plausibility.

“House of Cards” — created by Beau Willimon and adapted from an old British miniseries — always felt more like a stagy battle re-enactment, with the most duplicitous scheme winning and extra points awarded for the character delivering the fanciest dialogue.

That turns out to be Claire, whose ascent to the Oval Office was determined in Season 5 before the Spacey matter. As a widow now, she finds herself beset by a laughably long list of Cabinet members, archrivals and nemeses clamoring to take her down. The attacks are relentless in both their opportunism and sexism.

When a potential assassin’s bullet chips the window of her armored limo, she quips that it’s the first sign of real respect she has had during her first 100 days in office.

“Here's the thing,” Claire says, on the first chance she gets to face the camera and speak to the viewers directly — a narrative device that was irritating when Spacey’s Frank Underwood did it and is only slightly less so now.

“Whatever Frank told you the last five years — don't believe a word of it. ... It’s going to be different for you and me. I'm going to tell you the truth.”

The truth would be nice, as would a list of all Season 6 references to the many schemes afloat in President Underwood's Washington, now and in previous seasons, for those of us who bowed out a few seasons ago. The series has become too tangled to follow.

Fans savored the show because of its unhinged portrayal of backstage politics, but it was rarely politically relevant or even competent — not five years ago and surely not now. The series was about needless cruelty, proving that democracy dies at this level of darkness, as do TV shows.

To believe in "House of Cards," you had to buy into its puppet-master theory of government, which holds that one Machiavellian public servant can, through never-ending blackmail and stringpulling, gain control of so many people that he could decide the course of anything that happens in Washington. Nothing was too low or despicable for the show's characters — not even murder.

The crazier Washington became, the more “House of Cards"” lost its touch.

Still, Wright's performance is a rocksolid study in resolve, and the new season throws a few clever and pleasingly feminist elbows with its newfound perspective.

Diane Lane joins the cast as Annette Shepherd, girlhood chum and lifelong frenemy to Claire. Annette is also the sister of Bill Shepherd (Greg Kinnear), an industrial scion in the Koch brothers mold, who is livid at Claire for having second thoughts about signing an environmentally ruinous bill that he has wormed through Congress.

Lane and Kinnear both seem eager to show off their squintyeyed skills at playing caustically opportunistic demons.

Casting for maximum creepiness has never been a problem for the series, as veterans such as Campbell Scott and Patricia Clarkson demonstrate, by making easy work of their snaky roles. (He plays the vice president, and she plays some kind of duplicitous adviser.)

It all comes to a swelling point in the fifth episode, as one side deploys a constitutionally sound plot device, and Claire's counter-scheme explodes in full fury.

The only thing less believable is the idea that people will still be watching.