The new boss
“Happy Independence Day… to me,” smirks President Claire Underwood as she buries Francis personally and politically.
House Of Cards Season 6 Wednesdays (from 7 November) M-Net (*101) 22:00
Francis Underwood (Kevin Spacey) is dead. Equally dead are all the promises he made as he clawed and backstabbed his way to the top before being forced to resign at the end of season 5 (in September 2017) of House Of Cards (2013-2018). Before he left, he handed the reins to his wife and Vice President Claire Underwood (Robin Wright), but she isn’t here to clean up his mess like his mommy. The first female President Of The United States Of America is also the reigning queen of “don’t tell me what to do”. As she warns Francis’s ex-righthand man Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly), “I’m not going to be told what to do anymore, Doug. Not by you or any man, ever again.”
FIERCE, EVIL, FABULOUS
Robyn says that “I would personally like it to be the greatest president we have ever had. How she gets there and achieves that is a whole other thing regarding the opera of the show”. And while the spotlight shining on Francis’s murderous ruthlessness has let Claire slink by in the shadows, anyone who’s expecting a softer, gentler presidency simply hasn’t been paying attention. “You realise that she is just as fierce and evil, she just doesn’t have to talk so much,” teases Robin. House Of Cards’ co- executive producer Frank Pugliese adds, “Now that she’s become more ambitious, or actually just more pronounced with her ambitions, Claire complicity is going to be different than Francis’s complicity.”
WHO RUNS THE WORLD?
“One of our driving narrative forces [for season 6] has been an exploration of ‘Who owns the White House?’ It also became a season of reckoning for Claire to face herself in a way that maybe she has never had to, to this degree. A reckoning with her own ambition and herself and the definition of power,” says co- executive producer Melissa James Gibson. Claire’s most significant challengers to that power will be clobbering their way around Washington with politics’ most deadly, effective weapon – big, stinkin’ bags of money. Diane Lane and Greg Kinnear play super-mega-rich industrialist siblings Annette and Bill Shepherd, who are backing Annette’s son Duncan Shepherd’s (Cody Fern) entry into Washington’s political race. Francis made them a lot of promises and when Claire refuses to play along, she finds herself with a whole family of interesting new enemies. It’s a battle that will take place in the full glare of the spotlight as the Shepherds use their cash and contacts to spark a media circus.
NO FRIENDS IN POLITICS
It looks like Claire will have a lot of enemies and after burning Francis’s old bridges, very few friends too. “The notion of reckoning will play out across the characters and the sort of shifting notion of who is Claire’s partner? Doug potentially being one or not. It’s something we’re always going to be playing with. But there’s a lot to be reckoned with after six seasons of the show,” says Frank. And Melissa asks, “Is this country ready for a female president? Will they allow it? You know… that is a huge thing hanging over the season. The real world didn’t.” As the new season begins, one TV personality is already calling Claire “the worst thing that has ever happened to this country”.
Behind the scenes though, Robin will have no shortage of allies. After Kevin was fired, she approached Netflix directly to insist that they not drop the show and put 2 500 people out of work. That seems rather more successful than Francis Underwood’s America Works jobs campaign was!