“The age of the middle-aged white man is over.”
So whispers Robin Wright’s Claire Underwood in episode three of the new season of House of Cards. It’s but one example of the archly self-referential moments that punctuate the show’s sixth and final season but without doubt the most pointed. A season many speculated wouldn’t happen after the removal of its former star and executive producer, Kevin Spacey, whose turbulent journey as Francis J. Underwood — from party whip to Oval Office — had us rapt for the past five years.
Netflix’s first original series is no stranger to scandal. The five seasons to date have seen Spacey’s callous, scheming politician entangled in everything from perjury to extortion – determined to rise to the top by any and all means possible. But when the scandal shifted from story to production? That was something else entirely.
On 30 October 2017, just weeks into the #Metoo movement, actor Anthony Rapp (Star Trek: Discovery) came forward to accuse Kevin Spacey of making unwanted sexual advances. The incident in question was said to have occurred in 1985, when Rapp was just 14 years old. Spacey – who had just begun work on House Of Cards’ sixth season – responded to the allegations in a statement: “I honestly do not remember the encounter… if I did behave then as he describes, I owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behaviour, and I am sorry for the feelings he describes having carried with him all these years.”
The following day, Netflix and the show’s production company Media Rights Capital confirmed that Spacey was no longer on set (he wasn’t scheduled to be). The day after, production was halted entirely. By 4 November, following allegations that Spacey had also sexually harassed others, assaulted a male co-worker on the show and contributed to a ‘toxic’ work environment, he was summarily fired. The show about presidential depravity had just impeached and removed its president.
With that, the show’s future was cast into doubt, many wondering whether it could return at all. Showrunners Melissa James and Frank Pugliese, meanwhile, set about picking up the pieces, trying to make sense of a story without its lead. By the time filming resumed in January this year, it was clear they had found a through line: one blunt, to-the-point and entirely consistent with the show’s history of savage storylines. A teaser trailer released this September tells it simply: Francis Underwood is dead and buried, in the plot next to his father’s — a spot he regarded as a toilet. Replacing him in the Presidency: Robin Wright’s Claire Underwood, his wife. A move foreshadowed at the close of Season 5 with her fourth-wall-
breaking declaration, straight into the camera: “My turn.”
“Our entire goal was to end this story with a pay-off which addressed all the seeds that had been planted,” explains James, who alongside Pugliese has been writing for the show since its third season in 2014.
“[After production shut down] Melissa and I went back to work the next day,” says Pugliese. “We were still trying to finish telling the story we’d started years before.”
Shifting focus to Claire was a move made out of necessity — the only option left for a show shaken to its core. But despite its inauspicious origin, the show’s hasty readjustment is far from an unwelcome one. Recent seasons had been considered by some to lack the bite of the show’s acid debut and Underwood’s manoeuvring had, partly due to the seismic shift in real-world politics, lost much of its shock value. This coupled with the fact that Mrs Underwood has always been the more enigmatic and appealing half of the ruthless power couple, makes Claire’s shift to centre stage feel more shrewd than desperate.
“THE ONLY DIFFERENCEFOR ME
is I had more scenes to shoot than last season,” says Wright, matter-of-factly. It’s a pragmatic take on such a fundamental shift but then it’s not one for which Wright was unprepared. Claire’s ascendency was, she says, “always destined to happen”. With the seed deliberately planted by that two-word sign-off at the close of Season 5, it’s only the timescale that has altered, being drastically moved up from the original plans. Wright’s concern, like many others, was that the show would be cancelled.
“A lot of people would have been out of work,” she reflects. “We forged ahead and continued completing the mission we always intended on completing.”
While Claire (and perhaps Wright) might just find emancipation in Frank’s
departure, it has been less easily shrugged off in other quarters.
“On my first day back without him, there was a void,” says Michael Kelly, who plays Francis’ devoted aide Doug Stamper. “He was mine and Robin’s acting partner for six years. But with great respect to everyone involved, they said ‘Look, okay, either we go and we do what we need to do or we sit there wallowing.’”
If any single character was going to feel Underwood’s loss the most keenly, it’s Doug Stamper. More so even than Frank’s wife, Stamper’s fate and feelings were inextricably linked with Underwoods’. He lied for Frank, bled for him and even killed for him during the course of the show; dogged loyalty keeping Stamper by his master’s side through the worst of it all. With Frank’s departure, though, Doug is lost, tracing the jagged edges left when his boss was ripped from the storyboard.
“Doug always believed in being bad for the greater good,” suggests Kelly. “He believed in Frank, and he had definite conviction in everything he did for Frank. But now he’s gone [Doug’s] having a Jesus moment: ‘What am I doing? What is my purpose?’ It was one of the harder seasons for me because he’s going through things he’s never gone through before.”
Doug’s loyalty to the cult of Francis has not been interred alongside the man himself, though. If anything, his fanaticism only grows in his master’s absence. Loyalty, suggests Pugliese, is the character’s tragic flaw and after a career spent fostering the legacy of Frank J. Underwood, Stamper is left in a void – one that leads to a rich and far from easy dynamic between him and the former First Lady.
“She is such a force,” says Kelly, admiringly. “You can’t take your eyes off her.”
As the show’s driving force now, viewers will finally understand what makes Claire Underwood tick, exploring her interior perspective far more, just as we’ve previously done with Frank. Taking over from Spacey as the show’s to-camera commentator, Claire invites us inside her machiavellian schemes, delivered, as you might expect, with ice-cool directness and a knowing smile.
“There are fleeting moments of empathy, or a sensitivity,” insists Wright, who you sense has herself learned more of what makes Claire tick. “She breaks the shell of stoicism, and you see the woman, the little girl. I hope there were enough of those moments because you’ve got to like the character, even if you hate them!”
Likeability is hard line to walk with anti-heroic leads and harder to foster in female characters than male, especially when the woman in question is as bold and cunning as Claire Underwood. And further complicated when played out against the contextual backdrop of women generally being considered too soft and amenable for politics.
“Frank could do anything and he’s likeable,” observes Kelly. “Just because [Claire’s] a woman, she does something and you think differently, and that is mirrored in the current political situation and life in general. Women are still not viewed equally… and it’s still shit.”
Amiability, though, simply isn’t the goal. The show’s writers aren’t trying to win elections or court approval ratings, and Claire’s likeability is not the character’s appeal. It is, rather, the reverse – the way she concedes her kindness.
“Likeable is interesting but the draw is more that people wrestle with their humanity and often pay a price for it,” insists Pugliese.
Last season, Claire Underwood’s smart and pithy interactions with Patricia Clarkson’s Jane Davis proved a high point, one that is matched this time around by the introduction of a brand new sparring partner, this time played by Diane Lane. As Annette Shepherd, Lane is a southern belle who holds Claire close while muttering conniving threats, her affection making the knife twists in Claire’s back all the more damaging.
“There’s a backstory with our characters,” reveals Lane, “And that makes it even more delicious.”
Claire’s connection to Annette is one Frank never demonstrated with other men — not the ones he slept with, not even devoted lapdog Doug. It’s a new and, James emphasises, distinctly female tie only made possible by the show’s new dynamic .
“Women, when they’re alone with each other drop the artifice and cut to the chase a lot faster than men tend to,” says James. “It’s a gross generalisation, but it was fun to play with that in the highly masculine landscape of this show. It’s essential to us to explore multiple vulnerable female characters. We wanted this to be season of reckoning and we wanted it to grapple with everything it had wrought and we wanted to do it with powerful women characters.”
WHEN HOUSE OF CARDS BEGAN,
it was positioned as an extreme exaggerations of contemporary US politics. With their rampant corruption, manipulation and high crimes, the Underwoods were a villainous caricature of Washington’s elite. Times, however, have changed in the past five years. Fact has caught up with fiction and in a world in which special counsels, abuse of power and calls for impeachment are spoken of daily, the show has had to adapt to its new reality.
“We began in the age of Obama and ended in the age of Trump,” says James. “It couldn’t be a more dramatic context shift
for a show that deals with politics. I hope our show isn’t to blame!”
Rather than trying to paint over the series’ new similarities with the real world, the showrunners have chosen to lean into it, embracing the parallels and pulling back the curtain on Underwood’s machinations in a way the public is desperate to see happen to Trump. Meanwhile, in-series talk shows, where popular real-life anchors take a break from reporting on Trump to make their cameos, play a crucial part in parlaying the showrunners’ take on the ways in which politicians’ behaviour – particularly female ones – is hyper-analysed by the media.
“We’ve worked really hard over the years to not be predictive, but hopefully symptomatic of present day politics and culture,“explains Pugliese. “We’re always trying to figure out what’s happening and the conversation that’s in the air. At the end of Season 5, when [Claire] says, ‘It’s my turn,’ it was before it broke publicly that the series was coming to an end. [The fall of the middle-aged white man] has been in the air for a while, and is now at the forefront with #Metoo – and rightfully so.”
Unimaginable as it would have been when it first aired, the show has, with its first female commander-in-chief, managed to become almost progressive — an impressive feat for a dystopian Washington nightmare. But this is House Of Cards, and if you’re looking to the Underwoods for comfort in this time of political turmoil then you’re only asking for trouble. A female President she may be, but Claire, like her late husband, is rotten to the core. More nuanced and complex, certainly, but as cold and calculating an operative as series fans have come to expect. In other words, if you were hoping Claire’s tenure in the White House would provide a woke, feminist ending to redeem the series’ jet-black heart, you might be disappointed. The essence of the show remains very much unchanged and Frank’s legacy still lingers even as Spacey’s is set aside.
“To deny the existence of Francis Underwood would be to deny the history of the show,” explains James. “That would be absurd and for us going forward. There’s no way the character of Claire Underwood isn’t in dialogue with her past and Frank, including their shared deeds as she intends to forge a future without him. This character is facing herself in ways she has never been forced to do and that was exciting for us.”
Due to Kevin Spacey, the show has become as much a part of the conversation about abuse of power as its characters. But unlike its namesake, House Of Cards has no intention of tumbling down. Pulled into the reckoning of #Metoo, it’s a series now tasked with using that fact to make its story even more relevant, reframing the story around a new lead. A female lead. One arguably more timely and captivating than her predecessor. When the dust has settled, the end of one middle-aged white man may very well turn out to be the beginning of the show’s most rich and relevant season yet.