House Of Cards

While most of the attention on Netflix's forays into original programming has focused on revivals of canceled TV series, the streaming service first announced a new era of being a cable competitor with the acquisition of House Of Cards, an Americanization of the 1990 BBC drama of the same name due to premiere in one big lump on February 1. And finally, here's the trailer to make Netflix's ambitions more thematically explicit: Reuniting David Fincher with his Se7en star Kevin Spacey on an altogether-different story about ruthless manipulation—one likely to have fewer decapitations—House Of Cards finds Spacey pulling out his old Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil accent to play a Southern congressman climbing his way to the top on the backs of his enemies, and dropping every threatening metaphor he can think of for power along the way. It's like real estate ("The closer you are to the source, the higher your property value"). It's a jungle out there ("We’ll cleave you from the herd and watch you die in the wilderness.") It's like, uh, devouring a whale. In other words, politics is a nasty business, and only an aloof sociopath like Kevin Spacey seems fit to survive it.