Wolff: 'House of Cards' shows Netflix weakness

What does it mean for Netflix that the third season of House of Cards is no good? No, no, not just no good, but incompetent, a shambles, lost.

House of Cards has been the Netflix flag, the credential upon which it went from video reseller to tastemaker and show business force. Its effort to position itself as an HBO competitor, if not killer, rests with its ability as a programmer. Anybody can make deals as a secondary distributor of movies and TV shows on the Internet — Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Comcast all headed on board. The competitive barrier gets much higher when you become a brand that represents, well, must-see TV.

So what the hell happened?

Flops do happen, of course. But with significant franchises, usually the worse you can expect is the uninspired, or more of the same. But the new House of Cards — its 13 episodes became available for viewing last Friday — is turned inside out. It's the opposite of what it was. It's a bait and switch. The characters in this third season have the same names but aren't the same people as in the first two seasons.

House of Cards began life as a British series about the rise of not just an amoral politician, but a murderous one. It was the ultimate and satisfying satire of someone who would truly do anything for power — with a wife who turned out to be even more ruthless than him.

Netflix has bragged that it used its vast viewer data to pinpoint House of Cards for remake. Audiences apparently related to a political show that did not take itself very seriously and lampooned the usual self-seriousness and implied nobility of political drama. (HBO has done well with a similar remake, Veep, inspired by the British series The Thick of It.) Accordingly, it ordered up a U.S. version of House of Cards, in which Kevin Spacey, the producer of the project, stars as the ultimate anti-hero, Francis Underwood. Robin Wright is his icy and deadly wife. (In fact, while Netflix says it used its data resources to select the show, Spacey had been shopping the project for several years.)

Francis Underwood, in the first two seasons, which established House of Cards as television gold, garnering Emmy nominations and Golden Globe awards, was deliciously and joyously without moral restraint or qualms. His only agenda was himself — and sometimes his wife, if she was lucky. If he seemed slightly more reluctant to murder people than his British counterpart, eventually he got around to that, too. That's the concept of the show: What if a politician were actually as venal and corrupt and ruthless and as much of a cold-stone killer as we imagine politicians want to be if only they had the courage. Well, here was such a politician. Nothing shaded here. No ambivalence. Francis Underwood is not just bad, he's the devil.

Until season three. And now, as though the first two seasons did not exist, Francis Underwood is West Wing's Jed Bartlet, quite a striving liberal public servant (albeit without quite the charm and intelligence).

It actually seems that the writers in this third season didn't even see the first two seasons. (As with the first two seasons, Beau Willimon continues to get the writing credit, but it's fair to assume his staff has grown, with, perhaps, not enough adult supervision.)

It could, I suppose, be a conscious repositioning. Because Netflix does not release rating numbers, we can't know how truly popular House of Cards or Netflix's other original offerings have been. Maybe the data now show people prefer do-gooders to murderers. Or, maybe, as House of Cards became more and more central to Netflix's overall PR strategy and brand message, the corporation, dominated by Silicon Valley liberals, pressed for something more uplifting.

But that doesn't explain this season's total lack of basic logic or knowledge. It's dumb and dumber: Francis Underwood is solving unemployment by … having the government hire everybody. He's dealing with the Middle East by getting the Russians to join with the U.S. in a United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Jordan Valley, a 9-mile-wide strip of land of no strategic value between Jordan and Israel. The White House has an exchange program with Tibet, which, Francis Underwood seems not to know, is part of China and not a separate country. Oh, and Claire Underwood, by a plot twist too banal to recount, sleeps in a jail cell a few feet from someone hanging himself undisturbed by his choking (or the certain smell).

The first two seasons of House of Cards had off-the-charts budgets, putting it among the most expensive television shows ever made. And perhaps that is the problem. Such spending can't go on at a company failing to turn a profit. Perhaps season three is just House of Cards cheap.

But it may also be that Netflix — and this should give pause to all the other tech platforms eager to become television producers — is just not up to the job. The creative process is, after all, hard to manage. Netflix, fundamentally a lot of techies with little basis on which to know anything about TV writing, has not much distinguished itself on other projects: Marco Polo is quite dead on arrival. Netflix may just be that classic show business character: dumb money. Like many star-struck wannabes before, perhaps it's being fleeced by Hollywood, with Spacey and Willimon merely phoning it in and collecting their checks.

Or, Netflix is just now coming face-to-face with the hard truth. This isn't technology, it's show business, where the best-laid plans founder on more variables than any algorithm can account for. This ought to prompt a question about the tech industry's stomach for a process that resists control and that is always as likely to humiliate you as to reward you.

House of Cards, which appeared to usher in the golden age of Internet-produced, over-the-top-delivered television, could already be signaling its end.