If you haven’t cottoned on to the excitement, tonight our very own XTV plays host to the 40th National Student TV Awards.
Image credit: NaSTA
The event will reward excellence, innovation and hilarity in student TV, with dozens of stations from around the country descending on Exeter for a night of celebration accompanied by some embarrassing dance moves. Streaming of the awards goes LIVE at 8.10, to see how XTV fare, click here. Don’t forget to like XTV on Facebook, and for more NaSTA coverage, our print counterparts will be live tweeting the event!
Netflix, as many of us may have long suspected from the guys who killed Blockbuster and got clean away with it, are cunning little buggers.
These are, after all, the people who invented the bane of my university degree; the ‘Next episode in 15 seconds’ feature. If you haven’t heard of this then I congratulate you on your future 1st class degree and hope I can sleep on your floor sometime when my abject 3rd renders me unemployable.
The ‘next episode’ phenomenon is simple – you put on a TV show on Netflix, and at the end of the episode, instead of having to fiddle around and move from the face-down position on the sofa, it simply plays the next one for you after a modest delay. The result is that you never leave the sofa, especially if there is food within reach, and that you can burn through an entire TV series in a matter of days, or sometimes even just a day.
It’s an alarming enhancement of the already-addictive properties of modern television. My compulsive personality coupled with Netflix’s clever invention makes the likes of Breaking Bad or House of Cards (the show this article is nominally about, and that I will get to eventually) the cocaine my student loan can’t afford. Although at 6 quid a month Netflix ain’t stunningly cheap either, so thanks to Screen Editor Olivia Luder for letting me borrow her account to write this article!
House of Cards is the further refinement of this already potent mixture. A US-remake of the British political series, it was a surprise to everyone when Netflix outbid the standard US broadcast channels like HBO and AMC in negotiations, making House of Cards Netflix’s first piece of original programming. But crucially, Netflix abandoned the traditional format of teasing us with one episode at a time in favour if releasing the whole first season at once online. Allowing junkies around the world to blissfully overdose on a particularly high-quality fix.
And it is indeed high-quality, and high-budget too. Kevin Spacey as the ruthless House Majority Whip (ask a politics student) stalking the corridors of a neo-noir lamp-lit Washington, turning occasionally to deliver a smug and cynical aside to the audience in a southern drawl, makes for excellent viewing – an unusual style for a political drama but very refreshing.
It lacks somewhat the realism of, say, The West Wing, in favour of a slightly more stylised (and stylish) John Grisham approach, but I was hooked from frame one. The writing makes the occasional mis-step in its search for good dialogue (again, drawing inevitable comparisons with the flawless Aaron Sorkin), tending towards the overblown in the monologues, but for the most part the veiled sniping in the duologues sets the tone expertly. I strongly recommend giving it a watch – but be warned, you’ll be there for hours; Netflix have made sure of it.
Image credit: Netflix
Unsurprisingly, such an unusual step for a video rental company could not go unaccompanied by some inspiring copy about the state of the screen industry as a whole. Netflix seems to firmly believe that they are at the forefront of the next revolution, with both writer and director exclaiming “the world of [TV shows on] 7:30 on Tuesday nights, that’s dead” and that House of Cards and the new format “is the future, streaming is the future. TV will not be TV in five years from now…everyone will be streaming”. Spacey himself comes up with perhaps the best defence of the new format, noting how binging on TV series over a short period of time is becoming increasingly normal.
Whether or not Netflix is really leading the charge or wandering off in an odd direction remains to be seen. Certainly it would appear that the series has not garnered perhaps as much media and blogosphere attention as a series of its calibre deserves – if you’d heard of it before this article I’d imagine that puts you in the minority. Whether that is different on the other side of the Atlantic, or whether it’s a result of its unusual release, is hard to tell. But regardless of whether House of Cards is a trailblazer or doomed to remain an anomaly, it’s still most certainly worth a watch.
exeposedev 