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" On Friday, Netflix is launching the first of its original series, House of Cards, releasing all thirteen episodes at once. It doesn&amp;#039;t sound like that big of a deal, I know. They did sort of the same thing with the Norwegian comedy Lilyhammer last year. The difference is that Lilyhammer was produced by Norwegian television and then bought by Netflix afterward. House of Cards is the first show Netflix has made knowing from the beginning that they were going to release the whole thing at once. It&amp;#039;s a fundamental change in the means of production, a change in understanding what a television show is and what it should be. And basically it means that the quality of what we see on television is going to take another massive leap forward.  Netflix is only reflecting the prevailing practice of watching television, at least for me and everyone I know. I save up shows, and then watch them in bulk. Unless I&amp;#039;m in a hotel, I don&amp;#039;t just sit down to see what&amp;#039;s on television. Even more antiquated is the practice of thinking about an evening&amp;#039;s lineup, planning to watch something on Thursday night, say. There are a few shows you might actually watch as soon as they come out, like Mad Men or Girls, but that&amp;#039;s virtually it. Everything else can wait.  What House of Cards reveals is that television that&amp;#039;s released all at once just is not the same aesthetic act as television that&amp;#039;s released every week or so. Essentially it&amp;#039;s a thirteen-hour movie divided into sections. This new genre has different functionalities than previous television shows. The point of Three&amp;#039;s Company was to carry you along pleasantly until it was done. That was all it had to do. House of Cards has to do two things. It has to make you want to see the next episode immediately. And it has to make you want to see it again. House of Cards does both, and though the show has its flaws, lack of ambition is not among them. Netflix has made this with the highest production values, with star actors and the best available screenwriters. Ambition, it seems, is the way of the future.  The amazing thing is that Netflix is making this great television out of greed. The new financial realities have so aligned that there is a strong incentive to producing excellent television, and not just excellent television, but television that can be re-watched, that has to be loved to survive. Given all the creative destruction that digital dissemination has brought to other industries, particularly to music, this bit of good fortune for television viewers amounts to a miracle. Who could have predicted that television had to become literature to work?  Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a18610/house-of-cards-netflix-15039955/>