<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Everyone knows about the success of writers on television, but not enough is said about the visual accomplishments of some of the best shows right now. Lost among New York magazine&amp;#039;s recent interview with Steven Soderbergh, in which the director says all sorts of unadvisable things (seriously, check out his political opinions), Soderbergh does hit on something very true: What I like about all those shows is that there&amp;#039;s an aesthetic that&amp;#039;s adhered to no matter who is directing it. They have rules, there&amp;#039;s a tool kit. I don&amp;#039;t like seeing stuff where there&amp;#039;s no coherence to the choices that are being made. And all those shows are shot like movies. That train-robbery episode in the last season of Breaking Bad? They had like eight days to shoot that episode. That&amp;#039;s good shit! And House of Cards is the most beautiful thing you&amp;#039;ve seen on a screen.  Since most TV shows rotate directors frequently (Larry David&amp;#039;s insistence on hiring the same three or so guys notwithstanding), they need to set up visual templates for themselves. Often this is done by the initial director or some sort of creative force who tends to hire the directors, as Michael Mann did on Luck, whose horse-racing sequences visually rivaled and probably surpassed anything similar done in film. When the directors are good, you can get some really interesting riffs on a show&amp;#039;s template \u2014 Jesse in Breaking Bad levitating while high, he and Walt making meth to the sound of &amp;quot;On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever).&amp;quot; Netflix spared no expense on its first original series, House of Cards, and it shows. In addition to being the executive producer, David Fincher directed the first two episodes and clearly determined the show&amp;#039;s visual cues. If you&amp;#039;ve seen The Social Network, then you have a handle on the basic aesthetic of House of Cards \u2014 a lot of blue and dim lighting and people walking around the city at dawn. It doesn&amp;#039;t make you want to visit Washington, DC, even if it weren&amp;#039;t &amp;quot;filled with Machiavellian strivers.&amp;quot;      I wouldn&amp;#039;t call the show &amp;quot;the most beautiful thing you&amp;#039;ve seen on a screen,&amp;quot; but it has a look, one that&amp;#039;s been confidently crafted, and it does one thing perfectly: text messaging. If you go back through the history of e-messaging and the use of digital technology more generally in movies, it&amp;#039;s not pretty. Cutting to a text scrolling across a screen does not do much for dramatic tension. It can work as comedy, though, as Sneakers proved. House of Cards solves this dilemma. There are few shots of cellphone screens. Instead, the text messages that characters send and receive appear as blue bubbles popping near their bodies. This might&amp;#039;ve looked pretty silly in 1997, when we were still getting acquainted with the idea of text messages barraging us throughout the day, but now it just makes sense. It&amp;#039;s how we live. We can process those little bubbles on House of Cards along with the characters, like little blimps spelling out their doom, while simultaneously watching them trapped in their icy DC hell. Just look at Kevin Spacey sitting there by the fountain reading the annoyed questions of his wife. You can tell it&amp;#039;s going to be a long day. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a18857/house-of-cards-text-messaging-15059093/?click=news>