'House Of Cards' Season 4 Trailer: You Get The Leaders (And The Netflix Shows) You Deserve
When someone writes a gigantic book about the history of mass entertainment a few decades from now, they're going to need to dedicate a chapter to House of Cards. Netflix's first original series is one of those watershed moments – you can cleanly divide the timeline between before and after this show premiered. Here is the series that broke the dam on streaming shows. Here is the series that transformed Netflix into a major player in the film and TV industry. Here is a series that proved that you can somehow craft a hit show by running an algorithm.
And yet, you'd be hard-pressed to find too many fans who thought that season 3 of this crafty, dense political drama was up to snuff. It was a definite step down from the gleeful insanity of season 2, which saw the series embrace its soap operatic side with outlandishly entertaining results. So the new season has one primary objective: get everything back on course. And wouldn't you know it? A new House of Cards season 4 trailer has arrived and you can watch it below. Let's start judging.
The trailer, which premiered during the Golden Globes ceremony last night, rests entirely on House of Cards' strongest asset: star Kevin Spacey. One part snake oil salesman and one part glazed ham, this show has always been at its best when it just lets Spacey run wild and break the fourth wall and generally just be a devious sonuvabitch. This trailer, which consists of him addressing the nation directly while the sins of the previous three seasons flash across the screen, knows what we're here for. Naturally, massive spoilers for the entire show so far are contained in this video:
This is the first proper teaser for the new season, following an amusing faux campaign ad that announced the arrival of the next batch of episodes with cheeky dark humor. After all, a monster or two lurks behind every cheery political advertisement:
The truth is that Netflix doesn't even need to release a full and proper trailer at this point. They don't need to sell this thing. They know that their countless subscribers will literally have to see that the new season has arrived when they fire up their televisions to stream anything else. This is the strange new world in which we live now and this is what traditional networks have to compete against: a hugely popular series that barely needs to advertise itself and has a built-in audience that will watch by default. Now, all the show needs to is be entertaining again. Because yikes, season 3.
House of Cards season 4 will arrive on Netflix on March 4, 2016. Clear your schedule now.