With the long-anticipated third season of the classic Twin Peaks having debuted this past weekend, and the fifth season of the political drama House of Cards just a few days away, it’s shaping up to be a banner week for TV aficionados. But watch both shows carefully, and you’ll see a stark difference between them, a chasm that can teach us a lot about the ways we tell stories in America, which, really, is to say the ways we choose to make sense of our lives.
First, the Frank Underwood Show. You may argue that any show that has a high-ranking politician meet a reporter in a D.C. Metro station only to push her in front of an oncoming train is patently silly—as if we’re supposed to believe that the D.C. Metro actually runs!—but that would be missing the point. Fans of House of Cards watch it for the same reason pro-wrestling buffs tune in to see two fleshy mounds embracing: not despite the artifice, but because of it. To watch a glistening Hulk Hogan barely lift Andre the Giant and slam him into the mat is to witness the essence of the eternal struggle of good versus evil. No one really cared that their actual match—Wrestlemania III, to the uninitiated among you—was a long and mediocre slog. The storyline was compelling not because it was wrestling at its finest but because it pitted two very different characters against each other and allowed each to be blissfully, ridiculously free of the confines of nuance, gravity, or good taste.
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