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Hi, I'm Dana Stevens, filling in for Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture

Gab Fest. Six seconds of my life manages to bore even me edition. It's Wednesday, February

6, 2013, and on today's show, Netflix makes a hundred million dollar gamble on its new show House

of Cards.

Could it change the way we consume TV? Then we discuss our forays into the new video sharing app, fine. Could it be the next big contender in the competition to get as much food and as many cats onto the internet as possible? And finally, the Culture Fest is gearing up for the Oscars for the next few weeks by discussing an Oscar movie every week. This week we're going to talk about Silver Linings Playbook, a movie that I found refreshingly alive, despite many flaws. I'm joined remotely by Slate's deputy editor, Julia Turner. Hi, Julia. Hi, Diana. And here in the studio, Pinch Hitting for Stephen today is David Hagland, the editor of Slate's culture blog, Browbeat. Hi, David. Hi, Dana. So, guys, let's start by talking about the new Netflix drama House of Cards, which stars Kevin Spacey as a politician who's overlooked in his bid to become the Secretary of State. This series, which is based on a BBC series, is the very first to be produced exclusively for Netflix. As the result of a, I would say, precedent-setting content deal between Netflix and the director David Fincher, who's the executive producer of the show and also directed the first episode. It was released in an unusual fashion as well last week with all 13 episodes coming out on the same day so that viewers can watch them as they see fit. So before we get into the show itself, I want to talk a little bit about the distribution model and how it might change TV. What did you guys think of this experience of being able to watch a new show all at once without the weekly rhythm that TV usually provides? Well, to me, it's just an indication of how fast the TV landscape is changing. When this deal was announced, I think at least a year and a half ago, I thought, that seems crazy. I was not yet using Netflix streaming. It seemed complicated. Why would you put so much money into a medium that maybe not that many people are going to watch? Of course, since then, I've become a Netflix streamer, and it seems completely normal to watch something that's streaming from Netflix on my TV over the weekend. It's a slightly different series of buttons I push on my remote than I would push if I were

watching the new show from FX or HBO or NBC or any other network. But if Netflix wants to

act like a network, it kind of works for me. Like I thought it would feel more like watching the

internet than it did. It felt like watching TV. But isn't there something different about the reception of the show? I do feel like the conversation about the show feels different than the cultural conversation that we have about a show that's released week by week. Just insofar as you don't know how much anybody else has seen. You sort of don't know how to talk about it or in what doses to take it. Did you guys feel the need to binge when you started watching it? David, you did binge, right? Yeah, I finished it all by Saturday night, which I found somewhat embarrassing until June Thomas admitted she had done the same. And I didn't plan on doing that. I mean, I did find the show addictive, and I do like to watch shows that way. I was at first puzzled by Netflix's decision

to release it that way because there's no technological reason they need to. They could have put

it out once a week, a few episodes a week, whatever they wanted to do. I'm now convinced they

wanted to make this psychological break for people to suggest that TV is not what we used to think of it as, right?

It's not something that you have to tune in at a certain time to watch.

And in a lot of ways, people have already gotten used to that idea with DVRs and so on.

But this is more extreme.

Here's all of a television show or all of its first season at once.

...