'House of Cards': Here's when the third season will air
'House of Cards' airs on Netflix and stars Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright as a scheming political couple.
'House of Cards' stars Kevin Spacey (l.) and Robin Wright (r.).
Nathaniel E. Bell/Netflix/AP
Netflix's popular political thriller "House of Cards" will return for its third season on Feb. 27, the online streaming platform said on Monday.
Netflix Inc, which tapped into new "binge" watching habits by making all episodes available at once, unveiled the new season with a silent 12-second clip of star Kevin Spacey as President Francis Underwood ascending stairs to a plane with Robin Wright, who plays his wife, Claire.
A black presidential limousine sits on the tarmac in the background, underscoring the ruthless Underwood's new role as U.S. president.
"House of Cards” is the first online-only series to win an Emmy Award – it captured the prize for outstanding sound mixing for a comedy or drama series. It was also nominated for many other prizes, including outstanding lead actor in a drama series (for Kevin Spacey’s work), for outstanding lead actress in a drama series (for Robin Wright’s performance), and, the year before, for outstanding drama series. In 2013, it lost the outstanding drama prize to the AMC show “Breaking Bad.”
Spacey spoke about his show’s home on Netflix in a 2013 interview with the Associated Press. Quality Internet TV is “a new paradigm,” the actor said, and the amount of quality TV in general is only growing, according to the actor.
“For storytellers who want to tell stories that are driven by character and not by explosions and things that only, in a sense, appeal to the heartbeat or the pulse and not the mind, then it makes sense to me that the best writers and directors and actors and storytellers are going to go to the ground where it is fertile," he said. "It's very fertile now, obviously. The streaming business is fertile, and the television business in its usual sense.”
“Cards” also finds itself in the middle of a real-life political debate in Maryland over tax credits the show received as part of a production deal to film in the state.
Maryland lawmakers say the $60.2 million in tax credits given to "House of Cards" and HBO political satire "Veep" together do not produce long-term economic gains for the state, which faces a budget shortfall next year of $600 million.