The Self-Inoculating Insight of House of Cards

The Netflix series, "House of Cards," which is a remake of the British show by the same name, is in the second season.  Since the whole season was available at once, critics and just about everyone else binged.  While some critics (like those at Slate)  recognized that the series is trashy, many loved it (Under the Radar, Star Tribune, Rottentomatoes) and social media blew up with accolades.  What I find interesting is the way people think this show is profound, and the "the anti-hero turned villain"the best character on television.     
I don't think it is.  I think the second season is worse than the first, where there is an actual challenge to Frank Underwood's success.  It isn't just that the second season (SPOILER ALERT) where Frank moves from being the Vice-President to the President in 13 episodes by destroying the President, is difficult to believe, but it gives us a false sense of watching the workings of power.  We learn from Nietzsche that the powerful take pleasure in suffering and that we take pleasure in suffering because it gives us a feeling of power.  I'm struck by how this show works then to vicariously make us feel powerful, while dulling our outrage in response to the abuse of power.  In fact, I'm struck by the parallel that the effect of this show has to what one Plato scholar, Tom Davis, has called the self-inoculating insight that Socrates' interlocutors have over and over to prevent them from really examining themselves.
In Plato's Laches, Socrates is speaking with a number of Athenian generals about how to raise their sons.  Socrates leads them to see that the question that needs to be examined is whether any one of them is an expert in the care of the soul, the knowledge that would be needed to raise their sons to have good souls.  Socrates, as is his wont, denies that he has this knowledge, and encourages his Lysimachus, one of the generals to question Laches and Nicias, the other generals in order to see if they have this knowledge that would make them capable of caring for their souls.  But before that investigation could happen, an investigation that would force them to confront their own lack of knowledge about what they claim to be good at, Nicias interrupts and tells Lysimachus how Socrates works: that "Socrates will not let him go before he has well and truly tested every last detail" (188a).  Instead of submitting himself to this testing, Nicias discusses how the testing works and what it accomplishes.  It isn't that Nicias is wrong here--he describes Socrates' elenchus well--but that what he performs is a way of using his insight to escape having to actually respond.  I argue that this show accomplishes the same thing.
"House of Cards" allows us to act as if we have insight--power corrupts--but it protects us from having to respond and allows us to just wallow in the pleasure of a successful villain whom we may or may not be rooting for but are certainly captivated by.  It allows us not to think about and respond to the power structures that make corruption in power possible in a way that would force us to have to consider what role we play in that structure and what we can do to change it.  In this sense, I think "House of Cards," is very different from a show like, "The Wire."

David Simon's hit HBO show depicted a failed contest between cops and drug dealers where the losers were the cities and citizens.  There was a fascination with the show because of its grim reality that left the viewer never satisfied and often frustrated.  Drug plans that worked were cancelled because of "optics." The drive to statistics led to gross incompetence and the greater concern for closing cases than for justice.  In the end (SPOILER ALERT) one of the main characters, a homicide detective, invents a serial killer in order to get the much needed funds to stop a drug kingpin.  Nobody wins.  No viewer feels innoculated.  You keep watching because you think you are responsible to know.  And with that knowledge to respond.