Party affiliation aside, Frank’s a monster. Married to a monstress. …

Are we supposed to like them? No. Cheer for them? No. Boo and hiss as comeuppance gathers in the wings? Who knows? I’m pretty sure that when Frank did something very, very naughty in the first episode — imagine, if you will, LBJ kicking a reporter out the door of Air Force Two in flight — we were supposed to be caught off balance and shocked, and we were. Grateful, even, if you want to be honest, because (all right, seriously, SPOILER) that little reporter looked like a sullen elf who’d just had an electroshock treatment.

But is this entertainment? Why do I want to hang around with these people for ten hours?

It’s masochism TV, a new genre. The grittier the show is, the darker its premises, the more Important it is. The prime example is The Walking Dead, the main point of which seems to be: “There are probably a couple hundred people left in Georgia. Let’s see how long it takes for them to kill each other.” While it’s an unsparing examination of a Hobbesian world where people stage pitched battles for the possession of a can of cling peaches, it is unrelentingly joyless, fetid, miserable, violent, hopeless, and filthy.