It wasn't any over the top than the original. It mostly just followed The BBC production almost to the letter, except with US spin.

Until Season 4?. Whenever the re-election campaign started. Joel Kinnaman, while a great actor (loved him in Altered Carbon) was a massive miscast as a plausible candidate for the GOP. Mostly due to youth. And the last season was a Game of Thrones-level utter disaster.

I thought the original was scoped and paced perfectly: no fluff, all action (of the suspensy kind), didn't wait for itself to peter out.

The remake just drags on and on and on. Tons of irrelevant detail and uninteresting sidestories.

> Tons of irrelevant detail and uninteresting sidestories.

That's how I felt about Succession for 3 seasons.

I felt it just dragged and dragged and I couldn't understand what was the fuss.

Then I started watching some YouTube commentary and starting to understand that the irrelevant and uninteresting was actually relevant and interesting.

ATN, the succession, that was all bogus for character development, a setup.

I feel like House of Cards may fall in a similar category there. It's not much about the action but character evolution and dynamics.

Oh I have no doubt that was the aim in the HoC remake. It just wasn't any good, unlike Succession. Not all character development and dynamics are interesting.

The scope and pacing in the original was just perfect. Just because you can layer on more, doesn't mean it's gonna make it better. Much was pure tedium and seemed to serve filling time first and foremost.

except it made more sense Francis Urquhart being Conservative than Frank Underwood being Democrat

This is the first time I see a fellow Altered Carbon fan in the wild.

In the wild? For people who read books, they probably weren't a fan. For people who don't care about source material, the show was amazing. I'm still pissed it was cancelled. It was apparently ridiculous expensive to produce and that's all the more reason they should have kept going with it: to show that we want more of those types of things.

Recasting of the main character didn't help, even if it's explainable in-universe.

I thought it was a great standalone show. What I found unforgivable were the underlying plot changes vs the books.

The Last Envoy? What? That did not even become a plot point (at least in season 1, I bailed pretty early in S2). Also, Envoys are terrorists and not the ultimate-special ops forces?

This is what really threw me. In the book, Kovacs was hired because he had been a highly-trained UN envoy. It made little sense for him to be hired as a known terrorist. I wasn't much of a fan of any of the terrorist cell background, or the other background elements like those with his sister, that they decided to add to the show.

let's make it three then. Read the books, enjoyed the series(s). Want a unicorn backpack to carry around, but don't think I can carry it off (pun intended) the way Joel did.

I stopped in the episode where, for me at least, out of absolutely nowhere, Spacey's character seduces a body guard and him and his wife have a 3some with him. I'm sure many people loved that. For me, I was like WTF? what was completely out of left field, added to punch up ratings or just it insert shock value. I stopped watching. What that in the UK version?

Did you check out the original UK House of Cards? Worth catching if you can find it.