[bcrescimanno]

For House of Cards, where known commodities like Kevin Spacey and David Fincher were already attached to a known story (House of Cards is a remake of a British series from the late 80s) it probably doesn't make sense to do a pilot.

It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. None of the Netflix originals so far has done a traditional "pilot" approach and, while I was there at least, there was no desire to start taking that approach.

The Netflix model is really completely different than traditional TV. Take Hemlock Grove as an example. Critically panned and considered by most people in HN circles to be a "bad" show--but (without going into detail) I can absolutely say it has been VERY successful for Netflix.

[cdash]

I have heard this before, and just to inject my own experience while I like House of Cards it took me awhile to get through it. Hemlock Grove though I went on a complete binge, every episode that ended I wanted to watch the next one.

[bcrescimanno]

The thing I've heard most often about Hemlock Grove sounds something like this, "It's really, REALLY bad! Oh man, it was so terrible! I watched the whole thing in like 2 days and it sucked! I can't wait for Season 2--it's gonna be terrible!"

(only slightly exaggerated)

[mythz]

I found Hemlock Grove interesting, the story progressed really slowly, luckily Netflix allows all-you-can-eat watching so I end up watching the whole season in a couple of weeks - where if I had to wait a week in between episodes I likely wouldn't have bothered. Overall I thought the production quality was high with good actors/acting and I liked that it had an unusual story-line even though I don't really like that genre. Will definitely watch next season, tho there are also better things on Netflix.