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No, Washington, You Can’t Have “House of Cards” Today

Snowed in with nothing to do but watch TV, locals demand an early debut of the Netflix series, but Netflix refuses.
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Not yet. Photograph by Nathaniel Bell for Netflix.

Waking up to a foot of snow, many Washington residents are spending the sudden day off by launching a protest—at Netflix, demanding an early viewing of the second season of House of Cards, which is set to be released at midnight Friday.

But will clamoring from bored, snowed-in Netflix customers prompt the online video service to move the debut of the newest episodes of its flagship series up by a few hours.

Even Slate is getting in on the act, with Brow Beat blogger David Haglund posting an epistolary plea for an earlier view.

“I know you have a whole host of viewing options, but the only thing that will keep us entertained for the amount of time we have to kill is a gripping, twisty drama ‘designed to be binge-watched,’ like, say, House of Cards,” Haglund writes. “And not the first season. We watched that already. It was great! Now we need Season 2. Today.”

But sadly for Haglund and all the other needy House of Cards fans, Netflix is responding about as warmly as Frank Underwood, the scheming Vice President-designate played by Kevin Spacey.

“No, unlikely :(,” Netflix spokeswoman Karen Barragan writes in an email.

So what’s a few more hours, anyway? The new season of House of Cards will be available at midnight, and then you can watch all night and show up to work on Friday morning bleary-eyed, but at least you’ll be up-to-date.

And if you are looking for something to “binge-watch” today, there are far more appropriate viewing options for the weather. The Winter Olympics are on. Or, if you really need a scripted cable drama, why not fire up HBO Go and refresh yourself on Game of Thrones instead? It’s like North of the Wall out there, anyway.

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Staff Writer

Benjamin Freed joined Washingtonian in August 2013 and covers politics, business, and media. He was previously the editor of DCist and has also written for Washington City Paper, the New York Times, the New Republic, Slate, and BuzzFeed. He lives in Adams Morgan.