Congressman Frank Underwood is livid when he discovers that he will not get the Secretary of State position he was promised by a president whom he helped get elected. He then lies, schemes and murders his way into the president’s chair. Kevin Spacey’s Underwood is brilliant in the American version of House of Cards. Though it has several inconsistencies, House of Cards holds you as a gripping political drama. Currently, I am watching HBO’s Game of Thrones, based on George R R Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, on DVD. It is pretty graphic, at times grossly so, but it captures the brutality of the time it is set in, very well. House of Cards, Game of Thrones, Sherlock, Breaking Bad and about a dozen others are among a crop of superbly written TV shows mounted on a film scale. Each episode of Game of Thrones, for instance, is 60 minutes long. These shows point to one of the biggest changes taking place in the market for entertainment globally – the comeback of long-form fiction or drama as it is called in developed markets. A decade ago, the only channels spending large amounts of money on fiction programming were broadcast networks such as ABC or CBS (the equivalent of the general entertainment channels in India). Then, on the back of strong pay revenues, HBO, a cable channel, started investing in original programming taking risks with original series such as The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. And the market took off.

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