“We Couldn’t Do That Even if We Wanted To”: Family and Natality in Veep and House of Cards (US)

Abstract

Veep (2012–19) and House of Cards (2013–18), as political fictions and adaptations of UK series, provide an opportunity to consider the political significance and thematic mode of Martin Shuster’s “new television” within the specific contexts of both American politics and television. In these series’ invocations of the family, they challenge the idea that, as the sole remaining grounds for normative justification, family lies outside the vortex of late capitalism. In deploying the motif of natality, they foreground the figure of the pregnant woman complicating the supposed relation between natality, politics, and the political. In so doing, these series suggest that we cannot, through natality incubated in the family, “conceive of politics differently” without addressing politics as it is.