House of Cards: How Far Fiction Can Depict Political Moves? House of cards (US version) explicitly explores the ambiguity between « thriller » and « politics ». This TV series offer a good starting point to study how fiction depicts various « political moves », going from plausible to fictional, from political genre to crime fiction. This paper highlights how the storyline dives into fiction, when the moves are no longer political and become depoliticized. This movement lies essentially in the very writing of the show: the more the plot explores the main narrative arc (at each season, the greatest ambition of the main protagonist, Frank Underwood), the more the actions become unrealistic. In other words, the script gains in narration what it loses in plausibility. That way though, the storyline is reactivated every time the main character needs to be placed in an empowering position. However, this is done at the expense of the political realism.