My Beautiful Wife and I are cord-cutters. We get our local television via an Over the Air (OTA) antenna. We get the rest of our television over the Internet. We’re partial to our Roku. The Roku makes it easy to turn internet into television content.

MBW transitioned away from our cable package easily. She never looked back. To her, the move meant $160 more for shoes every month.

Me, I was the guy who would sit on his ass and channel up and down through the 24-hour news stations for six hours at a time, watching the same forty minutes’ worth of news cycle repeat over and over. My transition to the new schema was a bit more rocky. But I’m getting with the program, pun intended.

Binge watching suits us. Negotiating which shows we are going to binge watch suits us. We are both skilled compromisers. About the only thing we disagreed on was Game of Thrones. I’m in, she’s out. She found it too violent. Odd, because Inglorious Basterds is one of her favorite movies, but I respect her decision. I watch GoT without her.

How lame is it for me to write a post about our love of House of Cards? Breaking news: Scientists have just discovered water is wet. The world knows it’s a great show. Classically Shakespearian in structure. It has one of those Soprano’s arcs where no character is guaranteed to survive the season except the anti-hero. Classically soap opera in structure in that every villain moves on an arc toward redemption and every hero gets compromised toward villainy. Great stuff.

So I’m going to go on record and disagree with my wife about one thing: The show should have ended at the conclusion of Season 2.

And here I go pissing everybody else off: I would have been fine with Breaking Bad ending after Season 4. Yes, admittedly, Vince Gilligan aced Season Five, but that was unnecessary risk.

Mad Men should have ended after Season 6. It ended on a hard beat. Have the balls to make the decision that Don Draper is a villain and a loser. Period.

Lost should have ended after the third episode of the first season.

For every Vince Gilligan and Breaking Bad there are thirty other series we can name that go on too long. Once X-Files lost it’s arc and became episodic, it had gone on too long.

But here’s my real frustration: The long hiatus. Mad Men went 20 months between seasons due to contract negotiations with the union crew. Breaking Bad had that eternal gap between Seasons Four and Five while Gilligan stared down the dumbass corporate suits from AMC who thought they were going to step in and tell him how to write his show.

There’s the shifting narrative of why Deadwood went on a slow-death, two-year hospice hiatus on its way to oblivion. It began with a breakdown in contract negotiations between actors upping their fees and HBO cringing at a show they already thought was too expensive. After a year-and-a-half, the CEO of HBO, Chris Albrecht negotiated a handshake deal with the moody and drug-addled creator/writer (David Milch) to end the show with a couple of feature-length episodes. Cut to Albrecht getting arrested and subsequently fired for slapping his woman around. Then the new suits at HBO wasted no time demolishing the sets and pretending Deadwood never happened.

In other words, the long hiatus is a sign of the times, but it’s never a good sign.

And now House of Cards is on a long hiatus to Season 3. The production is pulling their sets out of Baltimore and relocating after the state legislature of Maryland nixed the tax credit demanded by the producers. If they move the story of American politics to shoot in Toronto, my head may very well explode from the impact of irony.

I say quit while you are ahead, Beau Willimon. Let evil win. We all know that sometimes that’s what happens. Take your victory lap and move on to the next project before the politics of entertainment ruins the entertainment of politics.