Netflix confirmed today that its popular political drama House of Cards will have a sixth and final season without its Oscar-winning star Kevin Spacey. Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos said the show will restart production next year, with Robin Wright in the lead. We hear filming is slated to begin in mid-January.
The eight-episode season will “bring closure of the show for fans” and bring back to work some 2,000 people in the Baltimore area whose livelihoods depend on the show, Sarandos said today at UBS’s Global Media and Communications Conference in New York. Previous HoC seasons consisted of 13 episodes each.
Netflix suspended production of the show on October 31, after the first allegations of sexual misconduct surfaced against star Spacey. Actor Anthony Rapp made the initial allegations, saying Spacey made unwanted moves on him in his New York apartment in the 1986, when Rapp was a 14-year-old stage actor. Others have subsequently come forward.
Originally HoC was eyeing a possible post-Thanksgiving production restart, with the writers working on reworking the scripts without Spacey’s murderous and now ex-President Frank Underwood.
The hiatus then was extended by two weeks, through December 8, with Pauline Micelli, SVP Television Business and Legal Affairs for HoC producer MRC, saying in a letter to the cast and crew that the hope is for a Season 6 to be produced.
In light of the allegations, MRC had suspended Spacey. Meanwhile, Netflix stated that it will “not be involved with any further production of House of Cards that includes Kevin Spacey.”
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