Il principe (The Prince) influenced House of Cards

The show's method is Machiavelli's: politics described as it is practised rather than as it is justified. Frank Underwood's asides to camera are a running commentary on how power is actually acquired and kept, which is the form of The Prince, a manual addressed to a ruler about means. The specific inheritance is the separation of effectiveness from virtue. Machiavelli's argument that a prince must learn how not to be good, and use it according to necessity, is the premise the series dramatises and then tests to destruction. The debt runs through the British original and Dobbs's novel as well as directly.