Rick Cleveland wishes America didn’t want to watch "House of Cards." An interesting take – especially considering Cleveland wrote two episodes of the Netflix hit.

"In a way, it’s a shame because it tells you where our country is at," Cleveland said. "I wish our country was at a place where no one would want to see 'House of Cards' because they’re not in the mood for bitter plotting and scandal and bad behavior. If the show suddenly became less representative of real life, people might stop watching it.

"So in that respect, it would be better for the country," he laughed. 

Even Cleveland admits a growing cynicism toward the current political system – especially the state of campaign financing, which he called "the downslide of the republic."

However, for his latest work – the new play "Five Presidents" arriving at the Milwaukee Rep on March 10 – the tone is less Frank Underwood and more Jed Bartlet, landing much closer to Cleveland’s other big political TV credit: "The West Wing." The show, which is a fictional riff on the real-life meeting of five U.S. presidents – Bush, Clinton, Carter, Reagan and Ford – at Richard Nixon’s funeral, attempts to take a sincere, somewhat reverent and human approach to these massive figures, a behind-the-scenes look at the personal tolls of the most important position in the nation. 

It’s a yet another intriguing project to add to the Emmy-winning writer’s impressive resume, filled with other acclaimed works like "Six Feet Under," "Mad Men," "Nurse Jackie" and "Archer." Before it arrives in Milwaukee, OnMilwaukee.com got a chance to chat with Cleveland about his new play, the shifting state of TV and the time he saved the presidential rug from Buddy Clinton. 

OnMilwaukee.com: Is there a big difference for writing for TV and writing for theater for you?

Rick Cleveland: These days, no. And I think if you look back as far as "The West Wing" – which was maybe a part of the beginning of what people call the new golden age of television, because after that you had "The Sopranos" and "Six Feet Under," and "The Wire" was happening, and that was the start; those were the shows that got us to "Breaking Bad" – what happened was they realized that playwrights should be allowed … a lot of those shows are playwright written. Aaron Sorkin was a playwright. Alan Ball was a playwright. Beau Willimon on "House of Cards" was and is a playwright.

I think playwrights always write in a mixed tone. There’s humor in their drama and drama in their humor, and for a long time in the history of television, that was scary. So playwrights didn’t get as much work. But now, that’s exactly what they want. 

OMC: I’ve always heard it said that TV is more of a writer’s medium, while movies are more of a director’s medium. Is that still true?

RC: Absolutely. Television is a writer’s medium because – that’s why they make us producers as well as writers on some of them – we go down on set in a supervisory capacity. If we’re doing a series, and we’re using a first-time director or maybe we’re using a director we’ve worked with for years, if we see them making a major mistake for the episode, we can talk to them. Now, on a film, if you’re even allowed to be on set as a writer and you see the director doing something and go up and ask him for a moment, you would be on the next flight home.

It’s not trying to get back at directors; that’s not what we’re doing here. What it is is we’re bringing in different directors for each episode, and we have to maintain the tone of the show. Otherwise, every director would make a tonally different, specific to their style and voice episode. I think someday, my idea is to do exactly that: let the director take a series like "Six Feet Under."

OMC: What is the future of television from where you’re standing right now?

RC: Having been in on what was happening with "House of Cards," being the first ones – they put "Lilyhammer" on, but that was an acquisition from a company in Norway or wherever – on the air, what we found happening is Netflix has an incredible database. They seem to know more about what people are watching – it’s scary – compared to the Nielson ratings. Their research and statistics are a lot more involved. So they could actually predict, before they even saw it, that "House of Cards" was going to be a hit. You wanted to ask, "Do you have a time machine?" They’re spooky that way.

They’ve changed the way people watch television. Now, my wife has met so many people who say they don’t watch shows when they’re on, because when it’s over, I want to watch them all over two or three days. They want to binge on them. It’s almost like a drug addiction, but what it’s also like is reading a great novel. And that’s what I think is happening. Television is not losing its visual chemistry, but it’s becoming the equivalent of a novel. It’s becoming the new novel. It’s not going to keep people from reading books, but I think the way people view television is completely different from 10 years ago.

OMC: I’ve always wondered what the networks are going to do with Netflix and cable networks, who are able to do what they can’t right now.

RC: In the middle of "Six Feet Under," the writers started getting calls because people wanted to snap them up. So I got one of those calls, and I went into a network. There was a room full of women around a conference table. This guy came in and said, "How are you doing? Fabulous show; congratulations. We’d really like you to come to work for us." He points to the women on the right and says, "If you want to write comedy, talk to these ladies. If you want to write drama, talk to these ladies," pointing to the other side of the table.

I looked at him and was like, "Is there any way I could write something that was both comedy and drama? Like the show I was just working on?" And it was like unplugging a Stepford Wives robot. It hadn’t even occurred to them that you could do that! Shakespeare is the precedent for that; the gravediggers in "Hamlet" are hilarious! That’s how playwrights work, I think.

OMC: How did you come across the story of these five presidents all in the same place, having this conversation?

RC: I saw that iconic photograph of those five men together at Nixon’s funeral – this was back on "The West Wing," my first season. There was a Bob Woodward book called "Shadow," and it had that photo on the cover. I thought I’d write that as a play, but then I immediately thought you can’t have a play where the characters are presidents; that’s too hard or too weird or nobody would like it.

It stuck with me years later, and I met Mark Clements, the artistic director at the Milwaukee Rep, who had directed one of my plays in England, so we already knew each other. I didn’t know he was in Milwaukee; that was kind of a happy accident that I tripped over. He said he was going to commission a play and did I have any ideas. So I told him about the five presidents. That was it.

OMC: How'd you prepare and research the play?

RC: One thing I did was a ton of research. Anything that I saw in quotations that was either interesting, bizarre, heavy-handed, obscene, I made lists of those for each of these guys. And the lists got kind of long, and I started to get to know them in a different way by the words they used on those lists. Because they weren’t in front of a microphone; they weren’t doing a press conference.

When I was on "The West Wing," we all got invited to the White House Correspondents Dinner. It was Clinton’s last, and we all got a ride on John McCain’s bus – I don’t know if you remember that; the Straight Talk Express. We went to the dinner and  the speaking and the after party and all that. The next morning, Lawrence O’Donnell (fellow "West Wing" writer) arranges for a small group of us to get a tour of the West Wing.

So we actually get to go into the Oval Office. We were supposed to meet with Bill, but he wasn’t in there, so we take turns sitting behind the Oval Office desk and taking pictures. He had a collection of paperweights – I don’t know, 10 or 12 paperweights – and I rearranged them. Just because I thought I had to do something; it’s not quite vandalism.

Bill comes in about 20 minutes later apologizing, and the minute his eyes meet yours, you’re in love with him. He’s genuinely interested in everyone that he talks to; it’s crazy. Buddy is with him, and Buddy walks over to the presidential rug with the seal on it, and he steps there to squat to pee. And I grab him, and I say, "No Buddy!" I roll him over on his back, put him in a submissive position, and I say, "Buddy! No! Pee outside!" I get up, and I realize, "Oh f*ck. I just did something that the secret service could’ve tazed me for." My family raised chocolate Labs, so I grew up with them and grew up watching them and correcting them, so it was like muscle memory.

I got up, and the President said, "That was good! Thank you for doing that!" I thought they would take me away. And that sort of started a friendship with him. I got to hear about how presidents talk behind closed doors, so I thought I would write this as a fly on the wall play. Not a lot happens on that day; it’s not like the LBJ play "All The Way," which begins with the assassination of JFK. This is a contemplative play on the day of Nixon’s funeral.

OMC: That’s interesting, using these quotes and experiences to put together what they might have said.

RC: I had about 30 books and another 15 or 20 on Nixon at my office. I had to look through them, and at one point, I had to put the books aside – this was something David Mamet said writing "Hoffa" – and treat your subject as a character. That was an epiphany for me. I gotta put this down and then I’ll go back through it, and if there’s something that feels wrong, I’ll fix it or cut it.

My goal for this is for it to be credible. Everyone knows it didn’t happen, and if it did happen, nobody knows what they talked about. My golden rule was to remain credible to the tone of the day and the sincerity of the men inside that room. Nobody slits anybody’s throat; nobody gets beaten to death with a screwdriver.

OMC: Is there a lot of politics in this show, or did you try to avoid that?

RC: I didn’t try to avoid it, and there aren’t a lot … well, there is and there isn’t. But it wasn’t an editorial decision. It was germane to what would happen between those men. If you call it the president’s club, those guys have a rule not to discuss politics. I’m not saying that politics don’t get discussed and there aren’t some arguments – because there are – but for the most part …

It’s been crazy; we’ve had about 23 productions in Tucson, and every performance has gotten a standing ovation when those five guys come out. I could say, "Wow, I wrote a great play." You could say the actors gave amazing performances, which they did. But there’s another thing going on there. I think a huge percentage of those standing ovations are for those five presidents they just spent 90 minutes with. Not the actors; the presidents themselves, because how maligned they were and how much the remember them and how much pain there was in some instances.

I think the standing ovation comes because people are feeling tired of ugly political discourse. I don’t think I’m easy on any of them; every f*ck up they made gets discussed or thrown at the guys. But at the end of the day, they have respect for each other. Now that they’re ex-presidents, they don’t have the animosity toward each other that they did when they were in office. They’re in this room, in the same place, and nobody knows what that’s like except for those five guys. And the next guy. Nobody knows what it’s like to be an ex-president.

I thought about that, and I thought about when I was a 6-year-old kid, staying at home in front of the TV watching the Watergate hearings. My mom couldn’t get me outside. I’ve been a political junkie my whole life, but this really interested me because you put these five guys in a room, and some interesting things can come out that could never come out in a press conference.

OMC: It’s the human side of these massive, iconic figures.

RC: That’s exactly what it’s like. I love magic, and I think a play is a lot like a magic trick. You fool an audience into giving you their willing suspension of disbelief for a certain amount of time, and they believe they’re in this room at these five presidents until it’s over. To me, that’s the closest I’ll ever come to pulling off a magic trick.