annoying."

Netflix's chief content officer Ted Sarandos was so taken with casting Spacey -- in part because his movies are popular for streaming -- he agreed to skip the pilot process and shell out $100 million for 26 episodes, sight unseen, the company's first foray into original programming. (Spacey reportedly got a salary bump from about $5 million to $9 million for the recently ordered third season.) And while Netflix won't provide streaming data, Spacey, also a producer, says he has seen numbers and the investment has paid off: Netflix needed to add only 565,000 more subscribers to break even on Cards' first two seasons, and that doesn't factor in the brand-building cachet, like this tweet from President Obama the day before the second season premiered: "Tomorrow: @HouseOfCards. Nohas given him credibility as an expert on the future of television and film. That was a theme of his attention-grabbing MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival in August. Spacey, the first actor to be invited to make the prestigious presentation (previous speakers include Rupert Murdoch and Google's Eric Schmidt), spoke intensely about the need for top executives to embrace risk-taking and trust its talent. "We know what works, and the only thing we don't know is why it's so difficult to find executives with the fortitude, the wisdom and the balls to do it," he said, praising Netflix for showing faith in the show's creators and not subjecting it to the indignities of the pilot process. He joked that if he were onstage running for