Underwood was not Speaker of the House, I think he was the Majority Leader in the House.
No, he was Majority Whip. The Netflix version tried to parallel the British original in the first two seasons and then diverged. Ian Richardson was a delight as Francis Urquhart. Spacey’s Frank Underwood started out with the same tongue-in-cheek approach but the series has gotten seriously dark in Season 4. Hopefully they’ll wrap it up in Season 5 because it’s already looking very stale, trying to build drama around Underwood’s 2016 re-election campaign.