The series was adapted by Andrew Davies from the 1989 novel of the same name by Michael Dobbs, who had been a former chief of staff at Conservative Party headquarters.

Michael Dobbs originally had Francis Urquhart die at the end of the first novel and had not planned to write sequels, but the TV screenplay diverged from the book's ending, which allowed for future series and led Dobbs to write two more novels, To Play the King and The Final Cut.

Ian Richardson, who had a Shakespearean background, based his portrayal of Francis Urquhart on Shakespeare's Richard III, and the show itself was said to draw on both Richard III and Macbeth.

In the American adaptation, the same phrase 'You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment' is used by Frank Underwood in the first episode during his initial meeting with Zoe Barnes, the American counterpart of Mattie Storin.

The catchphrase popularised by the show, 'You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment,' entered real political life, being used in the House of Commons, House of Lords, and Parliamentary Committees, and even spoken by Prince Charles in 2014 in response to a provocative journalist's question.

During the 1990/91 Gulf War, a British reporter in Baghdad, wary of censorship, used the same code phrase to answer a BBC presenter, and a variation was later written into the TV adaptation of Terry Pratchett's Hogfather as an in-joke, since the character Death was voiced by Ian Richardson.

The first episode aired two days before the actual Conservative Party leadership election, and the serial was said to have 'caught the nation's mood' during a period of political disillusionment.

Ian Richardson won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actor in 1991 for playing Urquhart, and writer Andrew Davies won an Emmy for outstanding writing in a miniseries; the serial was later ranked 84th in the British Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes.

The novel was rewritten by Dobbs in 2013 to coincide with the American adaptation's release, altering details such as Urquhart's wife's name (from Miranda to Mortima) and confirming that Urquhart murders Mattie Storin by throwing her off the roof, aligning the book's continuity with the TV series.