House M.D.

He Who Is Always Right

Note: I am making my big comeback with this piece so that it will explain, at least to some extent, where I have been all this time and what I had been doing, in case you care. There will be other posts filling you in with all sorts of movies and TV shows I have seen during these past few months which passed without the slightest clue for an update on The Long Take. All I need to do is to go through all my scribbles and form coherent articles. I am aware that there are lots of promises to keep on my part, so stay tuned.

Before we go knee-deep in the review, I will summarize the past 5 seasons for those of you who never had the chance to see the show. Below is an exhaustive list of keywords/phrases that will more or less substitute for 90-something hours that would be spent on watching the actual thing:

• "It's not lupus"
• Environmental reaction
  
• Auto-immune
  
• Cancer
  
• Infection
  
• White cell count
  
• "Differential diagnosis people!"
  
• "His liver is shutting down"
  
• "Search his house"
  
• Toxins
  
• Heavy metals
  
• Drugs
  
• "You have no medical evidence to support that diagnosis"
  
• "That's an excellent metaphor"
  
• "You've stolen my metaphor"
  
• "I'm not getting the metaphor"
  
• "I think I pushed that metaphor too far"
  
• CT scan
  
• MRI
  
• "People lie"
  
• Respiratory arrest
  
• Cardiac arrest
  
• "Bizarre is good"
  
• "It explains all the symptoms"
  
• Biopsy
  
• Lumbar puncture
  
• Vasculitis
• Toxoplasmosis
  
• Necrosis
  
• Meningitis
  
• "If I'm right, he should walk out of here tomorrow morning"
  
• "If you are wrong, patient dies"
  
• "So, I need to know..."
  
• "Are you really going to see a patient?"
• "You were right"
  
  

I think this kind of delivers the point across, but let me risk boring you by explaining myself a little bit further. If you have read the list above with a smile on your face, chances are you are watching the show and we are on the same page here. Yes, House M.D. is a tedious, repetitive and horrendously predictable medical drama; maybe not if you are a medical student playing guess-the-problem game with each episode but if you are a non-professional, like myself, who doesn't pay that much attention to all the technical hodgepodge and who focuses instead on the 'drama' part of the whole thing. At the end of the day, every House M.D. season has nothing more than a single fundamental idea in terms of content and every single episode plays like another variation on that same theme; sometimes slightly faster in pace, sometimes a little more emotional, sometimes considerably more exciting and creative but essentially always following the same pattern. It is formulaic in its dramatical structure, Princeton-Plainsboro (which miraculously encapsulates all the bizarre diseases in the world in a single teaching hospital) is a whole different world where everybody spends their free time psychologically deconstructing one another, and always doing one hell of a job at that. It's a world erected on a single dilemma (or, in the case of the TV show, a single premise): if the patient is treated with what House suggests and if he is wrong, the patient dies. Luckily though, a lupus diagnosis is more common than House being wrong; and as the people in his team cling onto their stubbornness to always oppose and fight House's preposterous theories, his condescending remarks become more and more creative. In fact, I think it's safe to declare at this point that, after having so many chances to work on it, Hugh Laurie is officially the first man on earth who has perfected the art of throwing a smirk at a small gang of sidekicks after outsmarting them on a matter of grave importance (no pun intended).

The parallels between Sherlock Holmes and Gregory House has always been a subject of interest among the show's followers. The creator David Shore admits his admiration towards Doyle's legendary detective and confirms that it was his intention to create House as a lonely and detached drug-addict just like Holmes himself. House is indeed the medical counterpart of Sherlock Holmes with every sense of the word; he never fails to solve the case, he is always indifferent to his clients, he never takes a case unless he is interested in it and he has James Wilson to act as his Dr. Watson whenever he needs further intellectual stimulation (wikipedia lists a lot more similarities such as House's door number and the fact that both play some instruments, in case you are interested). But once you switch from the characters to the story, the similarities end; because essentially, House M.D. is more similar to a collection of pulp detective novels where the old servant turns out to be the murderer in each case. It sometimes becomes a frustrating experience to know the outcome and go through the whole ordeal anyway.

What's so noteworthy about House M.D. then? If I have angered the show's fans with my remarks and left the impression that I hated it, here is the catch: The character is interesting. It might look like a small detail to you, but in this case, success in this aspect carries the whole show. On a simpler note, I watch the show because House is 'so cool'. He is a complicated character with complicated relationship, always consistent on paper and brilliantly acted on screen. Despite integrating so many unusual personality traits in himself, he is never overdone and never out of character. So far, the writers have meticulously avoided wounding the credibility of the character in exchange for some cheap sentimentality.

I have always related watching House on TV to watching and admiring the perfection of a Greek or Renaissance sculpture; the perfection in human physical appearance being replaced in this case by the perfection in terms of medical expertise and powers of observation. It is for this reason that the question of how much a human being is capable of doing the things that House is doing is irrelevant; because the show isn't (and never tries to be) realist. And this represents neither a flaw nor a success but merely a choice.

Having praised the House character to the sky, I must admit that all the other characters are quite pale in comparison. Especially his trio of a team (both the old one and the new one) exist only to enhance the contrast between themselves and Gregory House so that the amazing originality of the title character is never lost to the audience. Every now and then, like spoilt kids calling for attention, these characters take the center stage with their stories of dead husbands, dead family members, fatal diseases, family problems, personality issues and so on; but their complexity and multi-layered structures are mostly illusionary. Robert Sean Leonard (James Wilson) and Lisa Edelstein (Lisa Cuddy) do their best with their acting to make up for this but the rest of the House M.D. cast is a bunch of talent-free 'actors' who make the matters much worse for their characters.

How much blind trust is too much? All the fun and jokes aside, stripped of all the webs of human relationships and their complexity, what remains of House M.D. on a serious note is this question. How reasonable is it to surrender all senses of reason and opinion and blindly trust the instincts of a human being, regardless of how 'good' that human is at what he is doing? This issue is touched every now and then but it's not the firm grasp of a confident artist but more like the gentle touch of a stranger to a newborn baby, scared of contaminating the subject at hand. House M.D. misses all the opportunities to use this question to its advantage on its way to become a more valuable artistic piece. Among all the repetition and humdrum events drowning our characters in Princeton-Plainsboro, there is definitely more room for philosophical discussion on this notion.

Finally, there is one more praise left for Hugh Laurie regarding House M.D: His acceptance speeches. His few-minutes-long performances that you can see below are reminiscent of his comedian background (see: A Bit of Fry and Laurie) which I sometimes realize that I sorely miss.

7/10