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 ox's new drama House has impeccable credentials. The parasocial love child of Paul Attanasio (Homicide) and Bryan Singer (X-Men), it has taken the hidebound formula of the medical genre — every bit as rigid as a Harlequin romance — and subverted it.Dr. Gregory House (the razor-sharp British actor Hugh Laurie) is bereft of a sunny disposition. According to his backstory, an undetected blood clot paralyzed his leg. House's career as a brilliant diagnostician is brimming with irony, not karmic justice. He's so physically and emotionally damaged that he'd rather pop a Vicodin for chronic pain than take a patient history. But what is merely the series hook has been confused for its content. In fact, House's misanthropy is a stalking horse for a more substantive critique of the "healing arts." Yet at least one critic considers Dr. House a bitter pill. Sherwin B. Nuland, a surgeon and author of How We Die, recently wrote in Slate that House was a "medical monster who does not and could never exist." Ironically, the line is an echo of what was said of Keyser Soze in Singer's Usual Suspects: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." While Nulane puts Dr. House in the same category as Soze, I'm inclined to see him more closely allied to Dean Keaton, Gabriel Byrne's world-weary cynic. House grew from a blip on my radar thanks to a close friend up in Maine. Tom is not especially a fan of the genre. He has enough medical drama in his day-to-day life as a patient with a life-threatening, undiagnosed malady. As a shop foreman, he was in constant contact with an array of toxic materials. When he lost strength and began having seizures, he set out to find a cure. A CT scan revealed nothing. Tom learned that if it's not on the X-ray, apparently, it's in the head: "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, Tom," advised a pre-eminent neurologist at a New England teaching hospital. Dr. Nuland believes that the greatest conceit — and failure — of House is that "a physician so remote, so sadistic, so downright cruel as Gregory House would never be tolerated in any hospital, regardless of the non plus ultra quality of his diagnostic acumen." See above. Importantly, House reflects that the nature of the patient has itself changed. With a raft of self-help books and portals such as WebMD, everyone's a board-certified expert. Clinic walk-ins often provide the connective tissue to that episode's story: a mother's hesitation to dispense asthma medicine inspires Dr. House to treat a deteriorating patient with steroids, and another mother who is taking a political stand against vaccinations cues House's strategy in fighting a hospital epidemic among newborns. What's exciting here is not that we see medical gaffes or breaches of protocol, but that they are in the service of the patient. The show's sophistication allows that even our wellness can have consequence. In the aptly titled episode "Fidelity," House determines that a patient's ongoing fatigue might be due to a sexually transmitted African sleeping sickness. Her positive response to treatment is a scarlet "A." As she recovers, it's clear that her cuckolded husband is leaving her. House seasons each episode with CGIs of patient vitals, and its closeups on blood clots and capillaries recall the medical thriller Fantastic Voyage. (In fact, CSI is often given credit for these effects, when it was actually Fight Club's opening sequence that originally showed us the face of fear deep within the brain's recesses.) CSI, though, can rightly be acknowledged for inspiring the show's use of procedure. In every episode, House and his charges begin with a whiteboard, mapping out a differential diagnosis. Where the show departs from both procedurals and medical dramas is that the treatments taken are often the wrong course of action. Only through trial and error do the breakthroughs occur. Not that House is letter perfect. Its writers sometimes draw too much inspiration from cop shows, employing an apartment break-in and an unauthorized DNA test as plot points. Particularly during his scenes on passive-aggressive clinic detail, House can verge on glib overkill. One convention that threatens to undermine the show's maverick status is House's relationship with his hospital administrator Dr. Cuddy. Lisa Edelstein has made a career of playing the sexual outlaw: she was a hooker on The West Wing and a chick with a dick on Ally McBeal. Here, under her white smock, she sports décolletage that rivals Lindsay Lohan's. But her character follows an all-too-familiar throughline in chronically thwarting House's efforts. That said, her role as House's foil enables the show to take a very meta wink at other medical dramas. In the pilot, Cuddy scolds House for prescribing steroids on a hunch: "If we make mistakes, people die." After House has saved the day, we see him glued to an episode of General Hospital, where one of the actor-surgeons utters the very same dialogue. Dr. Wilson: Diseases don't have motives. Dr. House: No, but doctors do. At the end of the day, House makes an arresting point. It's not that curmudgeons like Ben Casey trump the warmth of Cliff Huxtable, but that incurious minds are hobbling the medical profession. I'd sooner see diagnosticians redouble their efforts than brush up on their TLC. My friend Tom gets more than adequate empathy from his wife and a support group. After seeing specialists who made themselves inaccessible and came up short, what he really needs is a physician who has the strength of her convictions. The writers of House have enabled Hugh Laurie to create a complex character while adroitly leveraging the advantage series television has over cinema: narrative arc. Dr. House is a biting, wounded everyman who's more comfortable with his Game Boy than his caseload. In an era in which doctors have an unenviable task — they're no longer held to be infallible, yet increasingly expected to perform miracles — he is a reluctant last resort. While Dr. House's acerbic demeanor epitomizes the '60s sentiment to question authority, more striking than his brusque manner is his way of thinking, which demands that we question the premise. n° House airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m.
©2005 Jerry Weinstein and hooksexup.com. |
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