"House": Why I like It

This is a show that I put at the top of my list of recommened shows to watch.  I think some explanation is warranted.  

I didn't watch the show at all for the initial two years of its run on FOX.   The idea of the show that I took from the commercial ads--a know-it-all doctor coming up with clues to strange diseases--didn't seem all that promising.  Plus, you had Hugh Laurie in it.  There were two more big problems right off.

1.  Mr. Laurie is a Brit...playing an American.  I know the Brits can do the accents of just about every nation they used to run, but I rather doubted the guy could "seem" really American. 

2. This is because I had only seen Hugh Laurie playing silly-ass historical roles like the hopeless Prince Regent (George IV of England) or some dotty twit/army officer on the Western Front in the "Black Adder" series.  The idea of Laurie playing an American and an Alpha Male.  Riiiiiight.  Sure, you might as well let the guy play James Bond.

Then I stumbled on a book during a trip to the library.  I was looking for a good mystery or a thriller and I wanted to get away from the John LaCarre or Stuart M. Kaminsky's Abe Lieberman cop procedural novels --stuff I usually wind up reading when such a mood strikes.  Something Ian Fleming-ish but up -to-date.

I came across a book called "The Gun Seller".  I think  the title art grabbed me. Roy Lichtenstein-like stuff.  It was by a chap named Hugh Laurie.  Funny, thought I, there's an actor noted for his silly-ass/Bertie Wooster roles by that same name.  I flipped open the dust jacket and saw that the author and the actor were one and the same.

I took the book home and read through it--I'm a slow reader, by the way--in several sittings.  It just got better and better.  It was advertised as a sort of comic Bond novel and that's what it was--with an absorbing  core of a story about an ex-Army Special Forces type whose not a insensative Spartan but an actual regular sort of guy who gets mixed up with some very bad people who are trying to stage a terrorist attack in Morocco on the British Embassy to score a big arms deal.  The darn thing wasn't half-bad.   This guy Laurie apparently has quite the imagination.   There are more facets  to this dude than I thought.

Next thing I know I actually watched an episode of "House".  Then Shirley went out and  got the whole first twenty-two episodes on DVD.   I got hooked on this show in spite of  the fact it was a "hospital show", the sort of thing I avoid having developed a severe allergic reaaction to such things from watching from my youth, when I gave up on the studly do-gooder Chad Everett from "Medical Center"; the too-kindly and trechly Dr. Marcus Welby and the self-righteous pretensions of Army gadfly Hawkeye Pierce from "MASH".    

What makes "House" so good?  Well, its not just Laurie.  It's the fact that the supporting actors like Omar Epps seem like real doctors and not interns who just go to the hospital to shack up with each other.  There is little soap opera romance of any of that on this show.  You really don't know much about what these people do outside the office and you don't worry about missing that info.  What you get, besides a realistic but dramatic hospital and a medical team of people of varying but normal tempraments, is  the abnormal Dr. House,  who is a misanthrope who hates dealing directly with patients at all, and freguently is cold-blooded and almost cruel at times-- a bit of a bully.  This is not the guy you'd want to play golf with, or even to be stuck in an elevator with.

Except...

In spite of his bad temper and horrific manners, Doctor Gregory House can get away with dissing his bosses and stepping on the egos of his patients because  he is incredibly good at what he does and the character is very reckless and bold and single-minded about keeping people alive.  That's the point of a hospital in the end, don't you think? 

Also, Dr House is interesting because he is a wounded soul.  He walks on a cane like some landlocked Ahab, stuck with a leg with a lot of dead muscle tissue, and he chomps Vicodin like they are M&Ms.  (He may wind up in jail for that bad habit, as you might know if you've seen the show this season.)

That woundedness he carries around, physical and mental,  makes him vulnerable and tolerable as a character.  One recent episode hinted at his having a bad childhood as a overtraveled Army brat who never identified with anyone but the outcasts he came across. Also there's a hint of a romance that went wrong in his past--sort of a Sherlock Holmes/Miss Adler thing.    You get  the sense House thinks the world has messed him over quite enough, thank you, and he wants little to do with it outside the place where he can control things: at work.    

And he's funny as hell.  I suspect Mr Laurie might ad lib some of the wittier and biting lines House delivers.  Anyway, House on a rant about the medical industry or the shortcomings of his peers and patients is a refreshing brace from those older shows where the doctor was like an angel, or a kindly avuncular figure or an action hero.   

And  as to Hugh Laurie playing an American. He nails it.    

The Devil Advocado says: give "House" a look.