We’ve been catching up on “House” reruns, which started immediately after the season finale a couple of weeks ago. We rashly made the pronouncement that it was “the best show on TV” after seeing just half of one show. We’re willing to stick with that assessment, but it’s interesting how the show really picked up quality with each episode, the actors began to fit their roles, the dialogue–always well written–started fitting their mouths better, everything just began to run more smoothly. By the time the finale aired, the show had the feeling of a series hitting its mid-career peak, two or three years down the line. (We hope that doesn’t mean an accelerated lifespan, but great writing and acting tends to be unsustainable for more than a two or three seasons. Consider, for eample, Sorkin-era “West Wing” and the shows sad decline into mediocrity.)
Of course, “House” would be just another general hospital potboiler if not for the brilliantly sketched character of the show’s namesake. Hugh Laurie has done an admirable job of creating a peevish, repellant anti-hero to enunciate all those clever put-downs, come-ons, and punchlines. We didn’t think it would be possible to see workplace sexism, dubious medical ethics, and persistent, recreational drug use as a relief, but after a harrowing season of “24” (which, in some aspects of its pro-torture, ends-justify-means agitprop, makes Leni Riefensthal look like Hitler’s biggest critic), we are–well, relieved.
“House” is billed as a new twist on generic mystery-TV, and so it is–although it combines some prurient CSI-style interest in its actual medical footage (kinda gross; the wife covers her eyes in disgust and makes little wretching noises), as well as a tendency to point beyond itself to larger social and political issues like euthanasia, health insurance, gun violence, and so on.
But we’ve had the sneaking suspicion for the entire season that “House” was actually an upscaling of an odd, uncelebrated, occasional front-of-book department in the New York Times Magazine, called “Diagnosis.” You can always tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs. This was an innovation of editor Adam Moss which seems to have been scalped by NTYMag’s old new editor, Gerry Marzorarti. Probably for the best. What that department really lacked is what the TV show has in aces: characters who instantly evoke a sympathetic response. Medicine as a whiz-bang diagnostic science has its appeal, of course, but it doesn’t sell beyond the pages of JAMA or New England Journal of Medicine, or even Nature. What doctors count as an asset–the ability to distance oneself emotionally in order to actually get through the waiting room in one piece, makes for lousy general-interest reading, but we can think of several wonderful examples of medical journalism that achieve what “House” achieves.
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