House: it’s more than just the medicine.
I love House. It is, for me, one of the best shows on TV. I love the world it’s created and the characters in it. I love the medical mysteries that centre the action and most of all I love Hugh Lauries amazing performance of the eponymous Dr. House. I can quite happily sit and watch an entire DVD boxed set of it back to back and think that a very good way to spend a weekend.
My mum doesn’t love House. She enjoys the odd episode enough, and like the characters but claims “it’s the same show every week”. I think she really misses the point. Yes, the formula for the show is fairly standard: Patient X is admitted with msytery illness, House and his team prod and poke the patient and come up with Theory A. Patient gets worse. House and his team examine some more and come up with Theory B. Pateint gets worse still. House then has a revelation (normally about the 35min mark) and skips straight to bizarre theory Z, which means the team has a painstaking task of processing a secret paternity test, or pushing to the front of the cue to use one of the hospitals machines. This sometimes revovles around a bet. Patient is cured. Is that all House is? A series of mini-mysteries that are cured from episode to episodes? No. Of course not.
The thing that makes House so beautiful to watch is that these mysteries are merely a backdrop. A setting in which the players interact to produce the real good stuff - the relationships between those characters themselves. Watching House solve case after case would get dull very quickly, but the richness of the character intereactions makes it TV gold. The interactions with Wilson and Cuddy border on comedy genius, and the darker moments when struggling with addiction are genuinely heart-wrenching stuff. The writers draw you into these characters and make them real for you, so that you laugh when they laugh and cry when they cry. That, for me, is the sign of a great TV show. So watch it occasionaly for a bit of “CSI: Medicine”, but please, I beg you - stay watching it for the characters.
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