Who Does The PTC Hate THIS Week – February 14, 2008

Light week from the PTC but as you can see below there's something they're going to be upset with next week. On the personal front, my mom got out of the hospital today. She's looking forward to having something good to eat. She forgets that I'm doing the cooking.

This doesn't happen often but I now have a chance to scoop the PTC! On the Thursday February 14^th episode of the Today Show Jane Fonda was discussing her role in The Vagina Monologues and how she had initially resisted taking the role when she said "the c-word" according to TVNewser, which has the NSFW clip on this page. For the sake of clarity I will use the word restricted from old comic books for resembling the word in question – squint at your own risk. Speaking with Meredith Viera Fonda said, "I hadn't seen the play — I live in Georgia. Then I was asked to do a monologue called 'CLINT', and I said, 'I don't think so. I've got enough problems.'" Viera later apologised saying, "Before we go to break, in our last half hour we were talking about The Vagina Monologues and Jane Fonda inadvertently said a word from the play that you don't say on television. It was a slip, and obviously, she apologizes and so do we. We would do nothing to offend the audience, so please accept that apology." The Midwest and Pacific feeds of the show had the word replaced with silence and a photograph placed on screen when Fonda says the word so that lip readers won't be offended. The apology is retained.

What is it with these relatively hot post-menopausal actresses on morning shows?! First we had 62 year-old Dianne Keaton dropping the F-Bomb on Good Morning America and then we have 70 year-old Jane Fonda saying "CLINT." What's next, Sally Field going on The Early Show on CBS and mentioning the product of bowel movements? Anyway, you know that the PTC is going to be over this one like white on rice – they wanted NBC fined when Helen Mirren said she nearly fell "tits over ass" trying to make it up the stairs at the 2006 Emmys – but it's another case of those pesky fleeting obscenities on live broadcasts. So naturally they'll complain about the Second Circuit Court and how the FCC needs to press the appeal to the Supreme Court and Congress need to pass a no hope bill that will give the FCC the power to fine anything it wants to just so long as they can justify it by calling it obscene. But that's just my guess.

The PTC has determined that the January 29^th episode of House M.D. is the Broadcast Worst Show of the Week. According to the PTC (adding TV critic to the group's resume): "House, M.D. has always contained graphic imagery and sexual dialogue, but the program also featured suspenseful storylines and witty banter, which gave the show its appeal. Now in its fourth season, the series has become stale and formulaic, and thus increasingly more dependent on sexual themes and gore." Funny that no one else has mentioned that the show has become "stale and formulaic." I mean most episodes tend to follow a pretty basic formula – thereby making it "formulaic" I suppose – but stale? Never! The problem that the PTC complains about in this episode is there are two storylines in this episode, "both involving promiscuous women." Ah, but it's more than that really, it's that the two women are fairly open about it...or are they. The first storyline involves a single woman who has had a double mastectomy, despite not having breast cancer, because of a genetic predisposition to the disease. She is also completely open and truthful with her daughter, about everything (well not quite everything which is a major plot point in the episode but doesn't affect what the PTC has to say about the episode), including sex. Here's what the PTC has to say about this part of the episode: "The mother openly sleeps with several partners and shares that aspect of her life with her daughter. As Dr. House attempts to diagnosis the woman's illness, he sits down with the young girl and asks her to describe her mother's sex practices. He asks the eleven-year-old, 'Saddle, bronc, or doggy… that's sex talk.' As if the question wasn't horrible enough, the writers have the girl respond, 'She used to like to be on top. Now she likes to be on her stomach. That way she doesn't have to see them looking at her scars.'" As I mentioned, the woman (played by the beloved by this blog Janel Maloney) is totally open and truthful to her daughter about all aspects of her life (well as I said, almost all aspects). The PTC is almost as scandalized by the young actress played the daughter and being "forced" to be exposed to such "offensive" material: "Leaving TV fantasyland one has to acknowledge that in filming this episode, an actual little girl was exchanging graphic dialogue with an adult man about sexual positions. Is this really acceptable?" I suppose that for the PTC this is graphic. This plot concludes when House discovers that while the woman has had a double mastectomy she still has breast cancer. There's a complicated explanation but the short reason is that she has breast tissue on the back of one knee. In what is a frankly gross scene, House syringes some milk from that tissue and shoots it into the mouth of the daughter. As I said it is a pretty gross moment, but that is also the reaction of everyone in the roof including the House's three new fellows.

The other storyline involves a young woman who is a patient at the Clinic who is being treated by House for a rash. If you watched the episode, you'll know that House assumes that the young woman is a prostitute because she is wearing a St. Nicholas Medal, and St. Nicholas is the patron saint of prostitutes (he is also the patron saint of "Children, sailors, fishermen, the falsely accused, pawnbrokers, and repentant thieves"). Actually he "logically" deduces this by eliminating the categories she doesn't fit. As I recall the scene the woman doesn't confirm or deny his assumption but undeniably does flirt with him. From this, the PTC also assumes that she's a prostitute; she is the other promiscuous woman of the PTC's introductory paragraph. Well here's what the PTC says about that plot: In the second plot, another woman is an implied prostitute who comes to see Dr. House for a rash on her neck and chest. As House probes her symptoms, he asks her if she has had contact with a donkey, engaging in a line of questioning that would lead one to believe she performs in a sex show involving animals.

House: 'Do you do a donkey show? I'm not curious. It matters.'
Woman: 'It's a donkey or a mule. I can never remember.'
House: 'Wow that's a creepy smile. I bet the donkey's is even creepier... Antibiotic cream for you and a love glove for Francis. You'll both be fine.'
Woman: 'You should come see the show. I think you'd like it.'
House: 'Sorry, I hate Westerns.'"

So here we have a young woman who House assumes is a prostitute and who the PTC states at the beginning of the article is one of two "promiscuous women." To be fair, the PTC does mention that "She does nothing during the conversation to dispel Dr. House's assumption that she performs a sex act on the donkey," (emphasis mine), and it is revealed at the end of the episode (when House goes to see her show – she gave him a handbill which presumably revealed to him if not to us what she was really doing) that she is in fact playing the Virgin Mary in a Christmas pageant. The woman is flirtatious rather than promiscuous, although one suspects that the PTC finds the two states to be close enough not to matter. Maybe this helps explain why their conclusion for this episode is uncharacteristically weak for the PTC: "The graphic sexual dialogue and themes make this episode inappropriate for prime-time television, and earns House the distinction of being Worst of the Week."

The Cable Worst of the "Week" is the same episode of Nip/Tuck that has topped the PTC's charts for three or four weeks now, and the Misrated show is the same episode of Cashmere Mafia as last week. That leads us to the PTC's TV Trends column titled "TV Writers On Strike But Sex Continues" and I personally find it to be a rather weak effort as well. The basic premise of the article is summed up in the introduction: "As the TV writers' strike drags on, prime-time broadcast TV becomes ever more mired in an endless cycle of reruns and "reality" shows. When the strike began the networks held back a few episodes of their programs, and some are showing them now. Others had programs that were always intended to premiere at midseason, and some such shows are now being aired. Unfortunately, the programming appearing in the last week is not substantially different from that which has gone before." Pretty wimpy right? The article then gets down to examples, of which they can come up with two. The PTC's obsession with NBC's supposed obsession with strippers and "the nearly full-frontal nudity of a later Las Vegas episode"
(the scene in the strip club where the entirely overdressed stripper lifts her top so two patrons who are betting on the colour of her nipples – but not the audience at home – can settle the bet; this is hardly "nearly full-frontal nudity") continues. This time they picked on Friday Night Lights which had a scene in which Riggins takes Matt Saracen to the town strip club on a Wednesday afternoon. The PTC has considerable praise for the show saying, "Friday Night Lights has been lauded for its positive portrayal of a small-town high school football team. Unlike programs like the CW's Gossip Girl, which features ultra-wealthy teens hopping from bed to bed and using drugs, Friday Night Lights portrays its teenagers and their families in a genuine fashion, with its characters confronting realistic problems – and facing realistic consequences for bad decisions." In the episode Riggins takes an emotionally fragile Saracen to the local strip club (because it's Wednesday and Riggins always skips on Wednesdays). Believe it or not, this is an important scene and not just a reason to show strippers – who by the way are wearing even more than the strippers that the PTC was complaining about on Las Vegas. Matt is in emotionally bad shape, feeling that everyone who means something to him abandons him, but it's something that Riggins isn't aware of. The PTC doesn't even get that. Here's what they write: "While some teens certainly drink, and some may visit strip clubs, it is a sign of the coarsening of TV (and the increasing acceptability among entertainment industry insiders) that the program felt it necessary to include such material. Given the obsession with strip clubs seen across the NBC network, the inclusion of this scene could very well have been intended to 'spice up' a heretofore down-to-earth program. One can only hope that the program retains its more realistic focus and does not succumb to NBC's apparent desire to feature strippers on as many shows as possible." See what I mean about "not getting it?" Everything to them is gratuitous, and represents a "coarsening of TV."

The other show that they discuss in this article is the same episode of House that was mentioned earlier in this piece. There are a couple of additional comments that the writer of this article adds in. First about the daughter knowing about her mother's preference in sexual positions: "The idea of an eleven-year-old girl being privy to the intimate details of her mother's sex life is more than a little disturbing, but is typical of House." Yeah, I know, it's the same old ground and who cares about characterization? But what gets me is that this writer considers the secondary plot, with the woman at the clinic, "far worse." After describing the setup to the scene they say, "House responds with his typically brusque and graphic manner, deducing that the woman is a prostitute, and furthermore that she has sex with animals." They make sure to repeat the dialogue of the scene, presumably to show how "shocking" it is and then adds, "Most people wouldn't find bestiality a subject for humorous banter with their physician. But then, most people don't have lives that resemble the programming on Fox." But here's the amazing part; somehow it isn't the fairly mild discussion of possible involvement between the woman and the Donkey that offends the PTC, it's this: "As a final fillip, House later sees the woman at a church play, where she is portraying the Virgin Mary…riding a donkey. Even more offensive, if possible, is the fact that this episode was clearly intended to air at Christmas, but was delayed by Fox because of the writer's strike." Excuse me, but even more offensive? I'm afraid I don't know where "offensive" registers on this one. Does the "fact" that it was supposedly meant to air at Christmas make it offensive? Is it the fact that a supposed prostitute is playing Mary? I saw the scenes in question and I saw them not as offensive – certainly not on the young woman's part – but more as playful banter and maybe just a bit of role-playing on her part that ends just as soon as House is given the flier for the show that she's doing.

Here's the PTC's conclusion (with one bit of correction by me). "The strike continues [not anymore it doesn't]…but the effects of Hollywood's writers and their love of extreme sex, violence, profanity and irreverence continue to be seen on all our television screens. Lucky us." Yes indeed, lucky you PTC, because if they didn't engage in what few people outside of your organization consider "extreme sex, violence, profanity and irreverence" you'd have to find something real to do, either as jobs or an avocation.

Update: Did I call it or what. While I was writing this...well actually while I was napping during writing this the PTC put up a press release on the Jane Fonda incident on the Today Show. I said that "naturally they'll complain about the Second Circuit Court and how the FCC needs to press the appeal to the Supreme Court and Congress need to pass a no hope bill that will give the FCC the power to fine anything it wants to just so long as they can justify it by calling it obscene," and sure enough, here it is:

We also ask the two federal court judges in New York whether they are proud of the legacy they have ensured for themselves by paving the way for material like this to come into our homes. Hopefully American families will not let them have the final word, and that the Congress will move quickly to vote on the bill pending before the Senate which would clarify the FCC’s authority to deal with this growing problem.

A Question Of Reality

It's depressingly easy for a TV series to fall into a rut, particularly when the amount of continuity is limited. Oh I don't mean that they recycle the same story week after week but they follow the same basic guidelines. House sometimes feels like that. The basic plot line runs something like this: a case arrives at the hospital that somehow piques House's jaded interest; he gathers his crew around him to discuss what the disease could be; they offer suggestions he shoots them down; A course of treatment is agreed upon but it doesn't work and probably makes the patient worse rather than better; they come with more ideas that don't work and then House has a sudden breakthrough of inspiration which makes things right. At some point during the evening you can usually count on Cameron getting soft and sentimental about someone's chances of living, Chase sucking up and Foreman being sarcastic. Add in copious amounts of Cuddy being exasperated and Wilson being his somewhat frustrated best friend, a soupcon of humour as House does clinic time and simmer in a stock of house being alternately callous and sarcastic and you have the recipe for a typical episode of the show. I'm not saying that the results are uninteresting but they do tend to follow a pattern and what raises the show above mediocrity is the cast, primarily Hugh Laurie, whose performance is inevitably the best thing on a given episode, and lifts the show above the pedestrian. But when the writers step outside the formula, that's when House becomes one of the best shows around. That was what happened with the first season's penultimate episode Three Stories and it is what happened in this year's season finale, No Reason.

The episode opens normally enough. House's interest is piqued by a patient in the clinic whose tongue has swollen to such a size that it won't fit into his mouth. As he begins the differential diagnosis with his team though a man walks into his conference room and very calmly shoots him twice, once in the abdomen and once in the neck. When House wakes up in recovery he finds that something is missing - his pain. It seems that Cuddy, who we know at least partially blames herself for the way that the misdiagnosis of the infarction that caused his constant physical pain, used an experimental treatment to put him into a temporary coma during the surgery to repair his wounds. The idea was to essentially reboot his brain so that he wouldn't feel the pain, although potential side effects included hallucinations. He has an hallucination - a beautiful woman claiming to be the wife of the patient with the enlarged tongue except that he was unmarried - but doesn't tell Cuddy about it and only mentions it to Wilson. The situation, both for House and his patient. The patient loses an eye and has his scrotum literally blow up and no one knows what is wrong with him as each test comes back negative. As for House he seems to have increasing numbers of hallucinations which are increasingly difficult for him to differentiate from reality. There are little clues, some of which - like a sudden shift in scene from the conference room to a stairwell - would seem to be simple convention in TV terms except that House might not remember how he got there, or he catches himself doing something that he'd never do. Eventually we - and House - discover that everything he's experienced since being shot is an hallucination, an illusion.

Throughout it all House is heckled (about the most appropriate word I can think of) by the other patient in his hospital room - the man who shot him. The cast listing at IMDB and other places calls the character "Moriarty", although he is never named at any point in the episode and certainly not before he shot House. Professor Moriarty, of course, was the most infamous adversary of Sherlock Holmes, the man who "killed" Holmes in The Final Problem, the man who Holmes refers to as "The Napoleon of Crime." (In his book The Seven Percent Solution - the title refers to Holmes's drug addiction to a 7% solution of cocaine in water - Nicholas Meyer suggests that Moriarty is simply Holmes's former mathematics tutor who has been blown up to titanic proportions of villainy in Holmes's mind by his cocaine addiction.) House's Moriarty, played by Canadian actor Elias Koteas, is like the Moriarty in the stories only so far as he's the opposite of House. While the Holmes's Moriarty was a villain whose reach extended into every criminal enterprise in London, House's Moriarty - the illusory one - embodies much of what House himself is trying to repress with his misanthropy, sarcasm and belief in the worst in people. Moriarty's heckling of House, calling him out on his beliefs while House himself is forced to confront the notion of whether the pain and his attitude make him a better doctor or just a massive pain in the ass.

There is one extremely memorable scene in the episode, one of tremendous erotic beauty which is also representative of House's greatest personal problem. In it he caresses Cameron's cheek, lifts her blouse slightly and gently blows in to her navel, and opens the top of her blouse by one button to ever so slightly expose the lacy top of her bra. Except that he doesn't do it himself. He arouses her, but he's using a surgical robot to do it, as a demonstration for the patient with the enlarged tongue. A small gripper moves down the side of Cameron's cheek, a probe with a blower blows into her navel, and an arm with a scalpel slices the button off of Cameron's blouse and another one opens it up. House is remote, detached, unfeeling, even clinical as he performs this incredibly intimate act, in much the same way that he's normally remote, unfeeling detached and clinical as he's dealing with human beings that he's treating. The scene is symbolic of his life.

Television too often falls into the trap of repeating what works, becoming formulaic. No series is entirely innocent of this, but it is different when a superior series - such as House - falls into the trap. It can be sad, if the show can't escape the trap and falls into mediocrity, or exhilarating when the show manages to escape the bonds of mediocrity and even for an episode or two in a season manages to escape the rut. The House season finale was one of those times. By pulling away from the formula for a while to examine the character of Dr. Gregory House through the medium of hallucination where what he chooses to repress confronts what he chooses to expose to the world, the writers the producers, and of course Hugh Laurie, have managed to give us an outstanding hour of television.

Short Takes - April 30, 2006

Another week of distractions and stuff that needed to get done and kept me away from Blogging.

Oh no, not HER: Meredith Viera will be replaced on The View by Rosie O'Donnell. So now we have a woman named Katie (and is it just me or would she be taken more seriously if she went by the name Katherine?) as the anchor of the CBS Evening News; a woman named Meredith doing puff pieces on Today, and a woman named Rosie doing whatever it is that they do on The View. Now on the whole I don't object that much to O'Donnell - I even think that she can act - but I'm just not sure of how well she's going to play with the other children. I can certainly see her and naive conservative Elisabeth Hasselbach having more than a few confrontations.

Prequels are a coming: While there's some discussion as to what the new Star Trek movie, to be helmed by J.J. Abrams, will be about what we've been told is that it will be a prequel featuring Kirk and Spock at Starfleet Academy. As the article indicates this may not be the case, although Abrams indicates that he's interested in possibly doing something contemporary to the Originals Series. Now it appears that Sci-Fi will be producing a prequel to Battlestar Galactica to be called Caprica. The new series will apparently be more of a family drama focussing on two families, the Adamas and the Graystones and will be set fifty years before the destruction of the Colonies at the time of the development of the first Cylons. Just to be clear this probably means that Bill Adama will probably just be getting ready to graduate...out of diapers. Some people aren't sure that the sequel is a good idea on the grounds that it's too soon or will dilute the franchise. However a combination of the two shows has some potential in keeping a Galactica related show on the air for an increased part of the season as well as giving viewers a sense of what Colonial society was like. It should also be noted of course that Doctor Who will be launching a spin-off this Fall to be called Torchwood (CBC has already signed on as a co-producer).

Don't do the crime if you can't do the time: Michelle Rodriguez, who has most recently been seen on the series Lost has done her time for a drunk driving charge in Hawaii. Rodriguez pleaded guilty to the charge last Tuesday and was sentenced to spend five days in jail and pay a $500 fine, or do 240 hours of community service, Surprisingly to some, Rodriguez opted to pay the fine and do the time, apparently on the grounds that "autograph hounds would hassle her if she did work hours." She went to jail on Tuesday and emerged on Friday, having been given credit for time already served immediately following her arrest. Personally I think there was a bit more to her decision. 240 hours of community service would have meant hanging around Hawaii for twenty to thirty days depending on how many hours she worked a day. Presumably this could have been disruptive to her work schedule. Doing the jail time, which she reportedly spent reading and watching TV, meant that she was free in a week.

Like a Swiss Watch: The Law & Order franchise just keeps chugging along. All three Law & Order shows have received early renewals from NBC, along with Crossing Jordan, Las Vegas and Medium. The Las Vegas renewal calms the fears of some fans that by assigning the show to the Friday night "death slot" in the second hour the network was hanging it out to die. No word as to what the network will do with Crossing Jordan and Law & Order: Criminal Intent, which will both lose their timeslots to Sunday Night Football but I at least wouldn't be at all surprised if they stay on Sunday night and run straight through with new episodes after the football season ends. Of course with the renewal of the main Law & Order series came the announcement that the incumbent ADA under Jack McCoy, Alexandra Borgia (played by Anne Parisse) will be leaving the show. Since Jill Hennessy left the series there have been four ADAs, played by Carrie Lowell, Angie Harmon, Elizabeth Rohm and now Parisse. Her tenure in the role is the shortest yet, just a season and a half.

I you can't do fiction, play games: After this season's rather weak dramatic efforts and the sliding ratings for The Apprentice NBC seemed to hit gold with Deal Or No Deal, so what could be more natural than another game show. The network has given the greenlight to a show called 1 Versus 100 to be produced by Endemol Productions. The premise is simple - one player competes against a "mob" of 100 other people in a trivia competition. The more people the one player beats the more money to be won. A player can stop at any time and take the money but if the player outlasts all 100 of the "mob" they can win a multi-million dollar prize. Of course if the player gets an answer wrong the prize is nothing. The show, which has elements that are reminiscent of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? is popular in a number of European countries and at least has the virtue of being more of a challenge than Deal Or No Deal which is also produced by Endemol.

A House is a Holmes: I've mentioned the various ways in which Dr. Gregory House is like Sherlock Holmes in the past, but one escaped me until the past couple of episodes - music. Holmes was an accomplished violinist who owned a Stradivarius and reportedly played professionally following his "death" at Reichenbach Falls. House is an accomplished piano player. Of course it helps that his residence - apartment B at 221 Baker Street (?) - is on the ground floor. So much easier to put a piano in there than in Holmes's second floor walk-up rooms. (Or maybe it's just because Hugh Laurie is a very good piano player.)

The Holmes-House Connection - New Revelations

Now I will freely admit that I can be fairly dense at times. By the time I figured out that a particular girl in high school had been hitting on me fairly consistently for several months she was already two boyfriends beyond me by which time I figured it was too late to do anything about it. Like I said, dense. So it's really no surprise that I didn't pick up on something about House MD and its relationship to the stories of Sherlock Holmes.

Oh sure, I got the link between Gregory House and Sherlock Holmes. That was so obvious even a blind man could see it so it only took someone who is as dense as I am a few minutes longer to pick up on it. It wasn't until an incident last night that I picked up on something else. It was a scene at the very beginning of the episode where House and his friend James Wilson are emerging from a building which I assume is House's townhouse or apartment building (sorry, I missed the first 30 seconds of the episode - sue me) where they encounter the man House refers to as his stalker, but that's not important. The number on the building, that's important. 221B. I mean seriously, all that it needed is for the street to have been named after a Mr. Baker for it to be absolutely perfect and for all we know it is. Ah, but I'm dense you know, so it took until this morning for the pieces to really fall into place for me.

Wilson is Watson! James Wilson=John Watson

Yes I know that traditionally Watson has been the old fuddy duddy to Holmes's brilliant young man but in fact the books made it clear that Watson was Holmes's contemporary, a military doctor who had been shot at least once in an unfortunate encounter with Afghan tribesmen. Watson's weaknesses are that he sees rather than observes and he tends to think down rather conventional lines. Wilson is an oncologist and (with all due respect to my friend Orac) like many doctors he tends to think down conventional lines - that is to say not crossing boundaries to look for answers outside his specialty. That of course was what sets Holmes apart from other detectives and House apart from other doctors - they're universalists who consider all possibilities rather than specialists. Even Wilson's several marriages link him with Watson. Although we know that Watson married Mary Marston at the end of Sign Of The Four, Watson's periods of residence at Baker Street have suggested to many enthusiasts (including William S. Baring-Gould who wrote the Annotated Sherlock Holmes - a massive two volume work which I happen to own) that Watson was married more than once.

Ah, so now I'm on a roll. It seemed obvious to me that Cuddy was Mrs. Hudson, Holmes's devoted housekeeper and the actual owner of 221B. No, on reflection, that's not right. Cuddy is Lestrade and all of the other cops that Holmes confounded, dumbfounded and infuriated over the years. As for Stacy, House's lost love, well she is so clearly Irene Adler the only female adversary Holmes had and the only person who got the better of him who according to Watson was always referred to by Holmes as "The Woman".

Which leaves us with House's little acolytes; Foreman, Chase and Cameron. Foreman and Chase are easy - they're the Baker Street Irregulars, the little street urchins who were always out gathering bits of information for the great man in return for sixpence and a kind word - but Cameron is a problem. More than Foreman and Chase she has injected herself into House's life even though he doesn't want it and she's reluctant about it. Is she Mrs. Hudson? Well the assumption is that Hudson was a widow (Cameron is), and given that the relationship between Holmes and Mrs. Hudson lasted from 1871 when he took the rooms at her home to perhaps as late as 1914 (the elderly housekeeper in His Final Bow is only known by her first name so it could have been Hudson), Hudson can't have been that old when they first met. It is also not impossible that there was some sort of romantic attraction on her part at least. On the other hand Hudson never got high and had wild animal sex with a Baker Street Irregular the way Cameron did last night, so for now let's make her a sort of hybrid of Hudson and an Irregular.

As for Professor Moriarity, I give you Chi McBride's character Edward Vogler.

It really is elementary... if you aren't dense.

The Best New Show On TV

With due respect to shows like Desperate Housewives and Lost, the best new show on American broadcast television in the 2004-2005 season has undoubtedly been House, or to give it its full title House M.D. (That incidentally is how it appears in the main title, with the M.D. so tiny that unless you are particularly observant you'd never notice it.) It may also provide definitive proof that the Parents Television Council is right about the V-Chip, but I'll get into the reason I say that shortly.

"House" is Dr. Gregory House and he's unusual, both for a TV doctor and a real doctor. Most TV doctors are (and have always been) surgeons or worked in emergency rooms. They look sharp in their white lab coats and heroic in their surgical greens. House is the head of the "Department of Diagnostic Medicine" at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital (based on the University Medical Center in Princeton). He usually looks worse than an unmade bed in a rumpled sports coat, an open collared shirt and running shoes. He doesn't do surgery and wouldn't wear a lab coat to save his job. He is, in fact an unlikely protagonist; an ill-tempered, sarcastic, misanthrope with a disdain for the mundane and a love for solving puzzles. He'd rather watch soap operas, and has to be threatened to get him to do time in t he hospital's clinic. He's walks with a cane thanks to a misdiagnosed embolism in his leg which destroyed much of the muscle tissue while leaving him in great pain. He's addicted to Vicodin, a fact that he admits, but refuses to enter a rehab program because his addiction has not impaired his ability to do his job. In the hands of the wrong actor the character could be such a turn-off that it would drive viewers away. In the hands of British actor Hugh Laurie (probably best known as a comedian, for his work in Blackadder and earlier in Jeeves and Wooster with his friend Stephen Fry) House's bad qualities are tempered with a dark humour and a basic humanity in addition to his brilliance as a diagnostician which, if it does nothing else arouses our sympathy.

The roots of House are apparent - if somewhat obscurely - in his name. The character is based very much on Sherlock Holmes (whose name can be pronounced "homes" - Holmes=House) which is only fitting since Arthur Conan Doyle based Holmes on one of his instructors at the Edinburgh Medical School, Dr. Joseph Bell. Bell had the ability, exhibited by Holmes and by House, of being able to tell things about a person based simply on looking at him or her. In one notable exchange in the series House tells a man, whose skin has turned orange in colour, that his wife is having an affair "because you're orange, you moron, and she hasn't noticed it." It goes further however. Holmes believed implicitly that everybody lies, or at least withholds the truth; House believes that everybody lies and finding out what the lies are and why they are lying is an important clue in the diagnostic process. His diagnostic process goes back even further to Edgar Allan Poe's character August Dupin. Dupin said (and this is often, wrongly, ascribed to Sherlock Holmes) "eliminate the impossible and whatever remains, regardless of how improbable, is the answer." House's diagnostic technique is to look at the symptoms and determine what could cause them, and then eliminate them as the cause. Sometimes this is done by asking questions, sometimes through investigation, and sometimes through experimentation. It is the latter that leads to the greatest conflict. House will order a course of treatment which will cure one possible cause of the patient's illness but be either ineffective or dangerous to another possibility. In this manner he collects and analyses data which leads to the answer. (Incidentally the cases are apparently based on real case files, although the way the details of the actual case are not necessarily recreated) Surrounding Dr. House are his team: Dr. Eric Foreman (Omar Epps), a neurologist, Dr. Robert Chase (Jesse Spencer), an intensivist (a doctor specialising in iintensive care), and Dr. Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), an immunologist. As well there's his best (well only) friend, Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), an oncologist, and hospital administrator, Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein). They are all specialists and so tend to see illnesses from their own viewpoint. Cameron is an immunologist so she tends to focus on infections as the principal case of problems rather to the exclusion of everything else. Similarly Foreman looks for neurological causes. House on the other hand looks beyond the boundaries of specialties to all possible causes.

House has had an interesting history as a series. Debuting in November 2004, following Fox's post season baseball coverage, the show had a major ratings improvement on its lead-in The Billionaire Rebel: Richard Branson's Quest for the Best, increasing the estimated audience from 5.35 million for Branson to 7 million. This still put the show in fourth place however. Viewership slumped by almost a million in the second week of the series. Although it remained mired in fourth place through the rest of the run of Billionaire Rebel, it continued to expand on the audience for that show by up to 87% at one point. Once American Idol became the lead-in for House in February 2005, ratings for the show took off. From being mired in fourth with the Branson series as its lead, House soared into first place when it followed Idol. The February 1, 2005 episode had 12.89 million viewers, and the February 8 episode had over 14 million. In other words the viewership doubled based entirely on having a popular show as a lead-in rather than a show that no one is interested in. This leads me to the obvious conclusion that the V-Chip can't possibly work: people are either too lazy or too dumb to change channels from hour to hour, so how can they be expected to master something as complicated as the V-Chip. (Before anyone complains, I am being sarcastic.)

In describing House as the best new show of the season, I am primarily concerned with the quality of the acting and the writing, both of which are excellent. Hugh Laurie does a masterful job playing the emotionally scarred Dr. House, who finds meaning in his work, and whose personal relationships are next to non-existant. There's no real need for external conflict, although the producers introduced some in the form of Chi McBride's character Edward Vogler. I am convinced that Vogler, a billionaire entrepreneur who buys his way into control of the hospital board and takes an immediate dislike to House because he's not "cost efficient", was introduced as a result of the early ratings. Vogler was intended to make House seem more sympathetic by being a nearly all powerful antagonist. By the time he was introduced however the crisis had ended. Viewers had begun to watch the show and they found the combination of the medical puzzles, House's outward irascibility and internal pain eminently easy to identify with. Credit belongs to the writers for crafting both an intriguing character but also to Hugh Laurie for making the character human and far more multidimensional than many characters on TV shows. All too often all we see of a character is him doing his job, with little detail of his life or personality beyond that. It is commendable.

(I'm getting a bit behind thanks to Sweeps and just the fact that it's May and there's a lot of stuff to do now that the snow is off the ground. I should have written this review of House earlier, but there was a lawn to mow before it started raining. I hope to have a review of Lost posted tomorrow.)