after watching, on a whim, the first episode of House last year, i posted:
watched the first episode of House having never watched House and it was the funniest shit ever. we were laughing the whole time. i love how he is supposed to be a sherlock genius but multiple times he will have one of those “stop in mid sentence slow zoom on the face oh my god he’s had an epiphany” epiphanies and then the epiphany is wrong, and then the way he solves the case in the end is by magically also having exhaustive knowledge outside his field (parasitology this time). if that’s what it is every time – “house has an additional degree he never mentioned” – i am into it
also i think it was much more fun to watch now, being in my mid thirties and having had to deal with shitty doctors – there is a new plausibility to things like “they found a lesion on her brain and then forgot about it”, or “they had a gilmore-girls-rapid-fire-diagnosis-huddle just to arrive at do a contrast mri and redo her blood tests“, or “the doctor is just a huge fucking asshole directly to the patient to the point he should 100% be fired”. the most implausible thing might be that house avoids being fired because he’s just so gosh darned good, when actually it would be because nobody in a position to fire him knows or cares
This turned into watching the whole show, which is a different kind of experience. The first few episodes are wildly ridiculous and often wildly offensive – in a medical sense, I mean (it’s offensive in other more boring ways on purpose) – it loves to say things like that fibromyalgia doesn’t exist. That eases off, but some trends never go away – it loves to put House (or another guy we’re to like) in a dodgy situation with an underage girl, and then vindicate whatever he was doing. This comes up way too often not to be weird.
You can’t really say of the show that it ever gets good, but it does occasionally do a pretty good episode, and even, once in a blue moon, a really good episode, but in being A Great Episode Of Television it breaks pattern with the rest of the series such that it’s now kind of a bad episode of House. Hugh Laurie and Lisa Edelstein turn out to be able to carry anything you give them, whether it’s absolute garbage or something that feels misplaced from a better show. Edelstein eventually gets cut from the cast at a ridiculous time (apparently for ridiculous reasons) and the show never recovers, and the last couple of seasons feel a bit “rise of skywalker”, walking back what character development House had finally undergone seemingly just to bring him back on-brand.
The thing I said about the first episode remains true though – the core fantasy of the show is that if you get mysteriously sick, a doctor, a team of doctors, might actually think about what’s happening with your case. They might think about it for a week, as opposed to real life, where most of the time you can’t get them to pay attention for the five minutes they’re in the room with you, and if there’s anything ambiguous about your case, that’s it, you’re basically fucked. The show is aware this is an unusual arrangement (House runs a type of department that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world) but is seemingly oblivious to what that means – it’s hostile to the idea of self-diagnosis, doesn’t like patients to self-advocate, and talks a lot about hypochondria (a diagnosis the team remain gung-ho about despite nearly killing patients with it occasionally). It’s not a thoughtful show, but I would recommend it to anyone who wants to settle in for a bad time of an evening and occasionally be surprised.
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:
that is indeed it every time.
that’s basically the first three seasons yeah
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:
It is exponentially funnier for British people who know Hugh Laurie from such august roles as “moron fop Prince Regent” and “moron fop Bertie Wooster”. It’s like watching Forbidden Planet now – you can’t take it seriously because you’re constantly expecting Leslie Nielsen to crack a gag about beavers.
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