Or, the problem with this show might be lupus
Do you watch House and care enough not to get spoiled about the various machinations of its damaged doctors but don’t care enough to watch every episode right away? If so, this post is not for you. I’m not necessarily sure it’s for me, either, because this week’s (possibly permanent) departure of one of the original cast members has reminded me why I just can’t feel any emotional attachment to these characters.
House is an odd case among prime time TV, because for the most part it does what it does very well. The writing is decent, the acting can be very good, and it’s crafted its particular form into a well-honed rhythm of alternating mysteries and clues. The show has also settled into a distinctive visual and verbal tone, so it feels consistent and very much like itself (as opposed to cribbing from other shows’ styles). There are worse things, right?
Except that I find the characters on House to be incredibly frustrating. The supporting characters, all of the doctors on House’s team, are mechanically created mixtures of brilliance and emotional damage, and everyone has built-in triggers that are too easy to consciously manipulate. At the same time, House himself is both all-powerful and vaguely evil, and his purpose in life is to play cynical puppet-master. To make matters worse, House operates on a zero sum system – every change, no matter how enormous and seemingly life-changing, inevitably finds some way to snap everything back into place. The first several years, House had a stable team of employees. When they left, a whole new cast came in and it felt like a huge shift, but of the five or so promising new supporting figures, only two now remain. House left as the head of his team, but now he’s back. It looked like Cuddy might change because she now has a daughter, but her baby apparently requires remarkably little care.
House's bevy of perpetually unhappy team members
To be fair, there have been a few major changes throughout the show, and this season in particular has looked promising. After years of addiction and misery, House sought treatment and was starting to look like a better, more fulfilled person. Were that change to become permanent, the entire premise and tone of the show might change, and it would be a good move – everyone would become more human, more rounded characters rather than caricatures of cruelty. Except this most recent episode, which looks on the surface like continuing rumbles of change, actually just forces House to revert to his emotionally stunted puppet-master role. Cameron, one of his original team members, ends the episode by leaving for good, but that minor departure is completely drowned out by the return of House as Evil God Doctor. What began as an intriguingly cruel House became a predictably, obnoxiously cruel House, then showed signs of becoming less cruel, only to revert back to the obnoxious stage. Hardly a character arc to write home about.
This is why House has always been good background viewing – you always know approximately what’s going on, there are some good gross out medical scenes, and the show is great at ratcheting up the surprise with increasingly disturbing diseases and odd patients. Unless they really commit to change who House is, though, it’ll stay in the background for me.