House calls, I listen

1. Hugh Laurie’s performance.  I know, I know, here I am, a Hollywood screenwriter, the most abused and overlooked class of artisans in the entertainment business, and I’m not starting with the outstanding work of series creator David Shore.  But, as Shore himself admits, without Laurie’s performance the character, and the show, wouldn’t work.  If you had a less than fully imagined, fully committed, richly detailed performance of the character, you would have to write all his dialogue on the nose and the show would have to work overtime to demonstrate that it’s “just kidding,” that it doesn’t really support the acid rantings and bellicosity of its protagonist.  Mind you, the notion of a misanthropic, spiteful ass as a doctor is just as artificial and unbelievable concept as the notion of a deeply caring, heroic doctor, and may not be an actual improvement.  But because Laurie’s performance is so committed, so fearless and so detailed (on a par with Michael Chiklis on The Shield, a performance in a role that blows my mind with its intensity and daring), the extremely talented writers of House get to put the most outrageous lines into his mouth and know that he will make them fly and take the audience along with them, making us gasp in disbelief instead of turning away in disgust.  Laurie has brought the most seamless bonding of actor and character to television detective work since Peter Falk invented Columbo.  The fact that he has done so while doing an impeccable American accent is a miracle.

2. Plotting.  As I say, there’s nothing extraordinary about the individual scenes on House, but the skill and innovation brought to bear on their deployment and arrangement is very extraordinary indeed.  Each story is so complex and twist-ridden it’s impossible to know where the hell it’s going.  Let’s look at “Sex Kills” again, which I consider a typical, not-especially vital or “special” episode of House.  The A-story twists go from “man has an STD” to “man has brucellosis” to “man needs a new heart” to “he can’t have a new heart” to “where will we find a new heart” to “a overweight dying woman can give her his heart” to “what did the overweight woman die of” and the show’s only half over!  Compare that to a typical A-story on CSI, where the story seems to go from “we know who the murderer is” to “well maybe we don’t know who the murderer is” to “it turns out we were right the first time, butnot for the reasons we originally thought.”  The plots on House (and any screenwriter will tell you that plot is the hardest thing of all) are dizzying in their complexity and rarely, if ever, fail to ultimately satisfy.

3. Tempo.  With such an elevated level of complexity, everything on House must move very quickly in order to accomodate all its plot machinations.  This, as it turns out, helps everything.  The acting is better when we don’t have time to dwell on an actor’s choices, the writing is better when we don’t have time to notice that it’s as riddled with cliches as any other show in the history of television, the direction is better when there’s no time for indulgence, the production design looks better when we don’t dwell on its improbabilities, the characters are more interesting when there are more of them and they don’t have enough time on screen for us to register that they aren’t that interesting.  Tempo makes the “differential” scenes dazzling displays of knowledge instead of leaden exposition, the “character” scenes are welcome respites from the dense, sometime impenetrable medical jargon, the “crisis” scenes arrive with the suddenness of emergency.

Strangely, even though the show hurtles at an exceptional pace (try watching House back-to-back with Monk — the latter will feel like it’s wearing lead boots in comparison) it never feels rushed.  This I’m putting down to —

4.  Production design, “background” and camera movement.  On top of the speed of the dialogue, the sheer busyness of the show is impressive.  Characters are always doing something, and not in the Law & Order sense of “the mechanic can’t stop working on the car in order to talk to a pair of homicide detectives investigating the murder of his best friend.”  The hospital of House is a busy, busy place (and filled with all those glass walls so we can see exactly how busy it is) and the characters are constantly hurrying through it on their way to somewhere else.  Which makes it that much more ironic and amusing that House himself is constantly found goofing off, watching medical dramas on TV or playing video games.  TV shows have had impressive worlds created before, but they always seem artificial and arch, like CSI, which seems to take place in a permanent midnight where no room is well lit.  The sunniness of the hospital of House somehow helps sell its darkness.  The intense, unbelievable stories (and their  intense, unbelievable protagonist) are all happening in an extremely pleasant, well-lit, well-appointed, well-maintained environment.  No one on House has the problems with the world House does — he’s a splinter sticking out from an otherwise smooth plank.

5. Stance.  By centering the show around the indelible House, the show’s creators present a philosophical outlook that never preaches, never offers solutions and never provides reconciliations.  House is never going to be happy, but then he’s not trying to be happy.  That keeps him mysterious, unreachable and fascinating.  The fact that his brilliance is matched by the desperate ordinariness of his preoccupations — monster trucks, medical dramas, hookers, etc — makes him recognizable, and his pain makes him human.  Somehow the parts all add up and provide us with a character we can’t stop watching.  As a medical drama/detective show, House is exemplary and exhilirating, but it’s the shows underlying view of humanity, both compassionate and disgusted, that keeps us watching.

 notes that the medical stuff on House is as implausible and fantastic as I have always suspected it is.  And yet it presents its, shall we say, “heightened reality” lightly (and swiftly), not with grim determination or dark seriousness.  House doesn’t have time to sell us on his fantastical diagnoses, he’s got someplace to limp off to.  She also notes that too much medical work on House is done by doctors, and yet I am consistenly impressed at the number of personnel on display on the show — there are surgeons and nurses and all manner of interns and students and clerks cluttering up the hallways and when the show calls for someone with specialized knowledge, they, often as not, show up, as in “Sex Kills” where one staff member is shown (she gets her own close-up) preparing to shut off the overweight woman’s breathing apparatus and another is shown to be in charge of organ donations and there are two teams of anonymous surgeons to do the heart transplants.  Personnel shows up and trundles off with an impressive regularity on House, indicating that all House has to do is wish it and the personnel will appear to make it so, which I guess is the exact opposite of the care I’ve received in hospitals, where the MRIs are given by MRI technicians, not doctors, and certainly not teams of doctors.  On the other hand, in terms of caregiving, Princeton-Plainsboro is a fantasyland on the level of Narnia — when a patient checks into House’s hospital with baffling, contridictory symptoms, heaven and earth are moved to discover the truth.  When I check into St. Vincent’s in New York with some unexplained tingling in my limbs, the staff is hurried, incompetent and inefficient, discharges me without diagnosis, refuses to return my phone calls and charges me $17,000.