Comments on: The Strange Case of Gregory House

By: mab

mab — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:56:57 +0000

I got addicted to House while in the US and just finished watching the dvd version of Season Five, via amazon.com. I can’t really believe House will turn into Mr Nice or Mr Happy. Maybe Mr not so self-destructive or Mr not so destructive?

As for happiness — I (small voice) aspire to happy. Maybe I’m using the term differently than you are. But I’m trying to more things that I enjoy than things that I don’t enjoy and spend more time with people who are nice to me than who are horrible to me. Things that I enjoy doing are very challenging, and I have the notion of contributing to, well, something other than myself. But doing it in a way that is as enjoyable as possible — as opposed to a dreadful as possible — seems okay to me.

Yes, yes. This gets distorted to the point where I maintain I’m the last living American who has never tried so much as valium. But I think you are jumping a bit with House. The writers pushed the show to its darkest incarnation in the last season, and if they want to explore House trying to not piss off everyone he cares about, I don’t think that’s necessarily a reflection of the Happy Culture.

By: jd

jd — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 02:24:31 +0000

The “new” season of House hasn’t started down here. But I lost interest when they switched the focus from medical problems to the personal problems of the characters.

By: CAFiorello

CAFiorello — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:38:17 +0000

I’m guessing they won’t keep it up. If they do, the show is dead. Surely they know that?

By: robert_piepenbrink

robert_piepenbrink — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:34:44 +0000

I’ve seen “House.” (I was in a motel room during a marathon last Thanksgiving.) Not a bad show and an interesting lead character. It IS very difficult to maintain an abrasive character on series TV. Does anyone else remember Raymond Burr in “Ironside?” In the pilot, he was brutal to the edge of sadistic–and exactly the man you wanted to catch criminals. By Season Three, he was a loveable curmudgeon. “The Six Million Dollar Man” didn’t last even that long, but the first three or four episodes were written for grown-ups.
That said, give it a few episodes before you despair. There are on television more life-changing experiences than there are changed lives. Failing that, there’s “Bones.”

Quite agree about saints. Wilberforce, Beecher, Booth and Baden-Powell, not to mention “Chinese” Gordon would none of them get their own TV series.

[I do not recommend the "1632" series as a whole, but I did enjoy translating a modern Catholic Church (St Vincent's) into the middle of the Thirty Years War. This creates certain theological difficulties--one of which is that Vincent de Paul hadn't been canonized yet. The Priest changes the name of the church, and EVERYONE agrees not to tell Vincent, who is hard enough to live with as it is.]

But I must disagree with this comment:

(We’ll leave aside the standard “test everything, then try 3 different wrong treatments that almost kill the patient before we get it right and cure them in 10 minutes flat” plot device of every show. No hospital in the world would put up with that)

They ALL put up with that, except for the actually curing the patient bit. If you want to see how a hospital actually functions, forget “House.” Rent George C. Scott in “The Hospital” or read Eileen Dreyer’s NOTHING PERSONAL.

By: Lymaree

Lymaree — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:01:51 +0000

Hubby & I watched the House episode last night, we’ve been big fans since the beginning. Along about 10 minutes into the second hour, I thought “Uh oh, the powers that be have gotten to the writers at last. They’re trying to make House “nice.”

Nice is the last thing House is or needs to be. When I’m in the hospital at death’s door, I don’t want a nice guy to hold my hand. That’s what nurses are for. I need a doctor, no matter how curmudgeonly, who *knows what’s wrong and knows what to do* or knows at least that there’s nothing left to do, and isn’t afraid to say it. I want the doctor who screwed up every relationship in his life because he was so wound up in medicine.

We’ll have to see how the series goes on. I’ve enjoyed it for too long to give up after one deviation toward Niceness.

I’d far rather the conclusion of the show had been that House wanted to be functional, rather than happy. Clearly his drug use had finally interfered with his functioning in a big way. He could no longer diagnose, which was the basis of his self-identity. Getting that back should have been his primary need. The ‘happy’ crap is just that. Crap.

Happiness must necessarily be fleeting, it’s not a state that can be sustained, and must always be contrasted with unhappiness in order to be identifiable. Serenity can persist, maybe. A sense of achievement, perhaps. Not happiness.

So, Jane, my thought on seeing that was “what is this? House, or Little Mary Sunshine?” Gah.

By: Cheryl

Cheryl — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:25:57 +0000

I never saw ‘House’ – but I’ve encountered the You Must Be Happy This Way mindset all my life. I think a lot of people really like simple and nice, and they don’t really get the idea that this isn’t always the case for everyone’s life at all times. If they did get it, they’d still think there had to be something wrong and with typical Western Can-Do spirit would try to fix it. Some of these people are among the devotes of ‘inclusion’ who have made me almost allergic to the term, because they mean inclusion into their own neat and tidy view of humanity and can’t see that they are in their own way excluding people. Only the bad ones, of course, who don’t accept the principle of inclusiveness!

I’m about 3 hours into (so far) 6 hour travel delay, and about to run out of minutes and change. I do realize it’s much better to find out about mechanical problems before the plane takes off, and that they can’t keep spare planes everywhere, especially at places that aren’t on the way to anywhere else, but it’s still annoying. At least they’ve fed us, and promised to get us on connnecting flights. Eventually.