Await Rescue (Day 227)

I've been watching a lot of House recently and have been quite enjoying it. This is somewhat surprising to me because it's a big name Network TV Show and I generally find those to be pretty contrived, aside from a few exceptions. I enjoyed Lost a lot and even appreciated the ending despite the general vitriol associated with it. House is different, though. It's part of a pretty well tread genre. It's a medical drama, although it certainly has its fair share of humor.

I guess I'm just really attracted to the misanthropic protagonist. I'm not misanthropic and I don't hate people but I do find the condition interesting. I've known people like that and a lot of his actions really do ring true to me. The way he alienates everyone around him consistently might seem a bit extreme to some viewers, but his behavior is very familiar to me. I guess you could say that I do share some traits with that character, but I'm at nowhere near that extreme a level. I'm just an introvert. I like people, but I don't like being around a lot of them at once. I like being around people in small doses. I prefer smaller groups to large ones. In House's case, he would rather only be around people when it serves his goals. He feels the need to unravel puzzles--not because it helps to save lives, but because it gives him an answer. If he consistently comes up with answers, it means he has control. He will always be sought out for those answers because no one does it as well as he does.

House is formulaic. Most episodes begin in the same way--the primary patient to be treated in that episode will experience a bizarre medical issue and most likely lose consciousness. Sometimes a fake out will occur and the person you are led to believe is getting sick will not be the person of interest. This reminds me a lot of the Six Feet Under cold opens--except in that case, someone generally dies at the beginning of every episode. Like House, it's not always who you initially expect. 

The episode will then progress with House soliciting input from his hand-picked team of young doctors. They will generally get the obvious diagnoses out of the way first, but in almost every case, House seems to have a much better idea of what might be wrong with the patient than his assistants do. Even though the patient's life is often as stake, he seems to toy with them, prodding them to rack their brains for the solution. In most cases, House will come up with a few ideas that his team has not considered that will be shot down for various reasons over the course of the episode. The patient will unexpectedly start coughing blood, seizing, go into cardiac arrest, or otherwise get much worse while the team continues to deliberate. 

In each episode, there will generally be a moment where an unrelated piece of information will cause House to have an epiphany--a eureka moment. House is essentially a show about medical mysteries, and the parallels to Sherlock Holmes are obvious. In almost every case, House is primarily responsible for eventually figuring out the underlying medical condition and solving it. Occasionally patients will walk away with a chronic condition but it is very seldom that they are terminal. Statistically, it seems this might be a bit of a stretch, but I'm willing to suspend my disbelief because the show is so consistently entertaining.

Beyond that, it's a show about a drug addict who practices medicine while subverting authority and breaking every rule and regulation in the book. I have to wonder if a real world diagnostician, no matter how talented, could get away with that kind of thing year after year without facing jail time and suspension of a medical license. I'm three seasons in now; I'm curious as to how the show's creators would maintain the same level of tension considering House always seems to get what he wants without (or with very little) consequence.