Peter Canavese
2011-08-29 01:12:00 UTC
Even in the show's seventh year, House continues to be an endlessly fascinating character, as brilliantly played by English actor Hugh Laurie...
"I don´t need to come back to watch this big mess. Not even for one episode." "I'm done." "I won’t be watching House anymore, even in reruns..." Author and journalist Mark Harris recently devoted one of his Entertainment Weekly columns to the phenomenon of comment-board carping, largely characterized by threats of never watching a show again due to a perceived betrayal of character or concept. Perhaps no show on the air has stirred up more such threats than House, M.D., which pressed its fanbase's buttons by finally "going there" with a romantic relationship between the damaged-goods Dr. Gregory House and his boss, Dr. Lisa Cuddy, a pairing long wished for by "Huddy" "shippers." The tumultuous path the relationship took over the course of the medical drama's seventh season was perhaps destined to upset everyone, at various times and for various reasons: everyone, that is, except those happy to be taken on the ride plotted by the show's creator, David Shore, and his fairly stable stable of writers.
Even in the show's seventh year, House continues to be an endlessly fascinating character, as brilliantly played by English actor Hugh Laurie (who remains, astoundingly, Emmy-less for embodying and sustaining this indelible character). Also an executive producer, Laurie has participated in the series' quality control, with varying degrees of success. The procedural has shifted its focus on medical mysteries to the inner lives of its doctors, but that's a reasonable adaptive strategy for an aging show intent on not repeating itself. Given the nearly unavoidable repetitive structure of the diagnostic investigations and the cyclical nature of its irascible protagonist's leg pain, Vicodin addiction, and romantic success and failure, House, M.D. has done an admirable job of keeping things fresh with a rotation of characters on House's team, the odd innovative plot structure, and different causes and effects to House's bad behavior. Season Seven has plenty of memorable moments (my favorite: a sweat-inducing self-surgery) but also at times crosses the line of behavioral believability, even for a character as edgy as House.
The season begins with House and Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) throwing lighter fluid on the fire they've kindled for six years, consummating the relationship and asking the title question of the season opener: "Now What?" The arrangement will require careful negotiation in keeping home and work lives separate, if indeed that's even possible, and Cuddy frets over the possible emotional consequences for her two-year-old daughter Rachel (Kayla and Rylie Colbert). Requited love results in tentative signs of growth on House's part: signifiers of caring for Lisa and Rachel, and a perhaps more optimistic view of human nature that creeps into his work with patients. House's humor remains irreverent as he mocks his long-suffering BFF Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) and the diagnostic team serving under House at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital.
Foremost on the team are the men House at one point calls "Boring, Bimbo and Bite-Size": Eric Foreman (Omar Epps), Robert Chase (Jesse Spencer) and Chris Taub (Peter Jacobson). In and out in the series opener is team member Remy "Thirteen" Hadley (Olivia Wilde, off to star in Cowboys and Aliens); her eventual short-term replacement is genius-level medical student Martha Masters (Amber Tamblyn). (Martha appears in fourteen of the season's episodes, while Thirteen appears in seven.) Masters allows House to play a few new notes as she is arguably the sharpest tool he's ever had on the team, while also the most innocent and resistant to House's corruption. House is never wrong about his motto "Everybody lies," though he is often frustrated by his patients' life choices, from the unwavering faith in God of a man (Kuno Becker) who crucifies himself to keep his daughter cancer-free to the crafty performance artist (Oscar nominee Shohreh Agdashloo) who discovers she's willing to compromise her principles after all.
Season Seven allots at least one episode's subplot to each of the supporting cast, and includes return visits from Wilson's ex-wife Sam (Cynthia Watros) as well as the introduction of Cuddy's mother Arlene (Candice Bergen in three episodes) and sister Julia (Paula Marshall). Though often pushed into the background and beholden to the old get-it-wrong, get-it-wrong, get-it-right pattern, the medical mysteries haven't yet lost the element of surprise, and the character plots are far more often engrossing or funny than they are preposterous. Still, House and Cuddy are asked to do things that defy reason (one of the more obvious is House drugging Cuddy's mother during a dinner, and Cuddy's acceptance of same), culminating in an outrageous season finale that, amazingly, wasn't intended as Cuddy's swan song but turned out to be after failed contraction negotiations with Edelstein.
The finale serves as a reminder of the trap the show finds itself in, requiring House to up the ante of his destructiveness to shock and awe the audience; with the character reaching his highest personal high, a precipitous drop is to be expected (and, perhaps, desired, to keep House at his unhappy best). Whether anyone will believe that life goes on in Season Eight is difficult to say, but I'm sure House's diminished but still sizeable core audience will come back—even many of those who swear they won't—for the next "Now What?"
|
|
