TV Review
What’s up, doc?
by Matt Nippert
Dr Gregory House kicks the drugs and takes up running? Pull the other one.
We can walk! Hugh Laurie’s viciously sarcastic Dr Gregory House has traded painkilling Vicodin for the miracle cure of a ketamine coma, cast aside his trademark cane and leapt like Lazarus into the third season of House.
When we last saw the not-so-good doctor, he was a brilliant mind shackled to a beat-up, drug-addicted body, with gunshots to the gut and neck. Now, after surgery and rehab, he is clean, goes running and even skateboards.
The doctor, in his late forties, pulls off a board trick and proclaims, “I stuck that primo! How rad am I?” Passing girls titter, almost certainly at him. Has the cure killed the patient?
In his hippie days, Samson must also have been a bore. But post-Delilah? The ex-iron man would have been a wreck, cut up and grasping for meaning in his life – much like Laurie’s earlier Golden Globe-winning turn in this hospital drama-comedy.
House is in many ways typically formulaic. The megalomaniac-savant House takes on patients with bizarre symptoms, speculates wildly about what ails them, then embarks on a series of near-fatal tests and treatments before miraculously returning them to full health. So far, so stand-well-clear.
But what separates House from other doctor-and-nurse shows is the vicious sarcasm; fortunately, some still survives. House’s superior, Dr James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), tries explaining his banal theory of happiness: “The fifth level of happiness involves creation. Changing lives.”
House: “Sixth level is heroin. Seventh level is you going away.”
When House is presented with a young yoga buff who claims to be paralysed despite an undamaged spinal cord, he tests her condition by holding a naked flame to her foot. After observing a reflex twitch, he calls her a “lunatic” for faking her symptoms, and moves on. Torturing then insulting a patient? Classic House.
(It turns out that yoga-girl has scurvy. “But I’m on this great diet,” she explains, which excludes Vitamin C.)
But there’s altogether too much moralising this time round, mostly about whether House’s sense of empathy is regrowing alongside his leg muscles. If you strip away half of a simultaneously attractive and repulsive character, the risk is that there’ll be too little left to watch.
This dilemma is neatly encapsulated in an exchange between House and an assistant, Dr Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison).
“I drink, you drink, we can do it at the same time, at the same table,” he says meanderingly. “Do you eat? We could do that, too.”
When she turns him down, he retorts: “You’re full of crap. You have no interest in going out with me. Maybe you did when I couldn’t walk, when I was a sick puppy that you could nurture back to health. Now that I’m healthy, there’s nothing in it for you.”
Surely this “healthy” House has to be a gimmick. Towards the end of the episode there are signs of possible redemption (or, rather, a welcome fall from grace) when House is seen sneaking into Wilson’s office to write a prescription for his old addiction: Vicodin. There’s still hope for this grumpy old dog.
Another series rooted in sarcasm is the new legal drama Shark. Until Hollywood character actor James Woods took on the lead role of the ruthless Sebastian “Shark” Stark, it was given only a slim chance of making it to air.
A veritable Gordon Gekko of the courtroom, Stark is a former top-flight defence attorney who was too successful – one client, found not guilty of attempted murder, went on to finish the job. “Winning is the only thing that matters,” he expounds to his idealistically naive assistants. “Justice is God’s problem.”
And: “I am great. And, yes, I am humble.”
Woods hasn’t been the only big name to be reeled in for Shark. Spike Lee directed the pilot, although apart from the snide threat from an opposing attorney that “I’m going to beat you like an African drum”, there’s no hint that America’s foremost black director is at the helm.
The pilot laid down the ground rules. Stark’s “cutthroat manifesto” compared legal battles to war, painted the truth as relative and set aside personal opinions (“there are only 12 that matter”).
There’s even the required prickly relationship between Stark and his no-nonsense boss Jessica Devlin (blonde bombshell Jeri Ryan). With the amount of collagen invested in Ryan, the scriptwriters must be banking on putting some fire into their icy relationship as the series progresses.
And progress it must. For although the courtroom scenes are polished, other aspects of Stark’s life need fleshing out. He has a daughter, Julie (Danielle Panabaker), who for some reason has opted to live with her distant father in Los Angeles rather than flee to New York with her supportive mother.
“Do you know what a 16-year-old wants?” her mother asks Stark. “She wants a Porsche and a date with Prince William.” But instead of the expected display of hedonism, Julie provides a cloying mirror to reflect Stark’s disconnection from humanity. “I never fit into your life,” she says. “Now I can stop trying.”
With any luck, the lessons of The Sopranos have been taken on board. In that series Meadow is an actual character and much more fun than a simple moral cipher.
This jury’s still out.
Diana Wichtel returns next week.
