Eight years ago, when I was in the middle of high school and
generally too busy proto-texting through AIM to watch much television, my
father suggested that I join the family to watch a new show that was debuting
on the Fox network. Even then I was generally in the habit of taking my
father’s advice, but I wasn’t especially impressed by his description of a
medical procedural with an unlikeable protagonist based on the literary
detective Sherlock Holmes (this was 2004, before I had read any Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle and Robert Downey Jr. was still recovering from his stint on “Ally
McBeal”). However, after watching House, M.D.’s pilot, “Everybody
Lies,” little doubt remained for me, and eight years later, I sat down with my
parents to watch the show’s conclusion, “Everybody Dies.”It would be arrogant to say that House M.D. changed the face of the one-hour drama, and probably inaccurate besides. But with nearly 28 million likes on its Facebook page and at least a few years as a household name, the show permeated the television culture of the 2000s. It indirectly spawned a number of short-lived “misanthropic savant” programs (“Lie to Me,” “Canterbury’s Law,” “Outlaw,” just to name a few [“Canterbury’s Law, by the way, is a little-known but very tragic entry on the list of quality shows murdered in their infancy by Fox executives]) that tried to capitalize on the success of House’s model. Instead, its only real rival was Grey’s Anatomy, with which I have only a passing familiarity but it has been my assumption that it is inherently separate enough from the House concept to allow the shows to peacefully (and successfully) coexist. Debuting in a period where sitcoms were in a post-Seinfeld/Raymond gray zone prior to the Charlie Sheen and Tim Allen resurrections, House had an ideal climate for maturing audiences (read: me) looking for something heavier, more poignant, but also wildly entertaining and really lovable in some surprising ways. Few protagonists have ever been so technically unlikeable but practically popular. We shouldn’t be on the side of House (Hugh Laurie), who runs his team through manipulation and bullying and treats his friends like pawns on a game board; audiences should instead be attracted to the plight of Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), the administrator who controls and contains him, or Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), his thrice-divorced best friend, or his various subordinates (brilliant in their own right but casually outshone by House himself), but we gravitate towards House anyway.
The series, like most, was not without its weak moments.
After the third season, the staff made the healthy but also risky
decision to shake up the cast list somewhat, relegating some of House’s
diagnostic team to guest roles and introducing new characters and nemeses for
House. Many viewers were also frustrated by the fourth and fifth season
interest in House’s drug abuse, culminating in a series of hallucinations that
landed him in a mental institution and indirectly resulted in the death of a
secondary character. I contend that these were some of the show’s most
powerful episodes and they grated on the audience because they admitted the
possibility that House was merely human, subject to addiction and illness and- worst
of all- fallibility. No one likes to watch their heroes fall, and
for that reason I imagine the show lost a sizeable chunk of viewers during that
story arc.
Despite
holding respectable Monday and Tuesday primetime slots for most of its run, the
show did slip from prominence in its last few seasons, especially after the
unexpected departure of Lisa Edelstein (Dr. Cuddy) from the cast at the end of
season seven. Audiences began to identify the episodic plots as
predictable and cyclic; “mystery of the week” episodes no longer surprised them
with exploding eyeballs or sensory aphasia. Every House drinking
game includes the rule “whenever someone has a seizure” and usually also “when
House has his epiphany of the week,” because each episode can be expected to
include these elements. Patient is admitted, House dismisses patient’s
case as trivial, patient gets worse (usually through some startlingly graphic
shower of bodily fluids), House debates with his team, patient nears death’s
door, House has epiphany during unrelated activity, and patient is magically
cured with a single syringe or by eating an orange or something. The show
does tend to follow this pattern, but the same is true of any procedural show,
medical or otherwise. The source of the drama is not the mystery itself,
but the way the characters interact while approaching it, skirting it, and
solving it (or failing to). And House has always had rich characters and
controversial themes to back up its illness d’jour. An example (there are
many, but only so much attention span, so I will limit myself): one case in the
third season, “Que
Será Será,” dealt with a morbidly obese patient (something
in the neighborhood of five hundred pounds, I believe) whose illness was always
attributed to his obesity. Through that story, the episode addressed
labels (and how they can be rejected), the widespread but unfounded biases that
still exist in our society, and even the ignorance of professionals.
The ultimate episode, for which this review is titled, mirrored the
pilot rather less than I had hoped, sharing little more than a play on words in
the titles (“Everybody Lies” and “Everybody Dies”). There was no poignant
reprise of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and more importantly, no guest
appearance by Lisa Edelstein (Dr. Cuddy) (although many other minor characters
return). The episode was, as advertised, an introspective look into
House’s mind through a series of apparitional encounters with people from his
past. I’m trying to limit the spoilers of the final season, but fans know
that a prominent character has only a handful of months to live, and this
inevitability has challenged House immensely, perhaps beyond anything his
psyche has yet endured. The actual action of the plot is relatively brief
and deals with a burning building that House may or may not escape from, but
the bulk of the episode’s time is spent inside House’s head, showing us debates
with various facets of his psyche. It was a fitting end for the series,
in part because it went a long way to resolving House’s character internally
and externally, but also because it resisted the temptation to do something
huge and overly dramatic (i.e. there was no terrorist bombing of the hospital,
no vehicular chase scenes, no mass die-off of characters, etc.). The tone
of the episode was simple, and even subdued at times. Its subtlety was
its strength, and the episode was just as enjoyable and engrossing as the
show’s emotionally-charged deathbed confessions and unforgettable “zombie episode”
(Season 7, “Bombshells”).
For the first time in my adult life, there will be no more House,
but it may be for the best. Though it did lose some steam in recent
years, the show did not become a shell of its former self, as many shows do
prior to their eventual cancellation. Despite an obviously talented
writing staff, there are only so many stories that can be told about one group
of characters in one particular setting, and many of the show’s characters
already outgrew that setting (Cuddy, Cameron, Thirteen, and in the final
episode, House). It was an elegant end and a graceful one, and I am
pleased that the show was neither cancelled prematurely (insert pointed glare
at Fox executives) nor was it dragged out beyond its natural life. It is
a show, a story really, that will go on my shelf next to Firefly to one
day be shared with my children, and always be shared with my friends. I
will miss House, but also remember it fondly, as it rightly deserves.
I would even go so far as it say I learned from it, even if it was
something I already knew, something simple… everybody lies. And everybody
dies. But it’s rarely lupus.
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