'House': What goes on inside that good doctor's head?

Now that’s a bit more like it.

After limping through its first two post-writers' strike episodes like its title character deprived of Vicodin, “House” seems to be pulling it together for a two-part season finale, the first half of which aired last night. According to legend, this was supposed to be the post-Super Bowl episode until the writers' strike derailed it. Titled "House's Head," it takes us back to where the show works best -- watching the psycho-brilliant doctor's mind at work. It also starts in a strip club, so you know it's going to be one of those "artsy" episodes.

Too dazed and confused to even enjoy the lap dance in progress, Dr. House (Hugh Laurie) quickly realizes that no, he’s not drunk, he’s concussed. He has, in fact, stumbled into the club after being in a horrendous bus accident, and the only thing he can remember, of course, is that someone on the bus “is going to die.”

Apparently, he noticed some symptomatic tell just before the crash and is now obsessed with figuring out what, and who, it was. Patients are interrogated, theories are debated, extreme measures are taken (House allows himself to be hypnotized, then immerses himself in an isolation tank and finally takes dementia-fighting memory drugs), all of which allows us to poke around in House’s subconscious -- which is a pretty interesting place as we know from previous season finales, like the near-death experience he had after he got shot at the end of Season 2. We see in his mind Dr. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), Dr. Chase (Jesse Spencer) and even Amber (Anne Dudek), which makes Wilson a little suspicious -- does House have feelings for his girlfriend? But it’s the scene in which Dr. Cuddy pole dances in a school girl’s uniform that in three minutes earns back the price of Tivo -- Lisa Edelstein, who knew?

The bus driver seems to be the mysterious Patient X; after much diagnostic huffing and puffing, House saves him from an air bubble in his chest by convincing Thirteen to violate all hospital protocol, including Cuddy’s direct orders, and to stab him in the heart with a big needle. Of course it works. Why do they even protest at this point?

Meanwhile, House continues to experience symptoms of his own, including a recurring hallucination of a sultry young woman, who puts one in mind of Jessica Lange’s death angel in “All That Jazz.” In fact, there’s a whole “All That Jazz” thing going on with the entire episode (though mercifully no musical numbers), with House pulling a Bob Fosse by working himself to death. (Me, I’d pay cash to see Hugh Laurie smoke a cigarette in the shower with as much desperate grace as the late great Roy Scheider). So determined to figure out what he has forgotten, House is willing to almost literally turn out the contents of his mind to figure out who that darn woman is and why she keeps asking him “What is my necklace made of?”

Well, it’s amber of course, and as soon as he realizes this, it all comes rushing back: Amber was on the bus with him, her leg impaled by a metal bar and though he managed to put a tourniquet on her, she is apparently the Jane Doe No. 1, the one at the other hospital with kidney damage, the one who is dying.

Oh poor Wilson, oh poor Amber, oh poor House, who really isn’t looking very well at all. When Ben Vereen shows up, or Foreman (Omar Epps) starts counting down the five stages of death, we’ll start to worry.  Meanwhile, it’s nice to have the old “House” back, though you do have to wonder: How many near-death experiences can one fairly sedentary doctor have? 

-- Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) never hedges his bets. It's part of his charm, and now we see why. Because if you hedge your bets, if you try to keep several possibilities in active play, you wind up with a television show that has what are essentially two separate casts, neither of which has enough to do.

For seven full days there was hope that last week's episode of "House," the first since the writers strike maimed the TV season, was terrible because everyone was a little rusty, a little out of sync. And last night's episode was better, but not much. At least not enough "much."

The problem, it would seem, is systemic -- neurological rather than viral, in the show's parlance (I think.) The brilliance of last season's decision to do away with the old consulting team in favor of a reality show-like competition for a new team left us with a numerical challenge. The old team came back, albeit not as diagnosticians, which means we have Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), Chase (Jesse Spencer) and Foreman (Omar Epps) jockeying for screen time with the new team -- Kutner (Kal Penn), Thirteen (Olivia Wilde) and Taub (Peter Jacobson). (None of whom have bios on the show's website; make of this what you will.) Add to that standing costars -- Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) and Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), oh and Wilson's new girlfriend Amber (Anne Dudek) -- and you have way too many people for a show that insists its main character be the center of each story line, delivering most of the best lines in almost every scene. 

All of which may explain why last night's episode, which should have been a jim-dandy -- House kidnaps the star of his favorite medical soap because he has noticed "symptoms" in the actor's delivery of his lines while Cuddy is in the middle of an unexpected accreditation review -- fell completely flat. And not because we know that, even by soap opera standards, Princeton Plainsboro should have lost its accreditation years ago, while House and his team languished in a low-risk security facility somewhere.

No, it fell flat because there was no narrative tension -- no matter how many times poor old Lisa Edelstein was forced to say "my job is on the line," we knew the hospital would not close and House would not be fired. There was also no personal tension because none of the characters has had time to create traction with the audience. Because there are too many characters! This is not "ER," people, this is not "Grey's Anatomy," this is not a serial drama with criss-crossing narratives in which every character gets his or her moment in the sun. This is "House," a procedural in which, thus far, the only character allowed any sort of development is House.

Which has worked just fine, awards all around, the No. 1 scripted drama (for a while anyway), magazine covers galore. But those shows only work when you have a small cohesive core surrounding the star; cast-wise, "House" is now an ensemble. With every one standing around watching Hugh Laurie do his thing (which can't be all that fun for Laurie, even with the cane-twirling thing.) Even the possibly interesting side plot about Wilson and Amber is being derailed into vaudeville by House's (read: the writers') insistence that he is at the root of it (that and the fact that without the tempering characteristic of doctorhood, Amber is, face it, just mean.)

So last night was just a panoply of weird tests and accidental successes, with the answer coming to House, as it always does, when he's just happens to notice that gum on the floor or the kid's stuffed bear or whatever. There was no snappy dialogue, no rich personal interplay, no attempt to use House's various quirks to reveal anything much. Because, apparently, the writers were too busy making sure everyone on the payroll had at least two lines.

It's not easy being "House," but then no one ever said it would be. Decisions must be made -- is this an ensemble drama or a lead-driven procedural. Make your choice. Begin writing accordingly. Because I for one miss my favorite show. And it's almost summer as it is.

--Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

Absence can, I'm told, make the heart grow fonder. But it can also make you wonder just what exactly you were so fond of in the first place.

In the wake of the writers strike, we've been waiting for months for our favorite shows to return to the air with new episodes.  Now here they are, all our old favorites, crowding up our TiVos with their dear familiar names. And yet something is missing. The first post-strike episodes of shows like "30 Rock" and "The Office" seemed to fall flat; "The Big Bang Theory," which seemed to be gaining some street cred, was just ridiculous; "Grey's" was clever but lacked emotional umph and then, last night, "House" returned with what can only be called the worst episode in its history.

Brevity is mercy in the case of last night's "House" so here's a quick recap: the main case is of a man so happy that Dr. House (Hugh Laurie) decides it is the symptom of something terrible; his new team, through plot twists that I cannot bring myself to explain, "discover" that House has syphilis; House and Amber (Anne Dudek) divide up visiting rights with Dr. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) in such a patronizing manner that I spent the entire episode wondering why Leonard did not threaten to quit if his character were not returned to adulthood, much less manhood. It was all so patently ridiculous, it felt almost like a parody. Except it wasn't funny. And for "House," not funny is a problem. 

Indeed, if this had been the premiere of a new show called "House," I would not be tuning in for the second episode.

At least that is what I was thinking when I crawled sulkily into bed last night. But then I wondered if maybe this wasn't more of a relationship problem than an industry issue. Separation can raise expectations, blur reality, dampen the mysterious chemistry that creates attraction. Watching these early episodes is a bit like seeing your college lover after summer has separated you -- yes, you're happy to be in his/her arms again, but man, did he always laugh that loudly? Was her stutter always that affected? The first embrace after months away is always a bit awkward, no matter what the train station scene in "Reds" has led us to believe.

So maybe television and its audience have just lost their groove. The question becomes, then: Is it permanent?  "It's just been too long," said one viewer with a shrug, explaining that she just didn't feel the same way about "my show" any more. "I guess I'll give it another chance but, I don't know...."

Sad and poignant words. If nothing else, we are learning the emotional value of the season finale. Because we are used to taking a break from our favorite shows, for weeks and months (or in the case of "The Sopranos" and "Battlestar Gallactica," years), but usually we get a good cliffhanger or very special episode to provide both closure and a little something to think about. But this time it was all so sudden, so outside our control -- one minute they were there, trustworthy, reliable -- the next they were not. Instead the curtain was ripped aside and we saw scruffy writers in baseball caps, actors with (gasp) no makeup doing time on picket lines and YouTube. Turns out television is just a business after all, with its creators whining about salaries and Bennie's just like we do at our places of employment.

So we can be forgiven for needing a little extra courtship, a little reassurance before we re-commit. And maybe it's the same with the writers. The alchemy of a writers room is a strange and fragile thing, which is why reporters and other outsiders are rarely allowed in. (That, and all the profanity.) It must be hard to rekindle that, hard for the writers, and the actors, to get back up to speed and recapture the magic.

Though this is no excuse for turning Wilson into a snickering man-child.

And subsequent episodes of "30 Rock" and "The Office" felt better, more like themselves, the shows we've known and loved. So maybe, as with any important relationship, we just need to give it time. As for "House," well, now that House has, basically, two diagnostic teams, maybe the writers should figure out what he, and they, are going to do with them. Or give Wilson and Amber a relationship that is recognizable as human. Or make Dr. Caddy (Lisa Elston) a real person again. Or bring back a romantic foil for House. But they're going to have to do something. And fast. Because the one thing the writers strike taught is that we may miss our shows when they're gone, but life does go on without them.

--Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

It was Christmas in January at ye olde Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Not only did we get the first new episode of "House" in weeks, we got one set in December, a time warp courtesy of the writers strike. Fox wisely squirreled away three new eps in the hopes of a week-long ratings blowout, peaking this Sunday when a very special episode of "House" will follow the Super Bowl.

Watching last night, one couldn't help but wonder if this was one of the storylines that was rushed through the writing room in those final pre-strike days. Though heaven knows any new "House" is more than welcome, this one, titled "It's a Wonderful Lie,"  lacked a certain richness, a depth of dialogue, perhaps, than the show normally delivers. With his new four-person team in place -- Foreman, Taub, Kutner and Thirteen -- House is faced with a woman whose hands have inexplicably become paralyzed. Then she goes blind. Convinced, as usual, that the woman is lying about something, House cross-examines her young daughter. While asking questions I'm pretty sure could get him arrested, he finds himself up against the creature he long considered imaginary: a perfectly honest person. What he sees gives even the unflinchable doc pause.

The case seems to turn the show's own conventions upside down, yet it doesn't quite. The mother, played by Janel Moloney, (and isn't it nice to see her again?) lost her own mom to breast cancer that was never mentioned until it was too late, so she swore she would never lie to her own daughter. But of course she has, and the big reveal is not only obvious, it doesn't really go anywhere. Indeed, during the climactic scene, after House performs his "Christmas miracle," no one seems to know quite what to say. Literally. Which left me wondering if perhaps the WGA's call for "pencils down" had come at an extremely bad time.

Or maybe I just missed the point. Heaven knows I've certainly missed "House." And while the B-plot of the newbies participating in a Secret Santa gift exchange in which House has rigged the outcome to keep the competition among them roiling was a bit weak, Dr. Wilson is getting cheekier by the day. "Are we going somewhere?" House asks when his friend strides away down the hall. "No," Wilson answers, "I just know it hurts you." How I love Robert Sean Leonard.

A very fun little narrative with a patient who House "diagnoses" as a prostitute with a "pony show" winds up with a Christmas pageant -- the patient's allergic reaction to a donkey is the result of her role as the blessed virgin. It's always nice to end a Christmas episode with a nativity scene, not to mention the miraculous sight of House in church. A tad strange in January, but hey, we'll take what we can get. Now, on to the Super Bowl.

-- Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

And then there were none. Well, two. Okay, actually three. The point is, the Great Race to reconfigure the diagnostics team on "House" is over and the winners are Dr. Kutner (Kal Penn), Dr. Straub (Peter Jacobson) and the mysterious Thirteen (Olivia Penn). How precisely the writers are going to keep them all busy while still throwing the old team enough work is a mystery, but one that will keep Avid Viewers like me tuned in.

In last night's episode, Dr. Lisa Cuddy finally drew herself to full administrative height and told House (Hugh Laurie) to pick two candidates and let the remaining two go. So when a punk rock musician with many addictions and few redeeming virtues pulls the typical "House" collapse -- sudden bout of coughing turns into bloody spew -- the case becomes make-or-break.

Now, the competition wasn't quite as intense as it seems, at least from the living room view. Kal Penn is a movie star, most recently seen in "The Namesake." So clearly he was staying. Jacobson has an IMDB list as long as your arm, and though some of the entries are along the lines of "man with the telephone," he was just seen in "Transformers" and did a very funny turn as the hateful ex-husband in "The Starter Wife." So smart money on him. The choice came down to the two women: the steely Amber (Anne Dudek) and the softer Thirteen (Olivia Penn). Both actors have done good work -- Dudek in high-profile shows like "Mad Men" and "Big Love," Penn in the unfortunate "Black Donnelly's" and, more successfully, "The O.C." But really there was no choice. Amber was too rough even for House, and romantic tension has been in short supply for a while, so the winner was Thirteen.

Yes, yes, there was a lot of cool medicine performed, tests and tubes and seizures, etc., and Drs. Wilson and Formen weighed in on how ridiculous House was to be caught up in his little games, but all of that was so much white noise as we waited to see why he would finally fire Amber and how he was going to keep three instead of two.

Amber revealed her near-pathological fear of losing anything, especially control, by her hatred of the druggie patient, and House finally had to concede that winning wasn't everything if fear of losing kept you hostage. Then he hired the two guys, knowing that that would never fly. Which it didn't; Cuddy told him to hire Thirteen (though why she didn't make him sacrifice one of the men is essentially what separates television from the reality of our lives).

And so the original team is nicely mirrored, two guys and a girl, though with Foreman, it's three guys and a girl. But hey, Amber's the sort who might just figure out a way to return.

Meanwhile, we can all get back to business: figuring out how to give all the old cast members a bit more screen time. I mean, they can't have colored Jennifer Morrison's hair for nothing, right?

-- Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

I just have to say it out loud: "House" just keeps getting better and better. What at first seemed like a pretty silly idea -- to passive-aggressively keep from hiring a new team, House has a group of doctors competing like they're in a reality show -- has turned out to be brilliant. Not only do we get all sorts of great new characters, we also get to see House at his best, trying to figure out, and neutralize, each one. Gone are all the boring concerns about his Vicodin addiction, gone is the irritating model of House declaiming and everyone else denying (even though he's always right), gone is the increasingly dull and unbelievable tension between him and Cuddy. (As subordinate/boss, that is. The sexual tension, one hopes, is still in there somewhere.) Cuddy is done trying to squelch him; now she is just shooting for managed chaos. Which is so much more fun because it revolves more around the medicine and less around all the personal pathos of the staff.

      Last night's case was a screenwriter's dream. A man comes in with no memory but a very strange disorder -- Giovanni's Mirror Syndrome (where do they come up with these things?), which causes him to unconsciously mimic those around them. So all of the characters were subjected to a vision of their own selves, and we got to watch them react to it. How great a dramatic idea is that? Although it must be conceded that while Patient X managed to delve into the psyches of all the contestants, he stayed on the surface when mirroring House, revealing only his lust for doctor 13 and admiration for Cuddy's breasts. Too bad; it would have been interesting to get a peep into House's interior, and even more interesting to see what he thought of the image.

But the quibble is so minor, I'm ashamed to have made it. This season of "House" should be handed out as Christmas gifts to every writers' room in America to serve as a template for really shaking up a show in danger of bogging down in its own conceit. Mercifully, House didn't kick anyone off the island last night; the loss of any of the new characters will lead only to heartbreak for me. I miss the old guy already and don't care that he wasn't a doctor. Indeed, I was just as uneasy when Cuddy announced she had hired Foreman back. I love Omar Epps, but I hope this doesn't mean a return to the old "House." As good as it was, the new "House" is better. 

(Photo courtesy Fox)

So here's a question: What exactly constitutes a fireable offense at Princeton Plainsboro?  Well, now we can take "sticking a knife in an electrical outlet in order to have a near-death experience" off the list. Because that's what Dr. Gregory House did on last night's episode of "House," in a weird and obsessive attempt to prove there is no afterlife. (This from a man who underwent semi-successful medical treatment that came to him in a dream after being shot two seasons ago.) 

Also, "allowing a patient to die through negligence" can be struck, since he had one of the 10 applicants competing to be on his team dose a young man in a less-than-rigorous way -- anyone who's ever been in hospital knows that the nurses deliver the meds and stand there like grim death until they see you take it.  Anyone but this young doctor apparently.

House felt bad about the second offense, if not the first, though the only consequence of either was a gentle remonstration from Dr. Cuddy, who, we are hoping, has other things on her mind that will be resolved soon.  Otherwise, House might just have to burn the hospital down to get a little decent banter.

Every week, "House" tests the ascendancy of drama over common sense, and every week, at least thus far, drama wins.  The show's writers pepper the script with a barrage of symptoms, conditions, tests and treatments, creating a narcotic rue of medicine that, once ingested, allows the Avid Viewer to overlook the most ridiculous things -- all those same-day MRIs, for instance, or Dr. Wilson's strange lack of patients.  The knife in the electric socket may have been pushing it -- I'm pretty sure any sort of suicide attempt requires a visit to the psych ward.  At least that's what happens on "ER."

Fortunately, the rest of the show was so good that even exploratory electrocution gets a pass. House's need to see if there is an afterlife revealed a hope not usually seen in his crusty, cynical character, as did the fact that he paged the least likeable candidate to revive him -- House may have met his match in the cutthroat pixie (now upgraded to bitch).  She is just as cold and calculating as he is, and that would be interesting.

The 10 doctors, well, nine and one impostor, left vying for the team are becoming such good characters that the sight of House, bunsen burners ablaze, about to vote a bunch of them off the island struck fear into the viewers' hearts.  It seems clear the twins are going to go, also the boring white guy with no back story, leaving the plastic surgeon, the cutthroat bitch, the lovely doctor who flubbed the medication, the old guy, the Mormon and the mouthy young man played by Kai Penn who we love so much.  Wait, that's six, and the website says five will remain.  I hope the old guy goes because I really love the plastic surgeon and the old guy isn't even a doctor.

Not that a detail like that really matters at ol' Princeton Plainsboro.

-- Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

At first glance, it would seem that the creators of “House” are trying to get a toehold in the reality TV audience. On this season's second episode of the medical drama, the canny and conniving Dr. House capitulates to the general demand that he create a new diagnostics team by assembling all the likely applicants, 40 to be precise, and pitting them against each other.

Their first case is, of course, extra-special difficult: An Air Force officer wants to know why she is “hearing colors,” but she doesn’t want the tests to be on the books because that would squash her chance to work for NASA. She comes to House, as so many of us do, because he breaks the rules.

Off the 40, arbitrarily cut down to 30, winsome young people go on assorted House-directed missions, from searching the officer’s home to washing House’s car. It quickly becomes apparent that “House” is not just tapping into the success of reality TV, it’s taking a page out of “Grey’s Anatomy.” These docs may not be interns, but they are just as ripe for competitive plots and steamy romance, if not spin-offs, as any of the folks at Seattle Grace.

The season premiere of “House” opened big — with a guy talking to his girlfriend on the cellphone just as the building she’s in collapses right before his very eyes. But for some of us, the opening credits were a much bigger source of tension. So it is with great pleasure that I can report that while last season ended with Drs. Foreman (Omar Epps), Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) and Chase (Jesse Spencer) being fired, there they are cycling through the opening credits and scuttling along House’s peripheral vision like so many ghosts of cases past.

House (Hugh Laurie, in case you have forgotten, which really isn’t possible since he has been on the cover of every magazine in America lately), meanwhile, is determined that he will not hire another team. He won’t, He Won’t, HE WON’T, not if he has to hold his breath ’til he turns blue or use a passing janitor as a sounding board. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) reacts the way he always does, by fondly psychoanalyzing House. (Really, either Wilson is in the wrong profession or he’s in lurve — and wouldn’t that be a great very special episode?) He diagnoses abandonment issues — House cared about his people, they left, so House will never put himself in that position again. Sniff.

It’s so hard for a medical drama to construct the cliff-hanger that has become the season finale standard. You can’t just leave some poor patient hovering between life and death for the entire summer -- so the writers must turn to the personal lives of their characters to leave viewers in the necessary suspense. On “House,” however, personal lives are in short supply, so somehow staffing issues must be made fascinating.

On Tuesday night’s season finale, the strange and tentative romance between Drs. Cameron and Chase was dutifully given the possibility of a last-minute reprieve but mostly the show concentrated on the state of the team.

Oh sure, there was a medical case—a woman and her husband braved the stormy seas from Cuba to seek House’s expertise, which he eventually provided—but many more people were obsessed with Foreman. Would he really go? Could House get him to stay? Would House admit he cared either way?

Isn't it nice when your favorite show actually airs for weeks on a regular basis with no "special events," illness-as-metaphor motifs or other sweeps week tinkerings? Four great "Houses" in a row prove how strong the show is when left to its basics -- a medical mystery conceit that is dominated by Hugh Laurie's provocative character, whose actions illuminate the various strengths and flaws of his colleagues.

Last night we got the whole shebang -- child in peril, possible parental abuse, cool neuron graphics and a whole lot of fun personal subplots for the rest of the cast. A little girl collapses at day care, with grown-up symptoms -- heart problems, ovarian cysts, etc. Meanwhile, Drs. Chase and Cameron (Jesse Spencer and Jennifer Morrison, respectively) snip and snarl at each other as their sex-only relationship hits the skids after Chase says he wants more. (While it's been fun watching Cameron play the horn dog -- especially since the two actors recently announced their engagement -- it was rather out of character, but hey, we all have those days.)

Hugh Laurie is a fine and versatile actor and there are many things I would like to see him do — Shakespeare, say, or Alan Ayckbourn. Dance with the Stars. What I really truly don't want to see him do is sit on the can and give himself a catheter. And yet that is an image that, thanks to last night's "House," I and several million other Americans now share.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that writer's meeting. Or when the pages first went out to the cast. The state of House's health, or addiction, or psychosis, is generally the secondary plot of most episodes, so the fact that he was in a terrible shape because he could not relieve himself seemed, at first, to be just one more subtle warning against Vicodin abuse: Kids, don't try this at home or you won't be able to pee.

Being a "House" fan is a bit like being friends with an addict. You have to put up with ridiculous behavior: a doctor who doesn't ever wear a surgical mask, mile-long tapeworms, a season-ending shooting that is never mentioned again. There are also the inexplicable disappearances — whenever "American Idol" needs a little extra leg-room, "House" goes missing — and all those lies — everyone who thought "House" really had brain cancer this week please stand on their heads.

But you remain an Avid Viewer for the same reason many people hang out with drunks and addicts: because, on top of their game, they are more fun than anyone you know.

This week's "House" will no doubt keep many of us co-dependents hooked for months. When a brain-damaged savant piano player loses the use of a hand, House, played by Hugh Laurie, is not only given license to figure out "where the music comes from," but also to decide what is more important: a small slice of real genius or a whole, but ordinary, life.

Oh, these wacky medical shows. They all say they have actual doctors as consultants but don't you think it's more like reps from Ripley's Believe It or Not? Because of its set-up — crack diagnostics team succeeds where everyone else fails —"House" has, by necessity, some of the wildest cases of the lot. Nun allergic to the copper of her forgotten IUD? Check. Guy with nails stuck all over his skull? Check. Child of dwarf who is not really a dwarf but a victim of an off-kilter pituitary? Check, check.

Even by those standards, last night's episode was a pip — girl with a condition I don't even know how to spell (OK, I checked the website, it's CIPA, which stands for congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis). Yes, "Grey's Anatomy" already used this conceit but "House" upped it with a tapeworm. As House would say, what are the odds? The tapeworm allowed a brief and disturbing homage to the John Hurt death scene in "Alien," with House extracting said tapeworm as girl, who, of course, did not require anesthesia, looked on. (I just have to ask, is House so magical he doesn't have to scrub before surgery? Last episode, he stuck his hand in some kid's bowels, without gloves, having just manually maneuvered himself into the operating room in a wheelchair. Could all these sneaky diseases be just post-op infections?)

In the three weeks between new episodes of "House," Hugh Laurie won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award for his portrayal of sardonic drug addict and master of diagnostic detection Gregory House. And on Tuesday's episode, he certainly earned both the hard way.

Fox's "American Idol" gave this episode its highest ratings ever, and it's too bad this was their introduction since it was the most un-"Housian" "House" to date. (You could practically see the network note: "Never mind that it's a hit; let's shake up the format.") Absent was the signature opening vignette of someone having a medical crisis; gone were the cool graphics of synapses firing/microbes invading/muscles detaching that give the viewer a corpuscle's-eye view; lacking was the diagnostic banter and the endless MRIs that have held this single-personality-driven show together. It was sort of like watching "MASH" without the helicopters. Or the jokes.

Suffering from a full 'House'

Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) never hedges his bets. It's part of his charm, and now we see why. Because if you hedge your bets, if you try to keep several possibilities in active play, you wind up with a television show that has what are essentially two separate casts, neither of which has enough to do.

For seven full days there was hope that last week's episode of "House," the first since the writers strike maimed the TV season, was terrible because everyone was a little rusty, a little out of sync. And last night's episode was better, but not much. At least not enough "much."

The problem, it would seem, is systemic -- neurological rather than viral, in the show's parlance (I think.) The brilliance of last season's decision to do away with the old consulting team in favor of a reality show-like competition for a new team left us with a numerical challenge. The old team came back, albeit not as diagnosticians, which means we have Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), Chase (Jesse Spencer) and Foreman (Omar Epps) jockeying for screen time with the new team -- Kutner (Kal Penn), Thirteen (Olivia Wilde) and Taub (Peter Jacobson). (None of whom have bios on the show's website; make of this what you will.) Add to that standing costars -- Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) and Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), oh and Wilson's new girlfriend Amber (Anne Dudek) -- and you have way too many people for a show that insists its main character be the center of each story line, delivering most of the best lines in almost every scene. 

All of which may explain why last night's episode, which should have been a jim-dandy -- House kidnaps the star of his favorite medical soap because he has noticed "symptoms" in the actor's delivery of his lines while Cuddy is in the middle of an unexpected accreditation review -- fell completely flat. And not because we know that, even by soap opera standards, Princeton Plainsboro should have lost its accreditation years ago, while House and his team languished in a low-risk security facility somewhere.

No, it fell flat because there was no narrative tension -- no matter how many times poor old Lisa Edelstein was forced to say "my job is on the line," we knew the hospital would not close and House would not be fired. There was also no personal tension because none of the characters has had time to create traction with the audience. Because there are too many characters! This is not "ER," people, this is not "Grey's Anatomy," this is not a serial drama with criss-crossing narratives in which every character gets his or her moment in the sun. This is "House," a procedural in which, thus far, the only character allowed any sort of development is House.

Which has worked just fine, awards all around, the No. 1 scripted drama (for a while anyway), magazine covers galore. But those shows only work when you have a small cohesive core surrounding the star; cast-wise, "House" is now an ensemble. With every one standing around watching Hugh Laurie do his thing (which can't be all that fun for Laurie, even with the cane-twirling thing.) Even the possibly interesting side plot about Wilson and Amber is being derailed into vaudeville by House's (read: the writers') insistence that he is at the root of it (that and the fact that without the tempering characteristic of doctorhood, Amber is, face it, just mean.)

So last night was just a panoply of weird tests and accidental successes, with the answer coming to House, as it always does, when he's just happens to notice that gum on the floor or the kid's stuffed bear or whatever. There was no snappy dialogue, no rich personal interplay, no attempt to use House's various quirks to reveal anything much. Because, apparently, the writers were too busy making sure everyone on the payroll had at least two lines.

It's not easy being "House," but then no one ever said it would be. Decisions must be made -- is this an ensemble drama or a lead-driven procedural. Make your choice. Begin writing accordingly. Because I for one miss my favorite show. And it's almost summer as it is.

--Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

Absence can, I'm told, make the heart grow fonder. But it can also make you wonder just what exactly you were so fond of in the first place.

In the wake of the writers strike, we've been waiting for months for our favorite shows to return to the air with new episodes.  Now here they are, all our old favorites, crowding up our TiVos with their dear familiar names. And yet something is missing. The first post-strike episodes of shows like "30 Rock" and "The Office" seemed to fall flat; "The Big Bang Theory," which seemed to be gaining some street cred, was just ridiculous; "Grey's" was clever but lacked emotional umph and then, last night, "House" returned with what can only be called the worst episode in its history.

Brevity is mercy in the case of last night's "House" so here's a quick recap: the main case is of a man so happy that Dr. House (Hugh Laurie) decides it is the symptom of something terrible; his new team, through plot twists that I cannot bring myself to explain, "discover" that House has syphilis; House and Amber (Anne Dudek) divide up visiting rights with Dr. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) in such a patronizing manner that I spent the entire episode wondering why Leonard did not threaten to quit if his character were not returned to adulthood, much less manhood. It was all so patently ridiculous, it felt almost like a parody. Except it wasn't funny. And for "House," not funny is a problem. 

Indeed, if this had been the premiere of a new show called "House," I would not be tuning in for the second episode.

At least that is what I was thinking when I crawled sulkily into bed last night. But then I wondered if maybe this wasn't more of a relationship problem than an industry issue. Separation can raise expectations, blur reality, dampen the mysterious chemistry that creates attraction. Watching these early episodes is a bit like seeing your college lover after summer has separated you -- yes, you're happy to be in his/her arms again, but man, did he always laugh that loudly? Was her stutter always that affected? The first embrace after months away is always a bit awkward, no matter what the train station scene in "Reds" has led us to believe.

So maybe television and its audience have just lost their groove. The question becomes, then: Is it permanent?  "It's just been too long," said one viewer with a shrug, explaining that she just didn't feel the same way about "my show" any more. "I guess I'll give it another chance but, I don't know...."

Sad and poignant words. If nothing else, we are learning the emotional value of the season finale. Because we are used to taking a break from our favorite shows, for weeks and months (or in the case of "The Sopranos" and "Battlestar Gallactica," years), but usually we get a good cliffhanger or very special episode to provide both closure and a little something to think about. But this time it was all so sudden, so outside our control -- one minute they were there, trustworthy, reliable -- the next they were not. Instead the curtain was ripped aside and we saw scruffy writers in baseball caps, actors with (gasp) no makeup doing time on picket lines and YouTube. Turns out television is just a business after all, with its creators whining about salaries and Bennie's just like we do at our places of employment.

So we can be forgiven for needing a little extra courtship, a little reassurance before we re-commit. And maybe it's the same with the writers. The alchemy of a writers room is a strange and fragile thing, which is why reporters and other outsiders are rarely allowed in. (That, and all the profanity.) It must be hard to rekindle that, hard for the writers, and the actors, to get back up to speed and recapture the magic.

Though this is no excuse for turning Wilson into a snickering man-child.

And subsequent episodes of "30 Rock" and "The Office" felt better, more like themselves, the shows we've known and loved. So maybe, as with any important relationship, we just need to give it time. As for "House," well, now that House has, basically, two diagnostic teams, maybe the writers should figure out what he, and they, are going to do with them. Or give Wilson and Amber a relationship that is recognizable as human. Or make Dr. Caddy (Lisa Elston) a real person again. Or bring back a romantic foil for House. But they're going to have to do something. And fast. Because the one thing the writers strike taught is that we may miss our shows when they're gone, but life does go on without them.

--Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

It was Christmas in January at ye olde Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Not only did we get the first new episode of "House" in weeks, we got one set in December, a time warp courtesy of the writers strike. Fox wisely squirreled away three new eps in the hopes of a week-long ratings blowout, peaking this Sunday when a very special episode of "House" will follow the Super Bowl.

Watching last night, one couldn't help but wonder if this was one of the storylines that was rushed through the writing room in those final pre-strike days. Though heaven knows any new "House" is more than welcome, this one, titled "It's a Wonderful Lie,"  lacked a certain richness, a depth of dialogue, perhaps, than the show normally delivers. With his new four-person team in place -- Foreman, Taub, Kutner and Thirteen -- House is faced with a woman whose hands have inexplicably become paralyzed. Then she goes blind. Convinced, as usual, that the woman is lying about something, House cross-examines her young daughter. While asking questions I'm pretty sure could get him arrested, he finds himself up against the creature he long considered imaginary: a perfectly honest person. What he sees gives even the unflinchable doc pause.

The case seems to turn the show's own conventions upside down, yet it doesn't quite. The mother, played by Janel Moloney, (and isn't it nice to see her again?) lost her own mom to breast cancer that was never mentioned until it was too late, so she swore she would never lie to her own daughter. But of course she has, and the big reveal is not only obvious, it doesn't really go anywhere. Indeed, during the climactic scene, after House performs his "Christmas miracle," no one seems to know quite what to say. Literally. Which left me wondering if perhaps the WGA's call for "pencils down" had come at an extremely bad time.

Or maybe I just missed the point. Heaven knows I've certainly missed "House." And while the B-plot of the newbies participating in a Secret Santa gift exchange in which House has rigged the outcome to keep the competition among them roiling was a bit weak, Dr. Wilson is getting cheekier by the day. "Are we going somewhere?" House asks when his friend strides away down the hall. "No," Wilson answers, "I just know it hurts you." How I love Robert Sean Leonard.

A very fun little narrative with a patient who House "diagnoses" as a prostitute with a "pony show" winds up with a Christmas pageant -- the patient's allergic reaction to a donkey is the result of her role as the blessed virgin. It's always nice to end a Christmas episode with a nativity scene, not to mention the miraculous sight of House in church. A tad strange in January, but hey, we'll take what we can get. Now, on to the Super Bowl.

-- Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

And then there were none. Well, two. Okay, actually three. The point is, the Great Race to reconfigure the diagnostics team on "House" is over and the winners are Dr. Kutner (Kal Penn), Dr. Straub (Peter Jacobson) and the mysterious Thirteen (Olivia Penn). How precisely the writers are going to keep them all busy while still throwing the old team enough work is a mystery, but one that will keep Avid Viewers like me tuned in.

In last night's episode, Dr. Lisa Cuddy finally drew herself to full administrative height and told House (Hugh Laurie) to pick two candidates and let the remaining two go. So when a punk rock musician with many addictions and few redeeming virtues pulls the typical "House" collapse -- sudden bout of coughing turns into bloody spew -- the case becomes make-or-break.

Now, the competition wasn't quite as intense as it seems, at least from the living room view. Kal Penn is a movie star, most recently seen in "The Namesake." So clearly he was staying. Jacobson has an IMDB list as long as your arm, and though some of the entries are along the lines of "man with the telephone," he was just seen in "Transformers" and did a very funny turn as the hateful ex-husband in "The Starter Wife." So smart money on him. The choice came down to the two women: the steely Amber (Anne Dudek) and the softer Thirteen (Olivia Penn). Both actors have done good work -- Dudek in high-profile shows like "Mad Men" and "Big Love," Penn in the unfortunate "Black Donnelly's" and, more successfully, "The O.C." But really there was no choice. Amber was too rough even for House, and romantic tension has been in short supply for a while, so the winner was Thirteen.

Yes, yes, there was a lot of cool medicine performed, tests and tubes and seizures, etc., and Drs. Wilson and Formen weighed in on how ridiculous House was to be caught up in his little games, but all of that was so much white noise as we waited to see why he would finally fire Amber and how he was going to keep three instead of two.

Amber revealed her near-pathological fear of losing anything, especially control, by her hatred of the druggie patient, and House finally had to concede that winning wasn't everything if fear of losing kept you hostage. Then he hired the two guys, knowing that that would never fly. Which it didn't; Cuddy told him to hire Thirteen (though why she didn't make him sacrifice one of the men is essentially what separates television from the reality of our lives).

And so the original team is nicely mirrored, two guys and a girl, though with Foreman, it's three guys and a girl. But hey, Amber's the sort who might just figure out a way to return.

Meanwhile, we can all get back to business: figuring out how to give all the old cast members a bit more screen time. I mean, they can't have colored Jennifer Morrison's hair for nothing, right?

-- Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

I just have to say it out loud: "House" just keeps getting better and better. What at first seemed like a pretty silly idea -- to passive-aggressively keep from hiring a new team, House has a group of doctors competing like they're in a reality show -- has turned out to be brilliant. Not only do we get all sorts of great new characters, we also get to see House at his best, trying to figure out, and neutralize, each one. Gone are all the boring concerns about his Vicodin addiction, gone is the irritating model of House declaiming and everyone else denying (even though he's always right), gone is the increasingly dull and unbelievable tension between him and Cuddy. (As subordinate/boss, that is. The sexual tension, one hopes, is still in there somewhere.) Cuddy is done trying to squelch him; now she is just shooting for managed chaos. Which is so much more fun because it revolves more around the medicine and less around all the personal pathos of the staff.

      Last night's case was a screenwriter's dream. A man comes in with no memory but a very strange disorder -- Giovanni's Mirror Syndrome (where do they come up with these things?), which causes him to unconsciously mimic those around them. So all of the characters were subjected to a vision of their own selves, and we got to watch them react to it. How great a dramatic idea is that? Although it must be conceded that while Patient X managed to delve into the psyches of all the contestants, he stayed on the surface when mirroring House, revealing only his lust for doctor 13 and admiration for Cuddy's breasts. Too bad; it would have been interesting to get a peep into House's interior, and even more interesting to see what he thought of the image.

But the quibble is so minor, I'm ashamed to have made it. This season of "House" should be handed out as Christmas gifts to every writers' room in America to serve as a template for really shaking up a show in danger of bogging down in its own conceit. Mercifully, House didn't kick anyone off the island last night; the loss of any of the new characters will lead only to heartbreak for me. I miss the old guy already and don't care that he wasn't a doctor. Indeed, I was just as uneasy when Cuddy announced she had hired Foreman back. I love Omar Epps, but I hope this doesn't mean a return to the old "House." As good as it was, the new "House" is better. 

(Photo courtesy Fox)

So here's a question: What exactly constitutes a fireable offense at Princeton Plainsboro?  Well, now we can take "sticking a knife in an electrical outlet in order to have a near-death experience" off the list. Because that's what Dr. Gregory House did on last night's episode of "House," in a weird and obsessive attempt to prove there is no afterlife. (This from a man who underwent semi-successful medical treatment that came to him in a dream after being shot two seasons ago.) 

Also, "allowing a patient to die through negligence" can be struck, since he had one of the 10 applicants competing to be on his team dose a young man in a less-than-rigorous way -- anyone who's ever been in hospital knows that the nurses deliver the meds and stand there like grim death until they see you take it.  Anyone but this young doctor apparently.

House felt bad about the second offense, if not the first, though the only consequence of either was a gentle remonstration from Dr. Cuddy, who, we are hoping, has other things on her mind that will be resolved soon.  Otherwise, House might just have to burn the hospital down to get a little decent banter.

Every week, "House" tests the ascendancy of drama over common sense, and every week, at least thus far, drama wins.  The show's writers pepper the script with a barrage of symptoms, conditions, tests and treatments, creating a narcotic rue of medicine that, once ingested, allows the Avid Viewer to overlook the most ridiculous things -- all those same-day MRIs, for instance, or Dr. Wilson's strange lack of patients.  The knife in the electric socket may have been pushing it -- I'm pretty sure any sort of suicide attempt requires a visit to the psych ward.  At least that's what happens on "ER."

Fortunately, the rest of the show was so good that even exploratory electrocution gets a pass. House's need to see if there is an afterlife revealed a hope not usually seen in his crusty, cynical character, as did the fact that he paged the least likeable candidate to revive him -- House may have met his match in the cutthroat pixie (now upgraded to bitch).  She is just as cold and calculating as he is, and that would be interesting.

The 10 doctors, well, nine and one impostor, left vying for the team are becoming such good characters that the sight of House, bunsen burners ablaze, about to vote a bunch of them off the island struck fear into the viewers' hearts.  It seems clear the twins are going to go, also the boring white guy with no back story, leaving the plastic surgeon, the cutthroat bitch, the lovely doctor who flubbed the medication, the old guy, the Mormon and the mouthy young man played by Kai Penn who we love so much.  Wait, that's six, and the website says five will remain.  I hope the old guy goes because I really love the plastic surgeon and the old guy isn't even a doctor.

Not that a detail like that really matters at ol' Princeton Plainsboro.

-- Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

At first glance, it would seem that the creators of “House” are trying to get a toehold in the reality TV audience. On this season's second episode of the medical drama, the canny and conniving Dr. House capitulates to the general demand that he create a new diagnostics team by assembling all the likely applicants, 40 to be precise, and pitting them against each other.

Their first case is, of course, extra-special difficult: An Air Force officer wants to know why she is “hearing colors,” but she doesn’t want the tests to be on the books because that would squash her chance to work for NASA. She comes to House, as so many of us do, because he breaks the rules.

Off the 40, arbitrarily cut down to 30, winsome young people go on assorted House-directed missions, from searching the officer’s home to washing House’s car. It quickly becomes apparent that “House” is not just tapping into the success of reality TV, it’s taking a page out of “Grey’s Anatomy.” These docs may not be interns, but they are just as ripe for competitive plots and steamy romance, if not spin-offs, as any of the folks at Seattle Grace.

The season premiere of “House” opened big — with a guy talking to his girlfriend on the cellphone just as the building she’s in collapses right before his very eyes. But for some of us, the opening credits were a much bigger source of tension. So it is with great pleasure that I can report that while last season ended with Drs. Foreman (Omar Epps), Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) and Chase (Jesse Spencer) being fired, there they are cycling through the opening credits and scuttling along House’s peripheral vision like so many ghosts of cases past.

House (Hugh Laurie, in case you have forgotten, which really isn’t possible since he has been on the cover of every magazine in America lately), meanwhile, is determined that he will not hire another team. He won’t, He Won’t, HE WON’T, not if he has to hold his breath ’til he turns blue or use a passing janitor as a sounding board. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) reacts the way he always does, by fondly psychoanalyzing House. (Really, either Wilson is in the wrong profession or he’s in lurve — and wouldn’t that be a great very special episode?) He diagnoses abandonment issues — House cared about his people, they left, so House will never put himself in that position again. Sniff.

It’s so hard for a medical drama to construct the cliff-hanger that has become the season finale standard. You can’t just leave some poor patient hovering between life and death for the entire summer -- so the writers must turn to the personal lives of their characters to leave viewers in the necessary suspense. On “House,” however, personal lives are in short supply, so somehow staffing issues must be made fascinating.

On Tuesday night’s season finale, the strange and tentative romance between Drs. Cameron and Chase was dutifully given the possibility of a last-minute reprieve but mostly the show concentrated on the state of the team.

Oh sure, there was a medical case—a woman and her husband braved the stormy seas from Cuba to seek House’s expertise, which he eventually provided—but many more people were obsessed with Foreman. Would he really go? Could House get him to stay? Would House admit he cared either way?

Isn't it nice when your favorite show actually airs for weeks on a regular basis with no "special events," illness-as-metaphor motifs or other sweeps week tinkerings? Four great "Houses" in a row prove how strong the show is when left to its basics -- a medical mystery conceit that is dominated by Hugh Laurie's provocative character, whose actions illuminate the various strengths and flaws of his colleagues.

Last night we got the whole shebang -- child in peril, possible parental abuse, cool neuron graphics and a whole lot of fun personal subplots for the rest of the cast. A little girl collapses at day care, with grown-up symptoms -- heart problems, ovarian cysts, etc. Meanwhile, Drs. Chase and Cameron (Jesse Spencer and Jennifer Morrison, respectively) snip and snarl at each other as their sex-only relationship hits the skids after Chase says he wants more. (While it's been fun watching Cameron play the horn dog -- especially since the two actors recently announced their engagement -- it was rather out of character, but hey, we all have those days.)

Hugh Laurie is a fine and versatile actor and there are many things I would like to see him do — Shakespeare, say, or Alan Ayckbourn. Dance with the Stars. What I really truly don't want to see him do is sit on the can and give himself a catheter. And yet that is an image that, thanks to last night's "House," I and several million other Americans now share.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that writer's meeting. Or when the pages first went out to the cast. The state of House's health, or addiction, or psychosis, is generally the secondary plot of most episodes, so the fact that he was in a terrible shape because he could not relieve himself seemed, at first, to be just one more subtle warning against Vicodin abuse: Kids, don't try this at home or you won't be able to pee.

Being a "House" fan is a bit like being friends with an addict. You have to put up with ridiculous behavior: a doctor who doesn't ever wear a surgical mask, mile-long tapeworms, a season-ending shooting that is never mentioned again. There are also the inexplicable disappearances — whenever "American Idol" needs a little extra leg-room, "House" goes missing — and all those lies — everyone who thought "House" really had brain cancer this week please stand on their heads.

But you remain an Avid Viewer for the same reason many people hang out with drunks and addicts: because, on top of their game, they are more fun than anyone you know.

This week's "House" will no doubt keep many of us co-dependents hooked for months. When a brain-damaged savant piano player loses the use of a hand, House, played by Hugh Laurie, is not only given license to figure out "where the music comes from," but also to decide what is more important: a small slice of real genius or a whole, but ordinary, life.

Oh, these wacky medical shows. They all say they have actual doctors as consultants but don't you think it's more like reps from Ripley's Believe It or Not? Because of its set-up — crack diagnostics team succeeds where everyone else fails —"House" has, by necessity, some of the wildest cases of the lot. Nun allergic to the copper of her forgotten IUD? Check. Guy with nails stuck all over his skull? Check. Child of dwarf who is not really a dwarf but a victim of an off-kilter pituitary? Check, check.

Even by those standards, last night's episode was a pip — girl with a condition I don't even know how to spell (OK, I checked the website, it's CIPA, which stands for congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis). Yes, "Grey's Anatomy" already used this conceit but "House" upped it with a tapeworm. As House would say, what are the odds? The tapeworm allowed a brief and disturbing homage to the John Hurt death scene in "Alien," with House extracting said tapeworm as girl, who, of course, did not require anesthesia, looked on. (I just have to ask, is House so magical he doesn't have to scrub before surgery? Last episode, he stuck his hand in some kid's bowels, without gloves, having just manually maneuvered himself into the operating room in a wheelchair. Could all these sneaky diseases be just post-op infections?)

In the three weeks between new episodes of "House," Hugh Laurie won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award for his portrayal of sardonic drug addict and master of diagnostic detection Gregory House. And on Tuesday's episode, he certainly earned both the hard way.

Fox's "American Idol" gave this episode its highest ratings ever, and it's too bad this was their introduction since it was the most un-"Housian" "House" to date. (You could practically see the network note: "Never mind that it's a hit; let's shake up the format.") Absent was the signature opening vignette of someone having a medical crisis; gone were the cool graphics of synapses firing/microbes invading/muscles detaching that give the viewer a corpuscle's-eye view; lacking was the diagnostic banter and the endless MRIs that have held this single-personality-driven show together. It was sort of like watching "MASH" without the helicopters. Or the jokes.

'House': Worst episode ever

Absence can, I'm told, make the heart grow fonder. But it can also make you wonder just what exactly you were so fond of in the first place.

In the wake of the writers strike, we've been waiting for months for our favorite shows to return to the air with new episodes.  Now here they are, all our old favorites, crowding up our TiVos with their dear familiar names. And yet something is missing. The first post-strike episodes of shows like "30 Rock" and "The Office" seemed to fall flat; "The Big Bang Theory," which seemed to be gaining some street cred, was just ridiculous; "Grey's" was clever but lacked emotional umph and then, last night, "House" returned with what can only be called the worst episode in its history.

Brevity is mercy in the case of last night's "House" so here's a quick recap: the main case is of a man so happy that Dr. House (Hugh Laurie) decides it is the symptom of something terrible; his new team, through plot twists that I cannot bring myself to explain, "discover" that House has syphilis; House and Amber (Anne Dudek) divide up visiting rights with Dr. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) in such a patronizing manner that I spent the entire episode wondering why Leonard did not threaten to quit if his character were not returned to adulthood, much less manhood. It was all so patently ridiculous, it felt almost like a parody. Except it wasn't funny. And for "House," not funny is a problem. 

Indeed, if this had been the premiere of a new show called "House," I would not be tuning in for the second episode.

At least that is what I was thinking when I crawled sulkily into bed last night. But then I wondered if maybe this wasn't more of a relationship problem than an industry issue. Separation can raise expectations, blur reality, dampen the mysterious chemistry that creates attraction. Watching these early episodes is a bit like seeing your college lover after summer has separated you -- yes, you're happy to be in his/her arms again, but man, did he always laugh that loudly? Was her stutter always that affected? The first embrace after months away is always a bit awkward, no matter what the train station scene in "Reds" has led us to believe.

So maybe television and its audience have just lost their groove. The question becomes, then: Is it permanent?  "It's just been too long," said one viewer with a shrug, explaining that she just didn't feel the same way about "my show" any more. "I guess I'll give it another chance but, I don't know...."

Sad and poignant words. If nothing else, we are learning the emotional value of the season finale. Because we are used to taking a break from our favorite shows, for weeks and months (or in the case of "The Sopranos" and "Battlestar Gallactica," years), but usually we get a good cliffhanger or very special episode to provide both closure and a little something to think about. But this time it was all so sudden, so outside our control -- one minute they were there, trustworthy, reliable -- the next they were not. Instead the curtain was ripped aside and we saw scruffy writers in baseball caps, actors with (gasp) no makeup doing time on picket lines and YouTube. Turns out television is just a business after all, with its creators whining about salaries and Bennie's just like we do at our places of employment.

So we can be forgiven for needing a little extra courtship, a little reassurance before we re-commit. And maybe it's the same with the writers. The alchemy of a writers room is a strange and fragile thing, which is why reporters and other outsiders are rarely allowed in. (That, and all the profanity.) It must be hard to rekindle that, hard for the writers, and the actors, to get back up to speed and recapture the magic.

Though this is no excuse for turning Wilson into a snickering man-child.

And subsequent episodes of "30 Rock" and "The Office" felt better, more like themselves, the shows we've known and loved. So maybe, as with any important relationship, we just need to give it time. As for "House," well, now that House has, basically, two diagnostic teams, maybe the writers should figure out what he, and they, are going to do with them. Or give Wilson and Amber a relationship that is recognizable as human. Or make Dr. Caddy (Lisa Elston) a real person again. Or bring back a romantic foil for House. But they're going to have to do something. And fast. Because the one thing the writers strike taught is that we may miss our shows when they're gone, but life does go on without them.

--Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

It was Christmas in January at ye olde Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Not only did we get the first new episode of "House" in weeks, we got one set in December, a time warp courtesy of the writers strike. Fox wisely squirreled away three new eps in the hopes of a week-long ratings blowout, peaking this Sunday when a very special episode of "House" will follow the Super Bowl.

Watching last night, one couldn't help but wonder if this was one of the storylines that was rushed through the writing room in those final pre-strike days. Though heaven knows any new "House" is more than welcome, this one, titled "It's a Wonderful Lie,"  lacked a certain richness, a depth of dialogue, perhaps, than the show normally delivers. With his new four-person team in place -- Foreman, Taub, Kutner and Thirteen -- House is faced with a woman whose hands have inexplicably become paralyzed. Then she goes blind. Convinced, as usual, that the woman is lying about something, House cross-examines her young daughter. While asking questions I'm pretty sure could get him arrested, he finds himself up against the creature he long considered imaginary: a perfectly honest person. What he sees gives even the unflinchable doc pause.

The case seems to turn the show's own conventions upside down, yet it doesn't quite. The mother, played by Janel Moloney, (and isn't it nice to see her again?) lost her own mom to breast cancer that was never mentioned until it was too late, so she swore she would never lie to her own daughter. But of course she has, and the big reveal is not only obvious, it doesn't really go anywhere. Indeed, during the climactic scene, after House performs his "Christmas miracle," no one seems to know quite what to say. Literally. Which left me wondering if perhaps the WGA's call for "pencils down" had come at an extremely bad time.

Or maybe I just missed the point. Heaven knows I've certainly missed "House." And while the B-plot of the newbies participating in a Secret Santa gift exchange in which House has rigged the outcome to keep the competition among them roiling was a bit weak, Dr. Wilson is getting cheekier by the day. "Are we going somewhere?" House asks when his friend strides away down the hall. "No," Wilson answers, "I just know it hurts you." How I love Robert Sean Leonard.

A very fun little narrative with a patient who House "diagnoses" as a prostitute with a "pony show" winds up with a Christmas pageant -- the patient's allergic reaction to a donkey is the result of her role as the blessed virgin. It's always nice to end a Christmas episode with a nativity scene, not to mention the miraculous sight of House in church. A tad strange in January, but hey, we'll take what we can get. Now, on to the Super Bowl.

-- Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

And then there were none. Well, two. Okay, actually three. The point is, the Great Race to reconfigure the diagnostics team on "House" is over and the winners are Dr. Kutner (Kal Penn), Dr. Straub (Peter Jacobson) and the mysterious Thirteen (Olivia Penn). How precisely the writers are going to keep them all busy while still throwing the old team enough work is a mystery, but one that will keep Avid Viewers like me tuned in.

In last night's episode, Dr. Lisa Cuddy finally drew herself to full administrative height and told House (Hugh Laurie) to pick two candidates and let the remaining two go. So when a punk rock musician with many addictions and few redeeming virtues pulls the typical "House" collapse -- sudden bout of coughing turns into bloody spew -- the case becomes make-or-break.

Now, the competition wasn't quite as intense as it seems, at least from the living room view. Kal Penn is a movie star, most recently seen in "The Namesake." So clearly he was staying. Jacobson has an IMDB list as long as your arm, and though some of the entries are along the lines of "man with the telephone," he was just seen in "Transformers" and did a very funny turn as the hateful ex-husband in "The Starter Wife." So smart money on him. The choice came down to the two women: the steely Amber (Anne Dudek) and the softer Thirteen (Olivia Penn). Both actors have done good work -- Dudek in high-profile shows like "Mad Men" and "Big Love," Penn in the unfortunate "Black Donnelly's" and, more successfully, "The O.C." But really there was no choice. Amber was too rough even for House, and romantic tension has been in short supply for a while, so the winner was Thirteen.

Yes, yes, there was a lot of cool medicine performed, tests and tubes and seizures, etc., and Drs. Wilson and Formen weighed in on how ridiculous House was to be caught up in his little games, but all of that was so much white noise as we waited to see why he would finally fire Amber and how he was going to keep three instead of two.

Amber revealed her near-pathological fear of losing anything, especially control, by her hatred of the druggie patient, and House finally had to concede that winning wasn't everything if fear of losing kept you hostage. Then he hired the two guys, knowing that that would never fly. Which it didn't; Cuddy told him to hire Thirteen (though why she didn't make him sacrifice one of the men is essentially what separates television from the reality of our lives).

And so the original team is nicely mirrored, two guys and a girl, though with Foreman, it's three guys and a girl. But hey, Amber's the sort who might just figure out a way to return.

Meanwhile, we can all get back to business: figuring out how to give all the old cast members a bit more screen time. I mean, they can't have colored Jennifer Morrison's hair for nothing, right?

-- Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

I just have to say it out loud: "House" just keeps getting better and better. What at first seemed like a pretty silly idea -- to passive-aggressively keep from hiring a new team, House has a group of doctors competing like they're in a reality show -- has turned out to be brilliant. Not only do we get all sorts of great new characters, we also get to see House at his best, trying to figure out, and neutralize, each one. Gone are all the boring concerns about his Vicodin addiction, gone is the irritating model of House declaiming and everyone else denying (even though he's always right), gone is the increasingly dull and unbelievable tension between him and Cuddy. (As subordinate/boss, that is. The sexual tension, one hopes, is still in there somewhere.) Cuddy is done trying to squelch him; now she is just shooting for managed chaos. Which is so much more fun because it revolves more around the medicine and less around all the personal pathos of the staff.

      Last night's case was a screenwriter's dream. A man comes in with no memory but a very strange disorder -- Giovanni's Mirror Syndrome (where do they come up with these things?), which causes him to unconsciously mimic those around them. So all of the characters were subjected to a vision of their own selves, and we got to watch them react to it. How great a dramatic idea is that? Although it must be conceded that while Patient X managed to delve into the psyches of all the contestants, he stayed on the surface when mirroring House, revealing only his lust for doctor 13 and admiration for Cuddy's breasts. Too bad; it would have been interesting to get a peep into House's interior, and even more interesting to see what he thought of the image.

But the quibble is so minor, I'm ashamed to have made it. This season of "House" should be handed out as Christmas gifts to every writers' room in America to serve as a template for really shaking up a show in danger of bogging down in its own conceit. Mercifully, House didn't kick anyone off the island last night; the loss of any of the new characters will lead only to heartbreak for me. I miss the old guy already and don't care that he wasn't a doctor. Indeed, I was just as uneasy when Cuddy announced she had hired Foreman back. I love Omar Epps, but I hope this doesn't mean a return to the old "House." As good as it was, the new "House" is better. 

(Photo courtesy Fox)

So here's a question: What exactly constitutes a fireable offense at Princeton Plainsboro?  Well, now we can take "sticking a knife in an electrical outlet in order to have a near-death experience" off the list. Because that's what Dr. Gregory House did on last night's episode of "House," in a weird and obsessive attempt to prove there is no afterlife. (This from a man who underwent semi-successful medical treatment that came to him in a dream after being shot two seasons ago.) 

Also, "allowing a patient to die through negligence" can be struck, since he had one of the 10 applicants competing to be on his team dose a young man in a less-than-rigorous way -- anyone who's ever been in hospital knows that the nurses deliver the meds and stand there like grim death until they see you take it.  Anyone but this young doctor apparently.

House felt bad about the second offense, if not the first, though the only consequence of either was a gentle remonstration from Dr. Cuddy, who, we are hoping, has other things on her mind that will be resolved soon.  Otherwise, House might just have to burn the hospital down to get a little decent banter.

Every week, "House" tests the ascendancy of drama over common sense, and every week, at least thus far, drama wins.  The show's writers pepper the script with a barrage of symptoms, conditions, tests and treatments, creating a narcotic rue of medicine that, once ingested, allows the Avid Viewer to overlook the most ridiculous things -- all those same-day MRIs, for instance, or Dr. Wilson's strange lack of patients.  The knife in the electric socket may have been pushing it -- I'm pretty sure any sort of suicide attempt requires a visit to the psych ward.  At least that's what happens on "ER."

Fortunately, the rest of the show was so good that even exploratory electrocution gets a pass. House's need to see if there is an afterlife revealed a hope not usually seen in his crusty, cynical character, as did the fact that he paged the least likeable candidate to revive him -- House may have met his match in the cutthroat pixie (now upgraded to bitch).  She is just as cold and calculating as he is, and that would be interesting.

The 10 doctors, well, nine and one impostor, left vying for the team are becoming such good characters that the sight of House, bunsen burners ablaze, about to vote a bunch of them off the island struck fear into the viewers' hearts.  It seems clear the twins are going to go, also the boring white guy with no back story, leaving the plastic surgeon, the cutthroat bitch, the lovely doctor who flubbed the medication, the old guy, the Mormon and the mouthy young man played by Kai Penn who we love so much.  Wait, that's six, and the website says five will remain.  I hope the old guy goes because I really love the plastic surgeon and the old guy isn't even a doctor.

Not that a detail like that really matters at ol' Princeton Plainsboro.

-- Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

At first glance, it would seem that the creators of “House” are trying to get a toehold in the reality TV audience. On this season's second episode of the medical drama, the canny and conniving Dr. House capitulates to the general demand that he create a new diagnostics team by assembling all the likely applicants, 40 to be precise, and pitting them against each other.

Their first case is, of course, extra-special difficult: An Air Force officer wants to know why she is “hearing colors,” but she doesn’t want the tests to be on the books because that would squash her chance to work for NASA. She comes to House, as so many of us do, because he breaks the rules.

Off the 40, arbitrarily cut down to 30, winsome young people go on assorted House-directed missions, from searching the officer’s home to washing House’s car. It quickly becomes apparent that “House” is not just tapping into the success of reality TV, it’s taking a page out of “Grey’s Anatomy.” These docs may not be interns, but they are just as ripe for competitive plots and steamy romance, if not spin-offs, as any of the folks at Seattle Grace.

The season premiere of “House” opened big — with a guy talking to his girlfriend on the cellphone just as the building she’s in collapses right before his very eyes. But for some of us, the opening credits were a much bigger source of tension. So it is with great pleasure that I can report that while last season ended with Drs. Foreman (Omar Epps), Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) and Chase (Jesse Spencer) being fired, there they are cycling through the opening credits and scuttling along House’s peripheral vision like so many ghosts of cases past.

House (Hugh Laurie, in case you have forgotten, which really isn’t possible since he has been on the cover of every magazine in America lately), meanwhile, is determined that he will not hire another team. He won’t, He Won’t, HE WON’T, not if he has to hold his breath ’til he turns blue or use a passing janitor as a sounding board. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) reacts the way he always does, by fondly psychoanalyzing House. (Really, either Wilson is in the wrong profession or he’s in lurve — and wouldn’t that be a great very special episode?) He diagnoses abandonment issues — House cared about his people, they left, so House will never put himself in that position again. Sniff.

It’s so hard for a medical drama to construct the cliff-hanger that has become the season finale standard. You can’t just leave some poor patient hovering between life and death for the entire summer -- so the writers must turn to the personal lives of their characters to leave viewers in the necessary suspense. On “House,” however, personal lives are in short supply, so somehow staffing issues must be made fascinating.

On Tuesday night’s season finale, the strange and tentative romance between Drs. Cameron and Chase was dutifully given the possibility of a last-minute reprieve but mostly the show concentrated on the state of the team.

Oh sure, there was a medical case—a woman and her husband braved the stormy seas from Cuba to seek House’s expertise, which he eventually provided—but many more people were obsessed with Foreman. Would he really go? Could House get him to stay? Would House admit he cared either way?

Isn't it nice when your favorite show actually airs for weeks on a regular basis with no "special events," illness-as-metaphor motifs or other sweeps week tinkerings? Four great "Houses" in a row prove how strong the show is when left to its basics -- a medical mystery conceit that is dominated by Hugh Laurie's provocative character, whose actions illuminate the various strengths and flaws of his colleagues.

Last night we got the whole shebang -- child in peril, possible parental abuse, cool neuron graphics and a whole lot of fun personal subplots for the rest of the cast. A little girl collapses at day care, with grown-up symptoms -- heart problems, ovarian cysts, etc. Meanwhile, Drs. Chase and Cameron (Jesse Spencer and Jennifer Morrison, respectively) snip and snarl at each other as their sex-only relationship hits the skids after Chase says he wants more. (While it's been fun watching Cameron play the horn dog -- especially since the two actors recently announced their engagement -- it was rather out of character, but hey, we all have those days.)

Hugh Laurie is a fine and versatile actor and there are many things I would like to see him do — Shakespeare, say, or Alan Ayckbourn. Dance with the Stars. What I really truly don't want to see him do is sit on the can and give himself a catheter. And yet that is an image that, thanks to last night's "House," I and several million other Americans now share.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that writer's meeting. Or when the pages first went out to the cast. The state of House's health, or addiction, or psychosis, is generally the secondary plot of most episodes, so the fact that he was in a terrible shape because he could not relieve himself seemed, at first, to be just one more subtle warning against Vicodin abuse: Kids, don't try this at home or you won't be able to pee.

Being a "House" fan is a bit like being friends with an addict. You have to put up with ridiculous behavior: a doctor who doesn't ever wear a surgical mask, mile-long tapeworms, a season-ending shooting that is never mentioned again. There are also the inexplicable disappearances — whenever "American Idol" needs a little extra leg-room, "House" goes missing — and all those lies — everyone who thought "House" really had brain cancer this week please stand on their heads.

But you remain an Avid Viewer for the same reason many people hang out with drunks and addicts: because, on top of their game, they are more fun than anyone you know.

This week's "House" will no doubt keep many of us co-dependents hooked for months. When a brain-damaged savant piano player loses the use of a hand, House, played by Hugh Laurie, is not only given license to figure out "where the music comes from," but also to decide what is more important: a small slice of real genius or a whole, but ordinary, life.

Oh, these wacky medical shows. They all say they have actual doctors as consultants but don't you think it's more like reps from Ripley's Believe It or Not? Because of its set-up — crack diagnostics team succeeds where everyone else fails —"House" has, by necessity, some of the wildest cases of the lot. Nun allergic to the copper of her forgotten IUD? Check. Guy with nails stuck all over his skull? Check. Child of dwarf who is not really a dwarf but a victim of an off-kilter pituitary? Check, check.

Even by those standards, last night's episode was a pip — girl with a condition I don't even know how to spell (OK, I checked the website, it's CIPA, which stands for congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis). Yes, "Grey's Anatomy" already used this conceit but "House" upped it with a tapeworm. As House would say, what are the odds? The tapeworm allowed a brief and disturbing homage to the John Hurt death scene in "Alien," with House extracting said tapeworm as girl, who, of course, did not require anesthesia, looked on. (I just have to ask, is House so magical he doesn't have to scrub before surgery? Last episode, he stuck his hand in some kid's bowels, without gloves, having just manually maneuvered himself into the operating room in a wheelchair. Could all these sneaky diseases be just post-op infections?)

In the three weeks between new episodes of "House," Hugh Laurie won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award for his portrayal of sardonic drug addict and master of diagnostic detection Gregory House. And on Tuesday's episode, he certainly earned both the hard way.

Fox's "American Idol" gave this episode its highest ratings ever, and it's too bad this was their introduction since it was the most un-"Housian" "House" to date. (You could practically see the network note: "Never mind that it's a hit; let's shake up the format.") Absent was the signature opening vignette of someone having a medical crisis; gone were the cool graphics of synapses firing/microbes invading/muscles detaching that give the viewer a corpuscle's-eye view; lacking was the diagnostic banter and the endless MRIs that have held this single-personality-driven show together. It was sort of like watching "MASH" without the helicopters. Or the jokes.

Christmas-giving the 'House' way

It was Christmas in January at ye olde Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Not only did we get the first new episode of "House" in weeks, we got one set in December, a time warp courtesy of the writers strike. Fox wisely squirreled away three new eps in the hopes of a week-long ratings blowout, peaking this Sunday when a very special episode of "House" will follow the Super Bowl.

Watching last night, one couldn't help but wonder if this was one of the storylines that was rushed through the writing room in those final pre-strike days. Though heaven knows any new "House" is more than welcome, this one, titled "It's a Wonderful Lie,"  lacked a certain richness, a depth of dialogue, perhaps, than the show normally delivers. With his new four-person team in place -- Foreman, Taub, Kutner and Thirteen -- House is faced with a woman whose hands have inexplicably become paralyzed. Then she goes blind. Convinced, as usual, that the woman is lying about something, House cross-examines her young daughter. While asking questions I'm pretty sure could get him arrested, he finds himself up against the creature he long considered imaginary: a perfectly honest person. What he sees gives even the unflinchable doc pause.

The case seems to turn the show's own conventions upside down, yet it doesn't quite. The mother, played by Janel Moloney, (and isn't it nice to see her again?) lost her own mom to breast cancer that was never mentioned until it was too late, so she swore she would never lie to her own daughter. But of course she has, and the big reveal is not only obvious, it doesn't really go anywhere. Indeed, during the climactic scene, after House performs his "Christmas miracle," no one seems to know quite what to say. Literally. Which left me wondering if perhaps the WGA's call for "pencils down" had come at an extremely bad time.

Or maybe I just missed the point. Heaven knows I've certainly missed "House." And while the B-plot of the newbies participating in a Secret Santa gift exchange in which House has rigged the outcome to keep the competition among them roiling was a bit weak, Dr. Wilson is getting cheekier by the day. "Are we going somewhere?" House asks when his friend strides away down the hall. "No," Wilson answers, "I just know it hurts you." How I love Robert Sean Leonard.

A very fun little narrative with a patient who House "diagnoses" as a prostitute with a "pony show" winds up with a Christmas pageant -- the patient's allergic reaction to a donkey is the result of her role as the blessed virgin. It's always nice to end a Christmas episode with a nativity scene, not to mention the miraculous sight of House in church. A tad strange in January, but hey, we'll take what we can get. Now, on to the Super Bowl.

-- Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

And then there were none. Well, two. Okay, actually three. The point is, the Great Race to reconfigure the diagnostics team on "House" is over and the winners are Dr. Kutner (Kal Penn), Dr. Straub (Peter Jacobson) and the mysterious Thirteen (Olivia Penn). How precisely the writers are going to keep them all busy while still throwing the old team enough work is a mystery, but one that will keep Avid Viewers like me tuned in.

In last night's episode, Dr. Lisa Cuddy finally drew herself to full administrative height and told House (Hugh Laurie) to pick two candidates and let the remaining two go. So when a punk rock musician with many addictions and few redeeming virtues pulls the typical "House" collapse -- sudden bout of coughing turns into bloody spew -- the case becomes make-or-break.

Now, the competition wasn't quite as intense as it seems, at least from the living room view. Kal Penn is a movie star, most recently seen in "The Namesake." So clearly he was staying. Jacobson has an IMDB list as long as your arm, and though some of the entries are along the lines of "man with the telephone," he was just seen in "Transformers" and did a very funny turn as the hateful ex-husband in "The Starter Wife." So smart money on him. The choice came down to the two women: the steely Amber (Anne Dudek) and the softer Thirteen (Olivia Penn). Both actors have done good work -- Dudek in high-profile shows like "Mad Men" and "Big Love," Penn in the unfortunate "Black Donnelly's" and, more successfully, "The O.C." But really there was no choice. Amber was too rough even for House, and romantic tension has been in short supply for a while, so the winner was Thirteen.

Yes, yes, there was a lot of cool medicine performed, tests and tubes and seizures, etc., and Drs. Wilson and Formen weighed in on how ridiculous House was to be caught up in his little games, but all of that was so much white noise as we waited to see why he would finally fire Amber and how he was going to keep three instead of two.

Amber revealed her near-pathological fear of losing anything, especially control, by her hatred of the druggie patient, and House finally had to concede that winning wasn't everything if fear of losing kept you hostage. Then he hired the two guys, knowing that that would never fly. Which it didn't; Cuddy told him to hire Thirteen (though why she didn't make him sacrifice one of the men is essentially what separates television from the reality of our lives).

And so the original team is nicely mirrored, two guys and a girl, though with Foreman, it's three guys and a girl. But hey, Amber's the sort who might just figure out a way to return.

Meanwhile, we can all get back to business: figuring out how to give all the old cast members a bit more screen time. I mean, they can't have colored Jennifer Morrison's hair for nothing, right?

-- Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

I just have to say it out loud: "House" just keeps getting better and better. What at first seemed like a pretty silly idea -- to passive-aggressively keep from hiring a new team, House has a group of doctors competing like they're in a reality show -- has turned out to be brilliant. Not only do we get all sorts of great new characters, we also get to see House at his best, trying to figure out, and neutralize, each one. Gone are all the boring concerns about his Vicodin addiction, gone is the irritating model of House declaiming and everyone else denying (even though he's always right), gone is the increasingly dull and unbelievable tension between him and Cuddy. (As subordinate/boss, that is. The sexual tension, one hopes, is still in there somewhere.) Cuddy is done trying to squelch him; now she is just shooting for managed chaos. Which is so much more fun because it revolves more around the medicine and less around all the personal pathos of the staff.

      Last night's case was a screenwriter's dream. A man comes in with no memory but a very strange disorder -- Giovanni's Mirror Syndrome (where do they come up with these things?), which causes him to unconsciously mimic those around them. So all of the characters were subjected to a vision of their own selves, and we got to watch them react to it. How great a dramatic idea is that? Although it must be conceded that while Patient X managed to delve into the psyches of all the contestants, he stayed on the surface when mirroring House, revealing only his lust for doctor 13 and admiration for Cuddy's breasts. Too bad; it would have been interesting to get a peep into House's interior, and even more interesting to see what he thought of the image.

But the quibble is so minor, I'm ashamed to have made it. This season of "House" should be handed out as Christmas gifts to every writers' room in America to serve as a template for really shaking up a show in danger of bogging down in its own conceit. Mercifully, House didn't kick anyone off the island last night; the loss of any of the new characters will lead only to heartbreak for me. I miss the old guy already and don't care that he wasn't a doctor. Indeed, I was just as uneasy when Cuddy announced she had hired Foreman back. I love Omar Epps, but I hope this doesn't mean a return to the old "House." As good as it was, the new "House" is better. 

(Photo courtesy Fox)

So here's a question: What exactly constitutes a fireable offense at Princeton Plainsboro?  Well, now we can take "sticking a knife in an electrical outlet in order to have a near-death experience" off the list. Because that's what Dr. Gregory House did on last night's episode of "House," in a weird and obsessive attempt to prove there is no afterlife. (This from a man who underwent semi-successful medical treatment that came to him in a dream after being shot two seasons ago.) 

Also, "allowing a patient to die through negligence" can be struck, since he had one of the 10 applicants competing to be on his team dose a young man in a less-than-rigorous way -- anyone who's ever been in hospital knows that the nurses deliver the meds and stand there like grim death until they see you take it.  Anyone but this young doctor apparently.

House felt bad about the second offense, if not the first, though the only consequence of either was a gentle remonstration from Dr. Cuddy, who, we are hoping, has other things on her mind that will be resolved soon.  Otherwise, House might just have to burn the hospital down to get a little decent banter.

Every week, "House" tests the ascendancy of drama over common sense, and every week, at least thus far, drama wins.  The show's writers pepper the script with a barrage of symptoms, conditions, tests and treatments, creating a narcotic rue of medicine that, once ingested, allows the Avid Viewer to overlook the most ridiculous things -- all those same-day MRIs, for instance, or Dr. Wilson's strange lack of patients.  The knife in the electric socket may have been pushing it -- I'm pretty sure any sort of suicide attempt requires a visit to the psych ward.  At least that's what happens on "ER."

Fortunately, the rest of the show was so good that even exploratory electrocution gets a pass. House's need to see if there is an afterlife revealed a hope not usually seen in his crusty, cynical character, as did the fact that he paged the least likeable candidate to revive him -- House may have met his match in the cutthroat pixie (now upgraded to bitch).  She is just as cold and calculating as he is, and that would be interesting.

The 10 doctors, well, nine and one impostor, left vying for the team are becoming such good characters that the sight of House, bunsen burners ablaze, about to vote a bunch of them off the island struck fear into the viewers' hearts.  It seems clear the twins are going to go, also the boring white guy with no back story, leaving the plastic surgeon, the cutthroat bitch, the lovely doctor who flubbed the medication, the old guy, the Mormon and the mouthy young man played by Kai Penn who we love so much.  Wait, that's six, and the website says five will remain.  I hope the old guy goes because I really love the plastic surgeon and the old guy isn't even a doctor.

Not that a detail like that really matters at ol' Princeton Plainsboro.

-- Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

At first glance, it would seem that the creators of “House” are trying to get a toehold in the reality TV audience. On this season's second episode of the medical drama, the canny and conniving Dr. House capitulates to the general demand that he create a new diagnostics team by assembling all the likely applicants, 40 to be precise, and pitting them against each other.

Their first case is, of course, extra-special difficult: An Air Force officer wants to know why she is “hearing colors,” but she doesn’t want the tests to be on the books because that would squash her chance to work for NASA. She comes to House, as so many of us do, because he breaks the rules.

Off the 40, arbitrarily cut down to 30, winsome young people go on assorted House-directed missions, from searching the officer’s home to washing House’s car. It quickly becomes apparent that “House” is not just tapping into the success of reality TV, it’s taking a page out of “Grey’s Anatomy.” These docs may not be interns, but they are just as ripe for competitive plots and steamy romance, if not spin-offs, as any of the folks at Seattle Grace.

The season premiere of “House” opened big — with a guy talking to his girlfriend on the cellphone just as the building she’s in collapses right before his very eyes. But for some of us, the opening credits were a much bigger source of tension. So it is with great pleasure that I can report that while last season ended with Drs. Foreman (Omar Epps), Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) and Chase (Jesse Spencer) being fired, there they are cycling through the opening credits and scuttling along House’s peripheral vision like so many ghosts of cases past.

House (Hugh Laurie, in case you have forgotten, which really isn’t possible since he has been on the cover of every magazine in America lately), meanwhile, is determined that he will not hire another team. He won’t, He Won’t, HE WON’T, not if he has to hold his breath ’til he turns blue or use a passing janitor as a sounding board. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) reacts the way he always does, by fondly psychoanalyzing House. (Really, either Wilson is in the wrong profession or he’s in lurve — and wouldn’t that be a great very special episode?) He diagnoses abandonment issues — House cared about his people, they left, so House will never put himself in that position again. Sniff.

It’s so hard for a medical drama to construct the cliff-hanger that has become the season finale standard. You can’t just leave some poor patient hovering between life and death for the entire summer -- so the writers must turn to the personal lives of their characters to leave viewers in the necessary suspense. On “House,” however, personal lives are in short supply, so somehow staffing issues must be made fascinating.

On Tuesday night’s season finale, the strange and tentative romance between Drs. Cameron and Chase was dutifully given the possibility of a last-minute reprieve but mostly the show concentrated on the state of the team.

Oh sure, there was a medical case—a woman and her husband braved the stormy seas from Cuba to seek House’s expertise, which he eventually provided—but many more people were obsessed with Foreman. Would he really go? Could House get him to stay? Would House admit he cared either way?

Isn't it nice when your favorite show actually airs for weeks on a regular basis with no "special events," illness-as-metaphor motifs or other sweeps week tinkerings? Four great "Houses" in a row prove how strong the show is when left to its basics -- a medical mystery conceit that is dominated by Hugh Laurie's provocative character, whose actions illuminate the various strengths and flaws of his colleagues.

Last night we got the whole shebang -- child in peril, possible parental abuse, cool neuron graphics and a whole lot of fun personal subplots for the rest of the cast. A little girl collapses at day care, with grown-up symptoms -- heart problems, ovarian cysts, etc. Meanwhile, Drs. Chase and Cameron (Jesse Spencer and Jennifer Morrison, respectively) snip and snarl at each other as their sex-only relationship hits the skids after Chase says he wants more. (While it's been fun watching Cameron play the horn dog -- especially since the two actors recently announced their engagement -- it was rather out of character, but hey, we all have those days.)

Hugh Laurie is a fine and versatile actor and there are many things I would like to see him do — Shakespeare, say, or Alan Ayckbourn. Dance with the Stars. What I really truly don't want to see him do is sit on the can and give himself a catheter. And yet that is an image that, thanks to last night's "House," I and several million other Americans now share.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that writer's meeting. Or when the pages first went out to the cast. The state of House's health, or addiction, or psychosis, is generally the secondary plot of most episodes, so the fact that he was in a terrible shape because he could not relieve himself seemed, at first, to be just one more subtle warning against Vicodin abuse: Kids, don't try this at home or you won't be able to pee.

Being a "House" fan is a bit like being friends with an addict. You have to put up with ridiculous behavior: a doctor who doesn't ever wear a surgical mask, mile-long tapeworms, a season-ending shooting that is never mentioned again. There are also the inexplicable disappearances — whenever "American Idol" needs a little extra leg-room, "House" goes missing — and all those lies — everyone who thought "House" really had brain cancer this week please stand on their heads.

But you remain an Avid Viewer for the same reason many people hang out with drunks and addicts: because, on top of their game, they are more fun than anyone you know.

This week's "House" will no doubt keep many of us co-dependents hooked for months. When a brain-damaged savant piano player loses the use of a hand, House, played by Hugh Laurie, is not only given license to figure out "where the music comes from," but also to decide what is more important: a small slice of real genius or a whole, but ordinary, life.

Oh, these wacky medical shows. They all say they have actual doctors as consultants but don't you think it's more like reps from Ripley's Believe It or Not? Because of its set-up — crack diagnostics team succeeds where everyone else fails —"House" has, by necessity, some of the wildest cases of the lot. Nun allergic to the copper of her forgotten IUD? Check. Guy with nails stuck all over his skull? Check. Child of dwarf who is not really a dwarf but a victim of an off-kilter pituitary? Check, check.

Even by those standards, last night's episode was a pip — girl with a condition I don't even know how to spell (OK, I checked the website, it's CIPA, which stands for congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis). Yes, "Grey's Anatomy" already used this conceit but "House" upped it with a tapeworm. As House would say, what are the odds? The tapeworm allowed a brief and disturbing homage to the John Hurt death scene in "Alien," with House extracting said tapeworm as girl, who, of course, did not require anesthesia, looked on. (I just have to ask, is House so magical he doesn't have to scrub before surgery? Last episode, he stuck his hand in some kid's bowels, without gloves, having just manually maneuvered himself into the operating room in a wheelchair. Could all these sneaky diseases be just post-op infections?)

In the three weeks between new episodes of "House," Hugh Laurie won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award for his portrayal of sardonic drug addict and master of diagnostic detection Gregory House. And on Tuesday's episode, he certainly earned both the hard way.

Fox's "American Idol" gave this episode its highest ratings ever, and it's too bad this was their introduction since it was the most un-"Housian" "House" to date. (You could practically see the network note: "Never mind that it's a hit; let's shake up the format.") Absent was the signature opening vignette of someone having a medical crisis; gone were the cool graphics of synapses firing/microbes invading/muscles detaching that give the viewer a corpuscle's-eye view; lacking was the diagnostic banter and the endless MRIs that have held this single-personality-driven show together. It was sort of like watching "MASH" without the helicopters. Or the jokes.

New men (and woman) of the House

And then there were none. Well, two. Okay, actually three. The point is, the Great Race to reconfigure the diagnostics team on "House" is over and the winners are Dr. Kutner (Kal Penn), Dr. Straub (Peter Jacobson) and the mysterious Thirteen (Olivia Penn). How precisely the writers are going to keep them all busy while still throwing the old team enough work is a mystery, but one that will keep Avid Viewers like me tuned in.

In last night's episode, Dr. Lisa Cuddy finally drew herself to full administrative height and told House (Hugh Laurie) to pick two candidates and let the remaining two go. So when a punk rock musician with many addictions and few redeeming virtues pulls the typical "House" collapse -- sudden bout of coughing turns into bloody spew -- the case becomes make-or-break.

Now, the competition wasn't quite as intense as it seems, at least from the living room view. Kal Penn is a movie star, most recently seen in "The Namesake." So clearly he was staying. Jacobson has an IMDB list as long as your arm, and though some of the entries are along the lines of "man with the telephone," he was just seen in "Transformers" and did a very funny turn as the hateful ex-husband in "The Starter Wife." So smart money on him. The choice came down to the two women: the steely Amber (Anne Dudek) and the softer Thirteen (Olivia Penn). Both actors have done good work -- Dudek in high-profile shows like "Mad Men" and "Big Love," Penn in the unfortunate "Black Donnelly's" and, more successfully, "The O.C." But really there was no choice. Amber was too rough even for House, and romantic tension has been in short supply for a while, so the winner was Thirteen.

Yes, yes, there was a lot of cool medicine performed, tests and tubes and seizures, etc., and Drs. Wilson and Formen weighed in on how ridiculous House was to be caught up in his little games, but all of that was so much white noise as we waited to see why he would finally fire Amber and how he was going to keep three instead of two.

Amber revealed her near-pathological fear of losing anything, especially control, by her hatred of the druggie patient, and House finally had to concede that winning wasn't everything if fear of losing kept you hostage. Then he hired the two guys, knowing that that would never fly. Which it didn't; Cuddy told him to hire Thirteen (though why she didn't make him sacrifice one of the men is essentially what separates television from the reality of our lives).

And so the original team is nicely mirrored, two guys and a girl, though with Foreman, it's three guys and a girl. But hey, Amber's the sort who might just figure out a way to return.

Meanwhile, we can all get back to business: figuring out how to give all the old cast members a bit more screen time. I mean, they can't have colored Jennifer Morrison's hair for nothing, right?

-- Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

I just have to say it out loud: "House" just keeps getting better and better. What at first seemed like a pretty silly idea -- to passive-aggressively keep from hiring a new team, House has a group of doctors competing like they're in a reality show -- has turned out to be brilliant. Not only do we get all sorts of great new characters, we also get to see House at his best, trying to figure out, and neutralize, each one. Gone are all the boring concerns about his Vicodin addiction, gone is the irritating model of House declaiming and everyone else denying (even though he's always right), gone is the increasingly dull and unbelievable tension between him and Cuddy. (As subordinate/boss, that is. The sexual tension, one hopes, is still in there somewhere.) Cuddy is done trying to squelch him; now she is just shooting for managed chaos. Which is so much more fun because it revolves more around the medicine and less around all the personal pathos of the staff.

      Last night's case was a screenwriter's dream. A man comes in with no memory but a very strange disorder -- Giovanni's Mirror Syndrome (where do they come up with these things?), which causes him to unconsciously mimic those around them. So all of the characters were subjected to a vision of their own selves, and we got to watch them react to it. How great a dramatic idea is that? Although it must be conceded that while Patient X managed to delve into the psyches of all the contestants, he stayed on the surface when mirroring House, revealing only his lust for doctor 13 and admiration for Cuddy's breasts. Too bad; it would have been interesting to get a peep into House's interior, and even more interesting to see what he thought of the image.

But the quibble is so minor, I'm ashamed to have made it. This season of "House" should be handed out as Christmas gifts to every writers' room in America to serve as a template for really shaking up a show in danger of bogging down in its own conceit. Mercifully, House didn't kick anyone off the island last night; the loss of any of the new characters will lead only to heartbreak for me. I miss the old guy already and don't care that he wasn't a doctor. Indeed, I was just as uneasy when Cuddy announced she had hired Foreman back. I love Omar Epps, but I hope this doesn't mean a return to the old "House." As good as it was, the new "House" is better. 

(Photo courtesy Fox)

So here's a question: What exactly constitutes a fireable offense at Princeton Plainsboro?  Well, now we can take "sticking a knife in an electrical outlet in order to have a near-death experience" off the list. Because that's what Dr. Gregory House did on last night's episode of "House," in a weird and obsessive attempt to prove there is no afterlife. (This from a man who underwent semi-successful medical treatment that came to him in a dream after being shot two seasons ago.) 

Also, "allowing a patient to die through negligence" can be struck, since he had one of the 10 applicants competing to be on his team dose a young man in a less-than-rigorous way -- anyone who's ever been in hospital knows that the nurses deliver the meds and stand there like grim death until they see you take it.  Anyone but this young doctor apparently.

House felt bad about the second offense, if not the first, though the only consequence of either was a gentle remonstration from Dr. Cuddy, who, we are hoping, has other things on her mind that will be resolved soon.  Otherwise, House might just have to burn the hospital down to get a little decent banter.

Every week, "House" tests the ascendancy of drama over common sense, and every week, at least thus far, drama wins.  The show's writers pepper the script with a barrage of symptoms, conditions, tests and treatments, creating a narcotic rue of medicine that, once ingested, allows the Avid Viewer to overlook the most ridiculous things -- all those same-day MRIs, for instance, or Dr. Wilson's strange lack of patients.  The knife in the electric socket may have been pushing it -- I'm pretty sure any sort of suicide attempt requires a visit to the psych ward.  At least that's what happens on "ER."

Fortunately, the rest of the show was so good that even exploratory electrocution gets a pass. House's need to see if there is an afterlife revealed a hope not usually seen in his crusty, cynical character, as did the fact that he paged the least likeable candidate to revive him -- House may have met his match in the cutthroat pixie (now upgraded to bitch).  She is just as cold and calculating as he is, and that would be interesting.

The 10 doctors, well, nine and one impostor, left vying for the team are becoming such good characters that the sight of House, bunsen burners ablaze, about to vote a bunch of them off the island struck fear into the viewers' hearts.  It seems clear the twins are going to go, also the boring white guy with no back story, leaving the plastic surgeon, the cutthroat bitch, the lovely doctor who flubbed the medication, the old guy, the Mormon and the mouthy young man played by Kai Penn who we love so much.  Wait, that's six, and the website says five will remain.  I hope the old guy goes because I really love the plastic surgeon and the old guy isn't even a doctor.

Not that a detail like that really matters at ol' Princeton Plainsboro.

-- Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

At first glance, it would seem that the creators of “House” are trying to get a toehold in the reality TV audience. On this season's second episode of the medical drama, the canny and conniving Dr. House capitulates to the general demand that he create a new diagnostics team by assembling all the likely applicants, 40 to be precise, and pitting them against each other.

Their first case is, of course, extra-special difficult: An Air Force officer wants to know why she is “hearing colors,” but she doesn’t want the tests to be on the books because that would squash her chance to work for NASA. She comes to House, as so many of us do, because he breaks the rules.

Off the 40, arbitrarily cut down to 30, winsome young people go on assorted House-directed missions, from searching the officer’s home to washing House’s car. It quickly becomes apparent that “House” is not just tapping into the success of reality TV, it’s taking a page out of “Grey’s Anatomy.” These docs may not be interns, but they are just as ripe for competitive plots and steamy romance, if not spin-offs, as any of the folks at Seattle Grace.

The season premiere of “House” opened big — with a guy talking to his girlfriend on the cellphone just as the building she’s in collapses right before his very eyes. But for some of us, the opening credits were a much bigger source of tension. So it is with great pleasure that I can report that while last season ended with Drs. Foreman (Omar Epps), Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) and Chase (Jesse Spencer) being fired, there they are cycling through the opening credits and scuttling along House’s peripheral vision like so many ghosts of cases past.

House (Hugh Laurie, in case you have forgotten, which really isn’t possible since he has been on the cover of every magazine in America lately), meanwhile, is determined that he will not hire another team. He won’t, He Won’t, HE WON’T, not if he has to hold his breath ’til he turns blue or use a passing janitor as a sounding board. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) reacts the way he always does, by fondly psychoanalyzing House. (Really, either Wilson is in the wrong profession or he’s in lurve — and wouldn’t that be a great very special episode?) He diagnoses abandonment issues — House cared about his people, they left, so House will never put himself in that position again. Sniff.

It’s so hard for a medical drama to construct the cliff-hanger that has become the season finale standard. You can’t just leave some poor patient hovering between life and death for the entire summer -- so the writers must turn to the personal lives of their characters to leave viewers in the necessary suspense. On “House,” however, personal lives are in short supply, so somehow staffing issues must be made fascinating.

On Tuesday night’s season finale, the strange and tentative romance between Drs. Cameron and Chase was dutifully given the possibility of a last-minute reprieve but mostly the show concentrated on the state of the team.

Oh sure, there was a medical case—a woman and her husband braved the stormy seas from Cuba to seek House’s expertise, which he eventually provided—but many more people were obsessed with Foreman. Would he really go? Could House get him to stay? Would House admit he cared either way?

Isn't it nice when your favorite show actually airs for weeks on a regular basis with no "special events," illness-as-metaphor motifs or other sweeps week tinkerings? Four great "Houses" in a row prove how strong the show is when left to its basics -- a medical mystery conceit that is dominated by Hugh Laurie's provocative character, whose actions illuminate the various strengths and flaws of his colleagues.

Last night we got the whole shebang -- child in peril, possible parental abuse, cool neuron graphics and a whole lot of fun personal subplots for the rest of the cast. A little girl collapses at day care, with grown-up symptoms -- heart problems, ovarian cysts, etc. Meanwhile, Drs. Chase and Cameron (Jesse Spencer and Jennifer Morrison, respectively) snip and snarl at each other as their sex-only relationship hits the skids after Chase says he wants more. (While it's been fun watching Cameron play the horn dog -- especially since the two actors recently announced their engagement -- it was rather out of character, but hey, we all have those days.)

Hugh Laurie is a fine and versatile actor and there are many things I would like to see him do — Shakespeare, say, or Alan Ayckbourn. Dance with the Stars. What I really truly don't want to see him do is sit on the can and give himself a catheter. And yet that is an image that, thanks to last night's "House," I and several million other Americans now share.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that writer's meeting. Or when the pages first went out to the cast. The state of House's health, or addiction, or psychosis, is generally the secondary plot of most episodes, so the fact that he was in a terrible shape because he could not relieve himself seemed, at first, to be just one more subtle warning against Vicodin abuse: Kids, don't try this at home or you won't be able to pee.

Being a "House" fan is a bit like being friends with an addict. You have to put up with ridiculous behavior: a doctor who doesn't ever wear a surgical mask, mile-long tapeworms, a season-ending shooting that is never mentioned again. There are also the inexplicable disappearances — whenever "American Idol" needs a little extra leg-room, "House" goes missing — and all those lies — everyone who thought "House" really had brain cancer this week please stand on their heads.

But you remain an Avid Viewer for the same reason many people hang out with drunks and addicts: because, on top of their game, they are more fun than anyone you know.

This week's "House" will no doubt keep many of us co-dependents hooked for months. When a brain-damaged savant piano player loses the use of a hand, House, played by Hugh Laurie, is not only given license to figure out "where the music comes from," but also to decide what is more important: a small slice of real genius or a whole, but ordinary, life.

Oh, these wacky medical shows. They all say they have actual doctors as consultants but don't you think it's more like reps from Ripley's Believe It or Not? Because of its set-up — crack diagnostics team succeeds where everyone else fails —"House" has, by necessity, some of the wildest cases of the lot. Nun allergic to the copper of her forgotten IUD? Check. Guy with nails stuck all over his skull? Check. Child of dwarf who is not really a dwarf but a victim of an off-kilter pituitary? Check, check.

Even by those standards, last night's episode was a pip — girl with a condition I don't even know how to spell (OK, I checked the website, it's CIPA, which stands for congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis). Yes, "Grey's Anatomy" already used this conceit but "House" upped it with a tapeworm. As House would say, what are the odds? The tapeworm allowed a brief and disturbing homage to the John Hurt death scene in "Alien," with House extracting said tapeworm as girl, who, of course, did not require anesthesia, looked on. (I just have to ask, is House so magical he doesn't have to scrub before surgery? Last episode, he stuck his hand in some kid's bowels, without gloves, having just manually maneuvered himself into the operating room in a wheelchair. Could all these sneaky diseases be just post-op infections?)

In the three weeks between new episodes of "House," Hugh Laurie won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award for his portrayal of sardonic drug addict and master of diagnostic detection Gregory House. And on Tuesday's episode, he certainly earned both the hard way.

Fox's "American Idol" gave this episode its highest ratings ever, and it's too bad this was their introduction since it was the most un-"Housian" "House" to date. (You could practically see the network note: "Never mind that it's a hit; let's shake up the format.") Absent was the signature opening vignette of someone having a medical crisis; gone were the cool graphics of synapses firing/microbes invading/muscles detaching that give the viewer a corpuscle's-eye view; lacking was the diagnostic banter and the endless MRIs that have held this single-personality-driven show together. It was sort of like watching "MASH" without the helicopters. Or the jokes.

'House': Whole lot of shakin' goin' on!

I just have to say it out loud: "House" just keeps getting better and better. What at first seemed like a pretty silly idea -- to passive-aggressively keep from hiring a new team, House has a group of doctors competing like they're in a reality show -- has turned out to be brilliant. Not only do we get all sorts of great new characters, we also get to see House at his best, trying to figure out, and neutralize, each one. Gone are all the boring concerns about his Vicodin addiction, gone is the irritating model of House declaiming and everyone else denying (even though he's always right), gone is the increasingly dull and unbelievable tension between him and Cuddy. (As subordinate/boss, that is. The sexual tension, one hopes, is still in there somewhere.) Cuddy is done trying to squelch him; now she is just shooting for managed chaos. Which is so much more fun because it revolves more around the medicine and less around all the personal pathos of the staff.

      Last night's case was a screenwriter's dream. A man comes in with no memory but a very strange disorder -- Giovanni's Mirror Syndrome (where do they come up with these things?), which causes him to unconsciously mimic those around them. So all of the characters were subjected to a vision of their own selves, and we got to watch them react to it. How great a dramatic idea is that? Although it must be conceded that while Patient X managed to delve into the psyches of all the contestants, he stayed on the surface when mirroring House, revealing only his lust for doctor 13 and admiration for Cuddy's breasts. Too bad; it would have been interesting to get a peep into House's interior, and even more interesting to see what he thought of the image.

But the quibble is so minor, I'm ashamed to have made it. This season of "House" should be handed out as Christmas gifts to every writers' room in America to serve as a template for really shaking up a show in danger of bogging down in its own conceit. Mercifully, House didn't kick anyone off the island last night; the loss of any of the new characters will lead only to heartbreak for me. I miss the old guy already and don't care that he wasn't a doctor. Indeed, I was just as uneasy when Cuddy announced she had hired Foreman back. I love Omar Epps, but I hope this doesn't mean a return to the old "House." As good as it was, the new "House" is better. 

(Photo courtesy Fox)

So here's a question: What exactly constitutes a fireable offense at Princeton Plainsboro?  Well, now we can take "sticking a knife in an electrical outlet in order to have a near-death experience" off the list. Because that's what Dr. Gregory House did on last night's episode of "House," in a weird and obsessive attempt to prove there is no afterlife. (This from a man who underwent semi-successful medical treatment that came to him in a dream after being shot two seasons ago.) 

Also, "allowing a patient to die through negligence" can be struck, since he had one of the 10 applicants competing to be on his team dose a young man in a less-than-rigorous way -- anyone who's ever been in hospital knows that the nurses deliver the meds and stand there like grim death until they see you take it.  Anyone but this young doctor apparently.

House felt bad about the second offense, if not the first, though the only consequence of either was a gentle remonstration from Dr. Cuddy, who, we are hoping, has other things on her mind that will be resolved soon.  Otherwise, House might just have to burn the hospital down to get a little decent banter.

Every week, "House" tests the ascendancy of drama over common sense, and every week, at least thus far, drama wins.  The show's writers pepper the script with a barrage of symptoms, conditions, tests and treatments, creating a narcotic rue of medicine that, once ingested, allows the Avid Viewer to overlook the most ridiculous things -- all those same-day MRIs, for instance, or Dr. Wilson's strange lack of patients.  The knife in the electric socket may have been pushing it -- I'm pretty sure any sort of suicide attempt requires a visit to the psych ward.  At least that's what happens on "ER."

Fortunately, the rest of the show was so good that even exploratory electrocution gets a pass. House's need to see if there is an afterlife revealed a hope not usually seen in his crusty, cynical character, as did the fact that he paged the least likeable candidate to revive him -- House may have met his match in the cutthroat pixie (now upgraded to bitch).  She is just as cold and calculating as he is, and that would be interesting.

The 10 doctors, well, nine and one impostor, left vying for the team are becoming such good characters that the sight of House, bunsen burners ablaze, about to vote a bunch of them off the island struck fear into the viewers' hearts.  It seems clear the twins are going to go, also the boring white guy with no back story, leaving the plastic surgeon, the cutthroat bitch, the lovely doctor who flubbed the medication, the old guy, the Mormon and the mouthy young man played by Kai Penn who we love so much.  Wait, that's six, and the website says five will remain.  I hope the old guy goes because I really love the plastic surgeon and the old guy isn't even a doctor.

Not that a detail like that really matters at ol' Princeton Plainsboro.

-- Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

At first glance, it would seem that the creators of “House” are trying to get a toehold in the reality TV audience. On this season's second episode of the medical drama, the canny and conniving Dr. House capitulates to the general demand that he create a new diagnostics team by assembling all the likely applicants, 40 to be precise, and pitting them against each other.

Their first case is, of course, extra-special difficult: An Air Force officer wants to know why she is “hearing colors,” but she doesn’t want the tests to be on the books because that would squash her chance to work for NASA. She comes to House, as so many of us do, because he breaks the rules.

Off the 40, arbitrarily cut down to 30, winsome young people go on assorted House-directed missions, from searching the officer’s home to washing House’s car. It quickly becomes apparent that “House” is not just tapping into the success of reality TV, it’s taking a page out of “Grey’s Anatomy.” These docs may not be interns, but they are just as ripe for competitive plots and steamy romance, if not spin-offs, as any of the folks at Seattle Grace.

The season premiere of “House” opened big — with a guy talking to his girlfriend on the cellphone just as the building she’s in collapses right before his very eyes. But for some of us, the opening credits were a much bigger source of tension. So it is with great pleasure that I can report that while last season ended with Drs. Foreman (Omar Epps), Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) and Chase (Jesse Spencer) being fired, there they are cycling through the opening credits and scuttling along House’s peripheral vision like so many ghosts of cases past.

House (Hugh Laurie, in case you have forgotten, which really isn’t possible since he has been on the cover of every magazine in America lately), meanwhile, is determined that he will not hire another team. He won’t, He Won’t, HE WON’T, not if he has to hold his breath ’til he turns blue or use a passing janitor as a sounding board. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) reacts the way he always does, by fondly psychoanalyzing House. (Really, either Wilson is in the wrong profession or he’s in lurve — and wouldn’t that be a great very special episode?) He diagnoses abandonment issues — House cared about his people, they left, so House will never put himself in that position again. Sniff.

It’s so hard for a medical drama to construct the cliff-hanger that has become the season finale standard. You can’t just leave some poor patient hovering between life and death for the entire summer -- so the writers must turn to the personal lives of their characters to leave viewers in the necessary suspense. On “House,” however, personal lives are in short supply, so somehow staffing issues must be made fascinating.

On Tuesday night’s season finale, the strange and tentative romance between Drs. Cameron and Chase was dutifully given the possibility of a last-minute reprieve but mostly the show concentrated on the state of the team.

Oh sure, there was a medical case—a woman and her husband braved the stormy seas from Cuba to seek House’s expertise, which he eventually provided—but many more people were obsessed with Foreman. Would he really go? Could House get him to stay? Would House admit he cared either way?

Isn't it nice when your favorite show actually airs for weeks on a regular basis with no "special events," illness-as-metaphor motifs or other sweeps week tinkerings? Four great "Houses" in a row prove how strong the show is when left to its basics -- a medical mystery conceit that is dominated by Hugh Laurie's provocative character, whose actions illuminate the various strengths and flaws of his colleagues.

Last night we got the whole shebang -- child in peril, possible parental abuse, cool neuron graphics and a whole lot of fun personal subplots for the rest of the cast. A little girl collapses at day care, with grown-up symptoms -- heart problems, ovarian cysts, etc. Meanwhile, Drs. Chase and Cameron (Jesse Spencer and Jennifer Morrison, respectively) snip and snarl at each other as their sex-only relationship hits the skids after Chase says he wants more. (While it's been fun watching Cameron play the horn dog -- especially since the two actors recently announced their engagement -- it was rather out of character, but hey, we all have those days.)

Hugh Laurie is a fine and versatile actor and there are many things I would like to see him do — Shakespeare, say, or Alan Ayckbourn. Dance with the Stars. What I really truly don't want to see him do is sit on the can and give himself a catheter. And yet that is an image that, thanks to last night's "House," I and several million other Americans now share.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that writer's meeting. Or when the pages first went out to the cast. The state of House's health, or addiction, or psychosis, is generally the secondary plot of most episodes, so the fact that he was in a terrible shape because he could not relieve himself seemed, at first, to be just one more subtle warning against Vicodin abuse: Kids, don't try this at home or you won't be able to pee.

Being a "House" fan is a bit like being friends with an addict. You have to put up with ridiculous behavior: a doctor who doesn't ever wear a surgical mask, mile-long tapeworms, a season-ending shooting that is never mentioned again. There are also the inexplicable disappearances — whenever "American Idol" needs a little extra leg-room, "House" goes missing — and all those lies — everyone who thought "House" really had brain cancer this week please stand on their heads.

But you remain an Avid Viewer for the same reason many people hang out with drunks and addicts: because, on top of their game, they are more fun than anyone you know.

This week's "House" will no doubt keep many of us co-dependents hooked for months. When a brain-damaged savant piano player loses the use of a hand, House, played by Hugh Laurie, is not only given license to figure out "where the music comes from," but also to decide what is more important: a small slice of real genius or a whole, but ordinary, life.

Oh, these wacky medical shows. They all say they have actual doctors as consultants but don't you think it's more like reps from Ripley's Believe It or Not? Because of its set-up — crack diagnostics team succeeds where everyone else fails —"House" has, by necessity, some of the wildest cases of the lot. Nun allergic to the copper of her forgotten IUD? Check. Guy with nails stuck all over his skull? Check. Child of dwarf who is not really a dwarf but a victim of an off-kilter pituitary? Check, check.

Even by those standards, last night's episode was a pip — girl with a condition I don't even know how to spell (OK, I checked the website, it's CIPA, which stands for congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis). Yes, "Grey's Anatomy" already used this conceit but "House" upped it with a tapeworm. As House would say, what are the odds? The tapeworm allowed a brief and disturbing homage to the John Hurt death scene in "Alien," with House extracting said tapeworm as girl, who, of course, did not require anesthesia, looked on. (I just have to ask, is House so magical he doesn't have to scrub before surgery? Last episode, he stuck his hand in some kid's bowels, without gloves, having just manually maneuvered himself into the operating room in a wheelchair. Could all these sneaky diseases be just post-op infections?)

In the three weeks between new episodes of "House," Hugh Laurie won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award for his portrayal of sardonic drug addict and master of diagnostic detection Gregory House. And on Tuesday's episode, he certainly earned both the hard way.

Fox's "American Idol" gave this episode its highest ratings ever, and it's too bad this was their introduction since it was the most un-"Housian" "House" to date. (You could practically see the network note: "Never mind that it's a hit; let's shake up the format.") Absent was the signature opening vignette of someone having a medical crisis; gone were the cool graphics of synapses firing/microbes invading/muscles detaching that give the viewer a corpuscle's-eye view; lacking was the diagnostic banter and the endless MRIs that have held this single-personality-driven show together. It was sort of like watching "MASH" without the helicopters. Or the jokes.

'House': More extremities

So here's a question: What exactly constitutes a fireable offense at Princeton Plainsboro?  Well, now we can take "sticking a knife in an electrical outlet in order to have a near-death experience" off the list. Because that's what Dr. Gregory House did on last night's episode of "House," in a weird and obsessive attempt to prove there is no afterlife. (This from a man who underwent semi-successful medical treatment that came to him in a dream after being shot two seasons ago.) 

Also, "allowing a patient to die through negligence" can be struck, since he had one of the 10 applicants competing to be on his team dose a young man in a less-than-rigorous way -- anyone who's ever been in hospital knows that the nurses deliver the meds and stand there like grim death until they see you take it.  Anyone but this young doctor apparently.

House felt bad about the second offense, if not the first, though the only consequence of either was a gentle remonstration from Dr. Cuddy, who, we are hoping, has other things on her mind that will be resolved soon.  Otherwise, House might just have to burn the hospital down to get a little decent banter.

Every week, "House" tests the ascendancy of drama over common sense, and every week, at least thus far, drama wins.  The show's writers pepper the script with a barrage of symptoms, conditions, tests and treatments, creating a narcotic rue of medicine that, once ingested, allows the Avid Viewer to overlook the most ridiculous things -- all those same-day MRIs, for instance, or Dr. Wilson's strange lack of patients.  The knife in the electric socket may have been pushing it -- I'm pretty sure any sort of suicide attempt requires a visit to the psych ward.  At least that's what happens on "ER."

Fortunately, the rest of the show was so good that even exploratory electrocution gets a pass. House's need to see if there is an afterlife revealed a hope not usually seen in his crusty, cynical character, as did the fact that he paged the least likeable candidate to revive him -- House may have met his match in the cutthroat pixie (now upgraded to bitch).  She is just as cold and calculating as he is, and that would be interesting.

The 10 doctors, well, nine and one impostor, left vying for the team are becoming such good characters that the sight of House, bunsen burners ablaze, about to vote a bunch of them off the island struck fear into the viewers' hearts.  It seems clear the twins are going to go, also the boring white guy with no back story, leaving the plastic surgeon, the cutthroat bitch, the lovely doctor who flubbed the medication, the old guy, the Mormon and the mouthy young man played by Kai Penn who we love so much.  Wait, that's six, and the website says five will remain.  I hope the old guy goes because I really love the plastic surgeon and the old guy isn't even a doctor.

Not that a detail like that really matters at ol' Princeton Plainsboro.

-- Mary McNamara

(Photo courtesy Fox)

At first glance, it would seem that the creators of “House” are trying to get a toehold in the reality TV audience. On this season's second episode of the medical drama, the canny and conniving Dr. House capitulates to the general demand that he create a new diagnostics team by assembling all the likely applicants, 40 to be precise, and pitting them against each other.

Their first case is, of course, extra-special difficult: An Air Force officer wants to know why she is “hearing colors,” but she doesn’t want the tests to be on the books because that would squash her chance to work for NASA. She comes to House, as so many of us do, because he breaks the rules.

Off the 40, arbitrarily cut down to 30, winsome young people go on assorted House-directed missions, from searching the officer’s home to washing House’s car. It quickly becomes apparent that “House” is not just tapping into the success of reality TV, it’s taking a page out of “Grey’s Anatomy.” These docs may not be interns, but they are just as ripe for competitive plots and steamy romance, if not spin-offs, as any of the folks at Seattle Grace.

The season premiere of “House” opened big — with a guy talking to his girlfriend on the cellphone just as the building she’s in collapses right before his very eyes. But for some of us, the opening credits were a much bigger source of tension. So it is with great pleasure that I can report that while last season ended with Drs. Foreman (Omar Epps), Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) and Chase (Jesse Spencer) being fired, there they are cycling through the opening credits and scuttling along House’s peripheral vision like so many ghosts of cases past.

House (Hugh Laurie, in case you have forgotten, which really isn’t possible since he has been on the cover of every magazine in America lately), meanwhile, is determined that he will not hire another team. He won’t, He Won’t, HE WON’T, not if he has to hold his breath ’til he turns blue or use a passing janitor as a sounding board. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) reacts the way he always does, by fondly psychoanalyzing House. (Really, either Wilson is in the wrong profession or he’s in lurve — and wouldn’t that be a great very special episode?) He diagnoses abandonment issues — House cared about his people, they left, so House will never put himself in that position again. Sniff.

It’s so hard for a medical drama to construct the cliff-hanger that has become the season finale standard. You can’t just leave some poor patient hovering between life and death for the entire summer -- so the writers must turn to the personal lives of their characters to leave viewers in the necessary suspense. On “House,” however, personal lives are in short supply, so somehow staffing issues must be made fascinating.

On Tuesday night’s season finale, the strange and tentative romance between Drs. Cameron and Chase was dutifully given the possibility of a last-minute reprieve but mostly the show concentrated on the state of the team.

Oh sure, there was a medical case—a woman and her husband braved the stormy seas from Cuba to seek House’s expertise, which he eventually provided—but many more people were obsessed with Foreman. Would he really go? Could House get him to stay? Would House admit he cared either way?

Isn't it nice when your favorite show actually airs for weeks on a regular basis with no "special events," illness-as-metaphor motifs or other sweeps week tinkerings? Four great "Houses" in a row prove how strong the show is when left to its basics -- a medical mystery conceit that is dominated by Hugh Laurie's provocative character, whose actions illuminate the various strengths and flaws of his colleagues.

Last night we got the whole shebang -- child in peril, possible parental abuse, cool neuron graphics and a whole lot of fun personal subplots for the rest of the cast. A little girl collapses at day care, with grown-up symptoms -- heart problems, ovarian cysts, etc. Meanwhile, Drs. Chase and Cameron (Jesse Spencer and Jennifer Morrison, respectively) snip and snarl at each other as their sex-only relationship hits the skids after Chase says he wants more. (While it's been fun watching Cameron play the horn dog -- especially since the two actors recently announced their engagement -- it was rather out of character, but hey, we all have those days.)

Hugh Laurie is a fine and versatile actor and there are many things I would like to see him do — Shakespeare, say, or Alan Ayckbourn. Dance with the Stars. What I really truly don't want to see him do is sit on the can and give himself a catheter. And yet that is an image that, thanks to last night's "House," I and several million other Americans now share.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that writer's meeting. Or when the pages first went out to the cast. The state of House's health, or addiction, or psychosis, is generally the secondary plot of most episodes, so the fact that he was in a terrible shape because he could not relieve himself seemed, at first, to be just one more subtle warning against Vicodin abuse: Kids, don't try this at home or you won't be able to pee.

Being a "House" fan is a bit like being friends with an addict. You have to put up with ridiculous behavior: a doctor who doesn't ever wear a surgical mask, mile-long tapeworms, a season-ending shooting that is never mentioned again. There are also the inexplicable disappearances — whenever "American Idol" needs a little extra leg-room, "House" goes missing — and all those lies — everyone who thought "House" really had brain cancer this week please stand on their heads.

But you remain an Avid Viewer for the same reason many people hang out with drunks and addicts: because, on top of their game, they are more fun than anyone you know.

This week's "House" will no doubt keep many of us co-dependents hooked for months. When a brain-damaged savant piano player loses the use of a hand, House, played by Hugh Laurie, is not only given license to figure out "where the music comes from," but also to decide what is more important: a small slice of real genius or a whole, but ordinary, life.

Oh, these wacky medical shows. They all say they have actual doctors as consultants but don't you think it's more like reps from Ripley's Believe It or Not? Because of its set-up — crack diagnostics team succeeds where everyone else fails —"House" has, by necessity, some of the wildest cases of the lot. Nun allergic to the copper of her forgotten IUD? Check. Guy with nails stuck all over his skull? Check. Child of dwarf who is not really a dwarf but a victim of an off-kilter pituitary? Check, check.

Even by those standards, last night's episode was a pip — girl with a condition I don't even know how to spell (OK, I checked the website, it's CIPA, which stands for congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis). Yes, "Grey's Anatomy" already used this conceit but "House" upped it with a tapeworm. As House would say, what are the odds? The tapeworm allowed a brief and disturbing homage to the John Hurt death scene in "Alien," with House extracting said tapeworm as girl, who, of course, did not require anesthesia, looked on. (I just have to ask, is House so magical he doesn't have to scrub before surgery? Last episode, he stuck his hand in some kid's bowels, without gloves, having just manually maneuvered himself into the operating room in a wheelchair. Could all these sneaky diseases be just post-op infections?)

In the three weeks between new episodes of "House," Hugh Laurie won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award for his portrayal of sardonic drug addict and master of diagnostic detection Gregory House. And on Tuesday's episode, he certainly earned both the hard way.

Fox's "American Idol" gave this episode its highest ratings ever, and it's too bad this was their introduction since it was the most un-"Housian" "House" to date. (You could practically see the network note: "Never mind that it's a hit; let's shake up the format.") Absent was the signature opening vignette of someone having a medical crisis; gone were the cool graphics of synapses firing/microbes invading/muscles detaching that give the viewer a corpuscle's-eye view; lacking was the diagnostic banter and the endless MRIs that have held this single-personality-driven show together. It was sort of like watching "MASH" without the helicopters. Or the jokes.

'House': The new faces are welcome

At first glance, it would seem that the creators of “House” are trying to get a toehold in the reality TV audience. On this season's second episode of the medical drama, the canny and conniving Dr. House capitulates to the general demand that he create a new diagnostics team by assembling all the likely applicants, 40 to be precise, and pitting them against each other.

Their first case is, of course, extra-special difficult: An Air Force officer wants to know why she is “hearing colors,” but she doesn’t want the tests to be on the books because that would squash her chance to work for NASA. She comes to House, as so many of us do, because he breaks the rules.

Off the 40, arbitrarily cut down to 30, winsome young people go on assorted House-directed missions, from searching the officer’s home to washing House’s car. It quickly becomes apparent that “House” is not just tapping into the success of reality TV, it’s taking a page out of “Grey’s Anatomy.” These docs may not be interns, but they are just as ripe for competitive plots and steamy romance, if not spin-offs, as any of the folks at Seattle Grace.

The season premiere of “House” opened big — with a guy talking to his girlfriend on the cellphone just as the building she’s in collapses right before his very eyes. But for some of us, the opening credits were a much bigger source of tension. So it is with great pleasure that I can report that while last season ended with Drs. Foreman (Omar Epps), Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) and Chase (Jesse Spencer) being fired, there they are cycling through the opening credits and scuttling along House’s peripheral vision like so many ghosts of cases past.

House (Hugh Laurie, in case you have forgotten, which really isn’t possible since he has been on the cover of every magazine in America lately), meanwhile, is determined that he will not hire another team. He won’t, He Won’t, HE WON’T, not if he has to hold his breath ’til he turns blue or use a passing janitor as a sounding board. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) reacts the way he always does, by fondly psychoanalyzing House. (Really, either Wilson is in the wrong profession or he’s in lurve — and wouldn’t that be a great very special episode?) He diagnoses abandonment issues — House cared about his people, they left, so House will never put himself in that position again. Sniff.

It’s so hard for a medical drama to construct the cliff-hanger that has become the season finale standard. You can’t just leave some poor patient hovering between life and death for the entire summer -- so the writers must turn to the personal lives of their characters to leave viewers in the necessary suspense. On “House,” however, personal lives are in short supply, so somehow staffing issues must be made fascinating.

On Tuesday night’s season finale, the strange and tentative romance between Drs. Cameron and Chase was dutifully given the possibility of a last-minute reprieve but mostly the show concentrated on the state of the team.

Oh sure, there was a medical case—a woman and her husband braved the stormy seas from Cuba to seek House’s expertise, which he eventually provided—but many more people were obsessed with Foreman. Would he really go? Could House get him to stay? Would House admit he cared either way?

Isn't it nice when your favorite show actually airs for weeks on a regular basis with no "special events," illness-as-metaphor motifs or other sweeps week tinkerings? Four great "Houses" in a row prove how strong the show is when left to its basics -- a medical mystery conceit that is dominated by Hugh Laurie's provocative character, whose actions illuminate the various strengths and flaws of his colleagues.

Last night we got the whole shebang -- child in peril, possible parental abuse, cool neuron graphics and a whole lot of fun personal subplots for the rest of the cast. A little girl collapses at day care, with grown-up symptoms -- heart problems, ovarian cysts, etc. Meanwhile, Drs. Chase and Cameron (Jesse Spencer and Jennifer Morrison, respectively) snip and snarl at each other as their sex-only relationship hits the skids after Chase says he wants more. (While it's been fun watching Cameron play the horn dog -- especially since the two actors recently announced their engagement -- it was rather out of character, but hey, we all have those days.)

Hugh Laurie is a fine and versatile actor and there are many things I would like to see him do — Shakespeare, say, or Alan Ayckbourn. Dance with the Stars. What I really truly don't want to see him do is sit on the can and give himself a catheter. And yet that is an image that, thanks to last night's "House," I and several million other Americans now share.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that writer's meeting. Or when the pages first went out to the cast. The state of House's health, or addiction, or psychosis, is generally the secondary plot of most episodes, so the fact that he was in a terrible shape because he could not relieve himself seemed, at first, to be just one more subtle warning against Vicodin abuse: Kids, don't try this at home or you won't be able to pee.

Being a "House" fan is a bit like being friends with an addict. You have to put up with ridiculous behavior: a doctor who doesn't ever wear a surgical mask, mile-long tapeworms, a season-ending shooting that is never mentioned again. There are also the inexplicable disappearances — whenever "American Idol" needs a little extra leg-room, "House" goes missing — and all those lies — everyone who thought "House" really had brain cancer this week please stand on their heads.

But you remain an Avid Viewer for the same reason many people hang out with drunks and addicts: because, on top of their game, they are more fun than anyone you know.

This week's "House" will no doubt keep many of us co-dependents hooked for months. When a brain-damaged savant piano player loses the use of a hand, House, played by Hugh Laurie, is not only given license to figure out "where the music comes from," but also to decide what is more important: a small slice of real genius or a whole, but ordinary, life.

Oh, these wacky medical shows. They all say they have actual doctors as consultants but don't you think it's more like reps from Ripley's Believe It or Not? Because of its set-up — crack diagnostics team succeeds where everyone else fails —"House" has, by necessity, some of the wildest cases of the lot. Nun allergic to the copper of her forgotten IUD? Check. Guy with nails stuck all over his skull? Check. Child of dwarf who is not really a dwarf but a victim of an off-kilter pituitary? Check, check.

Even by those standards, last night's episode was a pip — girl with a condition I don't even know how to spell (OK, I checked the website, it's CIPA, which stands for congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis). Yes, "Grey's Anatomy" already used this conceit but "House" upped it with a tapeworm. As House would say, what are the odds? The tapeworm allowed a brief and disturbing homage to the John Hurt death scene in "Alien," with House extracting said tapeworm as girl, who, of course, did not require anesthesia, looked on. (I just have to ask, is House so magical he doesn't have to scrub before surgery? Last episode, he stuck his hand in some kid's bowels, without gloves, having just manually maneuvered himself into the operating room in a wheelchair. Could all these sneaky diseases be just post-op infections?)

In the three weeks between new episodes of "House," Hugh Laurie won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award for his portrayal of sardonic drug addict and master of diagnostic detection Gregory House. And on Tuesday's episode, he certainly earned both the hard way.

Fox's "American Idol" gave this episode its highest ratings ever, and it's too bad this was their introduction since it was the most un-"Housian" "House" to date. (You could practically see the network note: "Never mind that it's a hit; let's shake up the format.") Absent was the signature opening vignette of someone having a medical crisis; gone were the cool graphics of synapses firing/microbes invading/muscles detaching that give the viewer a corpuscle's-eye view; lacking was the diagnostic banter and the endless MRIs that have held this single-personality-driven show together. It was sort of like watching "MASH" without the helicopters. Or the jokes.

'House': He's back!

The season premiere of “House” opened big — with a guy talking to his girlfriend on the cellphone just as the building she’s in collapses right before his very eyes. But for some of us, the opening credits were a much bigger source of tension. So it is with great pleasure that I can report that while last season ended with Drs. Foreman (Omar Epps), Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) and Chase (Jesse Spencer) being fired, there they are cycling through the opening credits and scuttling along House’s peripheral vision like so many ghosts of cases past.

House (Hugh Laurie, in case you have forgotten, which really isn’t possible since he has been on the cover of every magazine in America lately), meanwhile, is determined that he will not hire another team. He won’t, He Won’t, HE WON’T, not if he has to hold his breath ’til he turns blue or use a passing janitor as a sounding board. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) reacts the way he always does, by fondly psychoanalyzing House. (Really, either Wilson is in the wrong profession or he’s in lurve — and wouldn’t that be a great very special episode?) He diagnoses abandonment issues — House cared about his people, they left, so House will never put himself in that position again. Sniff.

It’s so hard for a medical drama to construct the cliff-hanger that has become the season finale standard. You can’t just leave some poor patient hovering between life and death for the entire summer -- so the writers must turn to the personal lives of their characters to leave viewers in the necessary suspense. On “House,” however, personal lives are in short supply, so somehow staffing issues must be made fascinating.

On Tuesday night’s season finale, the strange and tentative romance between Drs. Cameron and Chase was dutifully given the possibility of a last-minute reprieve but mostly the show concentrated on the state of the team.

Oh sure, there was a medical case—a woman and her husband braved the stormy seas from Cuba to seek House’s expertise, which he eventually provided—but many more people were obsessed with Foreman. Would he really go? Could House get him to stay? Would House admit he cared either way?

Isn't it nice when your favorite show actually airs for weeks on a regular basis with no "special events," illness-as-metaphor motifs or other sweeps week tinkerings? Four great "Houses" in a row prove how strong the show is when left to its basics -- a medical mystery conceit that is dominated by Hugh Laurie's provocative character, whose actions illuminate the various strengths and flaws of his colleagues.

Last night we got the whole shebang -- child in peril, possible parental abuse, cool neuron graphics and a whole lot of fun personal subplots for the rest of the cast. A little girl collapses at day care, with grown-up symptoms -- heart problems, ovarian cysts, etc. Meanwhile, Drs. Chase and Cameron (Jesse Spencer and Jennifer Morrison, respectively) snip and snarl at each other as their sex-only relationship hits the skids after Chase says he wants more. (While it's been fun watching Cameron play the horn dog -- especially since the two actors recently announced their engagement -- it was rather out of character, but hey, we all have those days.)

Hugh Laurie is a fine and versatile actor and there are many things I would like to see him do — Shakespeare, say, or Alan Ayckbourn. Dance with the Stars. What I really truly don't want to see him do is sit on the can and give himself a catheter. And yet that is an image that, thanks to last night's "House," I and several million other Americans now share.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that writer's meeting. Or when the pages first went out to the cast. The state of House's health, or addiction, or psychosis, is generally the secondary plot of most episodes, so the fact that he was in a terrible shape because he could not relieve himself seemed, at first, to be just one more subtle warning against Vicodin abuse: Kids, don't try this at home or you won't be able to pee.

Being a "House" fan is a bit like being friends with an addict. You have to put up with ridiculous behavior: a doctor who doesn't ever wear a surgical mask, mile-long tapeworms, a season-ending shooting that is never mentioned again. There are also the inexplicable disappearances — whenever "American Idol" needs a little extra leg-room, "House" goes missing — and all those lies — everyone who thought "House" really had brain cancer this week please stand on their heads.

But you remain an Avid Viewer for the same reason many people hang out with drunks and addicts: because, on top of their game, they are more fun than anyone you know.

This week's "House" will no doubt keep many of us co-dependents hooked for months. When a brain-damaged savant piano player loses the use of a hand, House, played by Hugh Laurie, is not only given license to figure out "where the music comes from," but also to decide what is more important: a small slice of real genius or a whole, but ordinary, life.

Oh, these wacky medical shows. They all say they have actual doctors as consultants but don't you think it's more like reps from Ripley's Believe It or Not? Because of its set-up — crack diagnostics team succeeds where everyone else fails —"House" has, by necessity, some of the wildest cases of the lot. Nun allergic to the copper of her forgotten IUD? Check. Guy with nails stuck all over his skull? Check. Child of dwarf who is not really a dwarf but a victim of an off-kilter pituitary? Check, check.

Even by those standards, last night's episode was a pip — girl with a condition I don't even know how to spell (OK, I checked the website, it's CIPA, which stands for congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis). Yes, "Grey's Anatomy" already used this conceit but "House" upped it with a tapeworm. As House would say, what are the odds? The tapeworm allowed a brief and disturbing homage to the John Hurt death scene in "Alien," with House extracting said tapeworm as girl, who, of course, did not require anesthesia, looked on. (I just have to ask, is House so magical he doesn't have to scrub before surgery? Last episode, he stuck his hand in some kid's bowels, without gloves, having just manually maneuvered himself into the operating room in a wheelchair. Could all these sneaky diseases be just post-op infections?)

In the three weeks between new episodes of "House," Hugh Laurie won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award for his portrayal of sardonic drug addict and master of diagnostic detection Gregory House. And on Tuesday's episode, he certainly earned both the hard way.

Fox's "American Idol" gave this episode its highest ratings ever, and it's too bad this was their introduction since it was the most un-"Housian" "House" to date. (You could practically see the network note: "Never mind that it's a hit; let's shake up the format.") Absent was the signature opening vignette of someone having a medical crisis; gone were the cool graphics of synapses firing/microbes invading/muscles detaching that give the viewer a corpuscle's-eye view; lacking was the diagnostic banter and the endless MRIs that have held this single-personality-driven show together. It was sort of like watching "MASH" without the helicopters. Or the jokes.

'House': A season finale without suspense

It’s so hard for a medical drama to construct the cliff-hanger that has become the season finale standard. You can’t just leave some poor patient hovering between life and death for the entire summer -- so the writers must turn to the personal lives of their characters to leave viewers in the necessary suspense. On “House,” however, personal lives are in short supply, so somehow staffing issues must be made fascinating.

On Tuesday night’s season finale, the strange and tentative romance between Drs. Cameron and Chase was dutifully given the possibility of a last-minute reprieve but mostly the show concentrated on the state of the team.

Oh sure, there was a medical case—a woman and her husband braved the stormy seas from Cuba to seek House’s expertise, which he eventually provided—but many more people were obsessed with Foreman. Would he really go? Could House get him to stay? Would House admit he cared either way?

Isn't it nice when your favorite show actually airs for weeks on a regular basis with no "special events," illness-as-metaphor motifs or other sweeps week tinkerings? Four great "Houses" in a row prove how strong the show is when left to its basics -- a medical mystery conceit that is dominated by Hugh Laurie's provocative character, whose actions illuminate the various strengths and flaws of his colleagues.

Last night we got the whole shebang -- child in peril, possible parental abuse, cool neuron graphics and a whole lot of fun personal subplots for the rest of the cast. A little girl collapses at day care, with grown-up symptoms -- heart problems, ovarian cysts, etc. Meanwhile, Drs. Chase and Cameron (Jesse Spencer and Jennifer Morrison, respectively) snip and snarl at each other as their sex-only relationship hits the skids after Chase says he wants more. (While it's been fun watching Cameron play the horn dog -- especially since the two actors recently announced their engagement -- it was rather out of character, but hey, we all have those days.)

Hugh Laurie is a fine and versatile actor and there are many things I would like to see him do — Shakespeare, say, or Alan Ayckbourn. Dance with the Stars. What I really truly don't want to see him do is sit on the can and give himself a catheter. And yet that is an image that, thanks to last night's "House," I and several million other Americans now share.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that writer's meeting. Or when the pages first went out to the cast. The state of House's health, or addiction, or psychosis, is generally the secondary plot of most episodes, so the fact that he was in a terrible shape because he could not relieve himself seemed, at first, to be just one more subtle warning against Vicodin abuse: Kids, don't try this at home or you won't be able to pee.

Being a "House" fan is a bit like being friends with an addict. You have to put up with ridiculous behavior: a doctor who doesn't ever wear a surgical mask, mile-long tapeworms, a season-ending shooting that is never mentioned again. There are also the inexplicable disappearances — whenever "American Idol" needs a little extra leg-room, "House" goes missing — and all those lies — everyone who thought "House" really had brain cancer this week please stand on their heads.

But you remain an Avid Viewer for the same reason many people hang out with drunks and addicts: because, on top of their game, they are more fun than anyone you know.

This week's "House" will no doubt keep many of us co-dependents hooked for months. When a brain-damaged savant piano player loses the use of a hand, House, played by Hugh Laurie, is not only given license to figure out "where the music comes from," but also to decide what is more important: a small slice of real genius or a whole, but ordinary, life.

Oh, these wacky medical shows. They all say they have actual doctors as consultants but don't you think it's more like reps from Ripley's Believe It or Not? Because of its set-up — crack diagnostics team succeeds where everyone else fails —"House" has, by necessity, some of the wildest cases of the lot. Nun allergic to the copper of her forgotten IUD? Check. Guy with nails stuck all over his skull? Check. Child of dwarf who is not really a dwarf but a victim of an off-kilter pituitary? Check, check.

Even by those standards, last night's episode was a pip — girl with a condition I don't even know how to spell (OK, I checked the website, it's CIPA, which stands for congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis). Yes, "Grey's Anatomy" already used this conceit but "House" upped it with a tapeworm. As House would say, what are the odds? The tapeworm allowed a brief and disturbing homage to the John Hurt death scene in "Alien," with House extracting said tapeworm as girl, who, of course, did not require anesthesia, looked on. (I just have to ask, is House so magical he doesn't have to scrub before surgery? Last episode, he stuck his hand in some kid's bowels, without gloves, having just manually maneuvered himself into the operating room in a wheelchair. Could all these sneaky diseases be just post-op infections?)

In the three weeks between new episodes of "House," Hugh Laurie won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award for his portrayal of sardonic drug addict and master of diagnostic detection Gregory House. And on Tuesday's episode, he certainly earned both the hard way.

Fox's "American Idol" gave this episode its highest ratings ever, and it's too bad this was their introduction since it was the most un-"Housian" "House" to date. (You could practically see the network note: "Never mind that it's a hit; let's shake up the format.") Absent was the signature opening vignette of someone having a medical crisis; gone were the cool graphics of synapses firing/microbes invading/muscles detaching that give the viewer a corpuscle's-eye view; lacking was the diagnostic banter and the endless MRIs that have held this single-personality-driven show together. It was sort of like watching "MASH" without the helicopters. Or the jokes.

'House' uninterrupted: A crackling pleasure

Isn't it nice when your favorite show actually airs for weeks on a regular basis with no "special events," illness-as-metaphor motifs or other sweeps week tinkerings? Four great "Houses" in a row prove how strong the show is when left to its basics -- a medical mystery conceit that is dominated by Hugh Laurie's provocative character, whose actions illuminate the various strengths and flaws of his colleagues.

Last night we got the whole shebang -- child in peril, possible parental abuse, cool neuron graphics and a whole lot of fun personal subplots for the rest of the cast. A little girl collapses at day care, with grown-up symptoms -- heart problems, ovarian cysts, etc. Meanwhile, Drs. Chase and Cameron (Jesse Spencer and Jennifer Morrison, respectively) snip and snarl at each other as their sex-only relationship hits the skids after Chase says he wants more. (While it's been fun watching Cameron play the horn dog -- especially since the two actors recently announced their engagement -- it was rather out of character, but hey, we all have those days.)

Hugh Laurie is a fine and versatile actor and there are many things I would like to see him do — Shakespeare, say, or Alan Ayckbourn. Dance with the Stars. What I really truly don't want to see him do is sit on the can and give himself a catheter. And yet that is an image that, thanks to last night's "House," I and several million other Americans now share.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that writer's meeting. Or when the pages first went out to the cast. The state of House's health, or addiction, or psychosis, is generally the secondary plot of most episodes, so the fact that he was in a terrible shape because he could not relieve himself seemed, at first, to be just one more subtle warning against Vicodin abuse: Kids, don't try this at home or you won't be able to pee.

Being a "House" fan is a bit like being friends with an addict. You have to put up with ridiculous behavior: a doctor who doesn't ever wear a surgical mask, mile-long tapeworms, a season-ending shooting that is never mentioned again. There are also the inexplicable disappearances — whenever "American Idol" needs a little extra leg-room, "House" goes missing — and all those lies — everyone who thought "House" really had brain cancer this week please stand on their heads.

But you remain an Avid Viewer for the same reason many people hang out with drunks and addicts: because, on top of their game, they are more fun than anyone you know.

This week's "House" will no doubt keep many of us co-dependents hooked for months. When a brain-damaged savant piano player loses the use of a hand, House, played by Hugh Laurie, is not only given license to figure out "where the music comes from," but also to decide what is more important: a small slice of real genius or a whole, but ordinary, life.

Oh, these wacky medical shows. They all say they have actual doctors as consultants but don't you think it's more like reps from Ripley's Believe It or Not? Because of its set-up — crack diagnostics team succeeds where everyone else fails —"House" has, by necessity, some of the wildest cases of the lot. Nun allergic to the copper of her forgotten IUD? Check. Guy with nails stuck all over his skull? Check. Child of dwarf who is not really a dwarf but a victim of an off-kilter pituitary? Check, check.

Even by those standards, last night's episode was a pip — girl with a condition I don't even know how to spell (OK, I checked the website, it's CIPA, which stands for congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis). Yes, "Grey's Anatomy" already used this conceit but "House" upped it with a tapeworm. As House would say, what are the odds? The tapeworm allowed a brief and disturbing homage to the John Hurt death scene in "Alien," with House extracting said tapeworm as girl, who, of course, did not require anesthesia, looked on. (I just have to ask, is House so magical he doesn't have to scrub before surgery? Last episode, he stuck his hand in some kid's bowels, without gloves, having just manually maneuvered himself into the operating room in a wheelchair. Could all these sneaky diseases be just post-op infections?)

In the three weeks between new episodes of "House," Hugh Laurie won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award for his portrayal of sardonic drug addict and master of diagnostic detection Gregory House. And on Tuesday's episode, he certainly earned both the hard way.

Fox's "American Idol" gave this episode its highest ratings ever, and it's too bad this was their introduction since it was the most un-"Housian" "House" to date. (You could practically see the network note: "Never mind that it's a hit; let's shake up the format.") Absent was the signature opening vignette of someone having a medical crisis; gone were the cool graphics of synapses firing/microbes invading/muscles detaching that give the viewer a corpuscle's-eye view; lacking was the diagnostic banter and the endless MRIs that have held this single-personality-driven show together. It was sort of like watching "MASH" without the helicopters. Or the jokes.

'House': Seeing too much of this 'House'

Hugh Laurie is a fine and versatile actor and there are many things I would like to see him do — Shakespeare, say, or Alan Ayckbourn. Dance with the Stars. What I really truly don't want to see him do is sit on the can and give himself a catheter. And yet that is an image that, thanks to last night's "House," I and several million other Americans now share.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that writer's meeting. Or when the pages first went out to the cast. The state of House's health, or addiction, or psychosis, is generally the secondary plot of most episodes, so the fact that he was in a terrible shape because he could not relieve himself seemed, at first, to be just one more subtle warning against Vicodin abuse: Kids, don't try this at home or you won't be able to pee.

Being a "House" fan is a bit like being friends with an addict. You have to put up with ridiculous behavior: a doctor who doesn't ever wear a surgical mask, mile-long tapeworms, a season-ending shooting that is never mentioned again. There are also the inexplicable disappearances — whenever "American Idol" needs a little extra leg-room, "House" goes missing — and all those lies — everyone who thought "House" really had brain cancer this week please stand on their heads.

But you remain an Avid Viewer for the same reason many people hang out with drunks and addicts: because, on top of their game, they are more fun than anyone you know.

This week's "House" will no doubt keep many of us co-dependents hooked for months. When a brain-damaged savant piano player loses the use of a hand, House, played by Hugh Laurie, is not only given license to figure out "where the music comes from," but also to decide what is more important: a small slice of real genius or a whole, but ordinary, life.

Oh, these wacky medical shows. They all say they have actual doctors as consultants but don't you think it's more like reps from Ripley's Believe It or Not? Because of its set-up — crack diagnostics team succeeds where everyone else fails —"House" has, by necessity, some of the wildest cases of the lot. Nun allergic to the copper of her forgotten IUD? Check. Guy with nails stuck all over his skull? Check. Child of dwarf who is not really a dwarf but a victim of an off-kilter pituitary? Check, check.

Even by those standards, last night's episode was a pip — girl with a condition I don't even know how to spell (OK, I checked the website, it's CIPA, which stands for congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis). Yes, "Grey's Anatomy" already used this conceit but "House" upped it with a tapeworm. As House would say, what are the odds? The tapeworm allowed a brief and disturbing homage to the John Hurt death scene in "Alien," with House extracting said tapeworm as girl, who, of course, did not require anesthesia, looked on. (I just have to ask, is House so magical he doesn't have to scrub before surgery? Last episode, he stuck his hand in some kid's bowels, without gloves, having just manually maneuvered himself into the operating room in a wheelchair. Could all these sneaky diseases be just post-op infections?)

In the three weeks between new episodes of "House," Hugh Laurie won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award for his portrayal of sardonic drug addict and master of diagnostic detection Gregory House. And on Tuesday's episode, he certainly earned both the hard way.

Fox's "American Idol" gave this episode its highest ratings ever, and it's too bad this was their introduction since it was the most un-"Housian" "House" to date. (You could practically see the network note: "Never mind that it's a hit; let's shake up the format.") Absent was the signature opening vignette of someone having a medical crisis; gone were the cool graphics of synapses firing/microbes invading/muscles detaching that give the viewer a corpuscle's-eye view; lacking was the diagnostic banter and the endless MRIs that have held this single-personality-driven show together. It was sort of like watching "MASH" without the helicopters. Or the jokes.

'House': Piano player gives 'House' junkies a decent fix

Being a "House" fan is a bit like being friends with an addict. You have to put up with ridiculous behavior: a doctor who doesn't ever wear a surgical mask, mile-long tapeworms, a season-ending shooting that is never mentioned again. There are also the inexplicable disappearances — whenever "American Idol" needs a little extra leg-room, "House" goes missing — and all those lies — everyone who thought "House" really had brain cancer this week please stand on their heads.

But you remain an Avid Viewer for the same reason many people hang out with drunks and addicts: because, on top of their game, they are more fun than anyone you know.

This week's "House" will no doubt keep many of us co-dependents hooked for months. When a brain-damaged savant piano player loses the use of a hand, House, played by Hugh Laurie, is not only given license to figure out "where the music comes from," but also to decide what is more important: a small slice of real genius or a whole, but ordinary, life.

Oh, these wacky medical shows. They all say they have actual doctors as consultants but don't you think it's more like reps from Ripley's Believe It or Not? Because of its set-up — crack diagnostics team succeeds where everyone else fails —"House" has, by necessity, some of the wildest cases of the lot. Nun allergic to the copper of her forgotten IUD? Check. Guy with nails stuck all over his skull? Check. Child of dwarf who is not really a dwarf but a victim of an off-kilter pituitary? Check, check.

Even by those standards, last night's episode was a pip — girl with a condition I don't even know how to spell (OK, I checked the website, it's CIPA, which stands for congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis). Yes, "Grey's Anatomy" already used this conceit but "House" upped it with a tapeworm. As House would say, what are the odds? The tapeworm allowed a brief and disturbing homage to the John Hurt death scene in "Alien," with House extracting said tapeworm as girl, who, of course, did not require anesthesia, looked on. (I just have to ask, is House so magical he doesn't have to scrub before surgery? Last episode, he stuck his hand in some kid's bowels, without gloves, having just manually maneuvered himself into the operating room in a wheelchair. Could all these sneaky diseases be just post-op infections?)

In the three weeks between new episodes of "House," Hugh Laurie won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award for his portrayal of sardonic drug addict and master of diagnostic detection Gregory House. And on Tuesday's episode, he certainly earned both the hard way.

Fox's "American Idol" gave this episode its highest ratings ever, and it's too bad this was their introduction since it was the most un-"Housian" "House" to date. (You could practically see the network note: "Never mind that it's a hit; let's shake up the format.") Absent was the signature opening vignette of someone having a medical crisis; gone were the cool graphics of synapses firing/microbes invading/muscles detaching that give the viewer a corpuscle's-eye view; lacking was the diagnostic banter and the endless MRIs that have held this single-personality-driven show together. It was sort of like watching "MASH" without the helicopters. Or the jokes.

'House': Over the top?

Oh, these wacky medical shows. They all say they have actual doctors as consultants but don't you think it's more like reps from Ripley's Believe It or Not? Because of its set-up — crack diagnostics team succeeds where everyone else fails —"House" has, by necessity, some of the wildest cases of the lot. Nun allergic to the copper of her forgotten IUD? Check. Guy with nails stuck all over his skull? Check. Child of dwarf who is not really a dwarf but a victim of an off-kilter pituitary? Check, check.

Even by those standards, last night's episode was a pip — girl with a condition I don't even know how to spell (OK, I checked the website, it's CIPA, which stands for congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis). Yes, "Grey's Anatomy" already used this conceit but "House" upped it with a tapeworm. As House would say, what are the odds? The tapeworm allowed a brief and disturbing homage to the John Hurt death scene in "Alien," with House extracting said tapeworm as girl, who, of course, did not require anesthesia, looked on. (I just have to ask, is House so magical he doesn't have to scrub before surgery? Last episode, he stuck his hand in some kid's bowels, without gloves, having just manually maneuvered himself into the operating room in a wheelchair. Could all these sneaky diseases be just post-op infections?)

In the three weeks between new episodes of "House," Hugh Laurie won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award for his portrayal of sardonic drug addict and master of diagnostic detection Gregory House. And on Tuesday's episode, he certainly earned both the hard way.

Fox's "American Idol" gave this episode its highest ratings ever, and it's too bad this was their introduction since it was the most un-"Housian" "House" to date. (You could practically see the network note: "Never mind that it's a hit; let's shake up the format.") Absent was the signature opening vignette of someone having a medical crisis; gone were the cool graphics of synapses firing/microbes invading/muscles detaching that give the viewer a corpuscle's-eye view; lacking was the diagnostic banter and the endless MRIs that have held this single-personality-driven show together. It was sort of like watching "MASH" without the helicopters. Or the jokes.

'House': 'Idol' welcome mat to a different 'House'

In the three weeks between new episodes of "House," Hugh Laurie won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award for his portrayal of sardonic drug addict and master of diagnostic detection Gregory House. And on Tuesday's episode, he certainly earned both the hard way.

Fox's "American Idol" gave this episode its highest ratings ever, and it's too bad this was their introduction since it was the most un-"Housian" "House" to date. (You could practically see the network note: "Never mind that it's a hit; let's shake up the format.") Absent was the signature opening vignette of someone having a medical crisis; gone were the cool graphics of synapses firing/microbes invading/muscles detaching that give the viewer a corpuscle's-eye view; lacking was the diagnostic banter and the endless MRIs that have held this single-personality-driven show together. It was sort of like watching "MASH" without the helicopters. Or the jokes.