I WAS A little p.o'd by HOUSE's Bobby Ewing episode this week, but I have to admit I find Jaime Weinman's latest take on the show quite convincing -- even if he goes to some lengths to back away from it.
it’s pointless to complain that nobody ever changes, because that’s the whole point of the show.As I said, this is not an uncommon or illegitimate take on House. I don’t really buy it, but it does indicate why House has been so successful: it combines the up-to-date features of hip TV storytelling — ongoing storylines, speculation about what the characters will do next — with the traditions of comfort-food television, the most important tradition being that every episode should be pretty much the same. David Shore may not have planned it all out like this, but he hit upon a way to have his cake and eat it too, to create the comfort of familiarity without being written off as TV for the uncool. And he did it by creating a premise that turns the biggest tradition of old-school episodic television — that people stay the same no matter what happens — into a big over-arching worldview.
Like I said, I don’t exactly buy this, or I might have been more likely to buy it back when the show was at its peak. The past season has been uneven enough that I’m not prepared to accept the repetition as part of some statement about human nature. But it is part of the genius of House that, at its best, it made formula storytelling into something cool by transforming the formula into a worldview.
It occurs to me that this is exactly how I've treated HOUSE for the last couple seasons: comfort food. I'm watching a lot less TV right now than usual (that always happens when I'm on a show) and I watch different shows for different reasons. Like a lot of people right now, I'm drawn to comedies, which is why How I Met Your Mother continues to grow in my estimation, and why 30 Rock is crack to me (even if I have to stay up to 11pm...seriously...to catch it.)
But HOUSE, which is a show I used to call brilliant, is now like a pair of comfortable slippers. It's the Snuggie of network TeeVee. And that's OK.
But seriously, no more Bobby Ewing in the shower, m'kay?
2 comments:
Speaking of 'Ewing in the shower', did you happen to catch the Bones season finale? Hmmm....
See, my thing with House was that I didn't get into it until about 4 1/2 seasons in, and then my ladyfriend and I used the Showtime 11 PM reruns to completely catch up in about a month and a half. And the idea that it turned the formula of standalone episodic TV into a worldview is an interesting one.
But the important fact to me in watching it is that no one on the show other than House matters. It's like the Poochie school of television. For every second of the show, House either has to be on screen, or else every other character simply has to stand around asking "Where's Poochie?" The formula (here shown as reverse-sublimating -- a term I here made up -- the idea that TV characters never change) that hangs around House is just window-dressing. Because realistically, House has changed, albeit subtly, over the course of the show. His team, whichever iteration of it is around him (and I'm one of the few who enjoys the new team at least as much as the old one, even with Kutner gone -- OK, maybe I only enjoy Taub anymore), is only really there to ask where Poochie went. So long as House is there, and is being House, and we can get further and further into the man's head, lately even deeper through his hallucinations, and see HOW this fundamentally broken person grows and changes, the show will continue to be a success.
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