Heresy again

[avevale_intelligencer]

Having seen a couple of episodes of House last night, I find myself in awe at how brilliantly Hugh Laurie plays a character I would walk down a different street to avoid, and whom I would move to another town rather than let treat me for anything. The series shows perfectly that there is more to being a doctor than knowing how to cure every known disease.

Sorry, but I just don't care that he's got problems. I know people with problems, horrendous problems, and they manage to be bearable and even wonderful human beings in spite of it all. I find it amazing that a character who not only doesn't try to be nice, but makes an active effort to be horrible, garners so much love and admiration from the people around him. The horribleness is not in any way linked to the medical brilliance--he didn't have to give up his basic humanity to become a medical expert, unless there's something about American health care education that I haven't grasped.

I'm sure it's all very clever, and I'm probably very stupid for preferring shows with characters who at least try to get along, but I don't like it. I'll go to that nice Doctor Finlay instead. He may not recognise my epicacular philibompstering busticulitis, and I may die of it, but at least I'll die not wanting to.

(Also: medical mysteries. What's up with that? Where's the fun in waiting for the detective/doctor to pull some disease I've never heard of out of his hat and realise that the cure is--gasp--an injection of common tap water? I prefer my whodunnits with clues I can look back on and realise I should have seen.)

Grump.

Comments

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

HOUSE: Blasphemer!

COLLEAGUE: Oh come on, you're a religious personage now?

HOUSE: No, I said Blass' Femur! It has to be Blass' Femur, look at him, he's got the beard and the little squiddy eyes and the crossed legs...

COLLEAGUE: There hasn't been a case of Blass' Femur in over 70 years...

COLLEAGUE 2: I don't think his eyes are squiddy...

HOUSE: What, you think I can't diagnose squiddy eyes now?

COLLEAGUE 3 (NONCHALANTLY IN THE BACKGROUND): They're not as squiddy as yours.

COLLEAGUE 2 (HASTILY INTERVENING): There was that case of Bludgen's Tibia last week.

HOUSE: Oh come on, next you'll be telling me it's Swiverson's Fetlock!

(Continue ad nauseum.)

[paradisacorbasi.livejournal.com]

Dear one:

First and foremost, please stop beating yourself up. You are allowed to like what you like and dislike what you dislike. It's not heresy, even if other people disagree. It's just a simple preference issue, and you should not treat it as cause to beat yourself up.

Secondly: while I do like the show House itself?

I do not like Gregory House, MD one little bit. I can't stand him. He is abrasive. He is mean. He is downright cruel. He is sarcastic. He is every form of unpleasant I could come up with.

Yes, he's a very good doctor.

And what's really telling is that he's capable of being nice and sweet when he wants to. He's generally not as obnoxiously tactless and nasty to children under the age of 16. Their parents are another matter.

The thing is, it's to some degree an act. And it's an act to disguise the fact that he cares far more than he lets on. He'll sneer and tell you he won't bother with what seems to be a perfectly common case of Plantar's Warts because it bores him, but he will also offer the way to resolve that simple issue as he's limping away with his nose in the air.

But I digress.

My feeling is people like it because it's a vicarious catharsis for them. There are people in the world who aggravate, annoy, distress, frustrate and enrage us so that "we" wish we could just casually cut them down with the careless ease House seems to.

In real life, almost nobody is as nasty and obnoxious as Greg House. Nobody gets away with being that horrible. In real life, somebody would have punched him in the face or smacked him in the head with all their might using a bedpan. So it's a twisted kind of wish fulfillment -- he gets away with saying and doing things people would like to say and do to the "stupid" people they encounter.

It's still your right to dislike it, of course. Just really wish you wouldn't beat yourself up while explaining why you don't.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I tend to be a bit defensive when I seem to be in a tiny minority, and also when I know my feelings aren't based on a fair sampling. Possibly if I'd watched it from the beginning I'd have seen what a warm and wonderful human being-type character he is underneath it all...but if he was like this in the beginning I don't think I'd have stuck with it anyway.

Also, I know from my reading elsewhere that preferring stories with nice characters in them is often categorised as the sign of a shallow, superficial, genre-fixated fanboy, and I have a sneaking feeling that I am just that...and the truth hurts. :)

But I think you are right (no surprise there) as to the reasons why people like it. Or him, anyway.

[dickgloucester.livejournal.com]

Saw it once, thought it was an amusing one-trick pony. Didn't feel I missed anything not seeing it again. *shrug*

Why should you allow other people's enthusiasm for it to make you so defensive? You have a right to your likes and dislikes, just as anyone does!

[lindaneely.livejournal.com]

I watched a few episodes to see Hugh Laurie - after all, I loved him on Black Adder. Unfortunately, I got bored because all the episodes seem to follow the same pattern. . . "try this" "okay that didn't work" "what are they lying about" "try this" "okay that didn't work" "what are they lying about" try this etc etc.

Too bad. Hugh Laurie is an amazing actor. I'd just like to see him in something worth his talent.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I still think he should have been grabbed for the role of Captain Carrot in the Discworld books. He's probably too old now, but if you look at the cover of the book A Bit Of Fry And Laurie (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bit-Fry-Laurie-Stephen/dp/0749307056), that's definitely Carrot's face.

[howeird]

I don't get why any of my friends can say good things about the show, let alone be addicted to it. I'm not at all impressed with Hugh Laurie, it doesn't take a lot to play an angry man with problems, I do it IRL all the time. He'd make a superb angry homeless man, living under a bridge curled up in his cardboard box with a bottle, shouting at whomever passes by his full diagnosis of their medical conditions; oddly coherent through his drunken stupor.

But it's not just the Bad Doctor, the whole show has a feeling of a cloud hanging over it, and any time I channel surf to it, I hit the "next channel" button instinctively.

[deviant-gent.livejournal.com]

I refuse to watch it on account of his racist tendancies towards Lupus.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

It is, of course, a medical pastiche of Sherlock Holmes as the names House and Wilson testify, not to mention their characters.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

So presumably the administrator person he alternately persecutes and snogs* is the Lestrade equivalent.

I'll take your word for it, but I'm fairly Holmes conscious and I have to reach quite a way to make that connection work.

*at least in the episodes I saw...

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Oh, it has been acknowledged from the early days of the series - and from your description that sounds like a very late episode....

[hurdle1gal.livejournal.com]

The show was created on the basis of creating a modern, medically educated version of Sherlock Holmes. If you check it out on wikipedia.org, you'll find other references to Holmes and his life in the TV show.

But the character is always this way. There are some times where we see his humanity or how he came to be this way (he was always a skeptic, but I think that his character being in constant pain influences some of his rash behavior (he takes Vicidin all the time to combat the pain but I hear this season he is in rehab for that addiction)).

I watch the show on occasion and enjoy it, mainly more for the character interactions. Sure it's repetitive, but aren't all investigative solving shows (like CSI, Bones, Law and Order, etc)?

[paradisacorbasi.livejournal.com]

Oh, and this metaquote about House made me think it might perhaps make you smile, and that I might perhaps have been putting too much thought into why people like House.


http://community.livejournal.com/metaquotes/7270261.html