Building from Nurse Jackie and Don Draper, I thought that I'd continue on this anti-hero vein and talk a little bit about my current tv series crush, House, MD. I'm always behind on television because, you know, I'm way too cool to watch anything as it airs on prime time, so we've been watching on DVD. Fortunately for me, my brother left Season 5 at our house and---hey Bro, if you're reading this, it's a great season SUCKAH! wait until Turkey weekend to get it back!!!-- we've become immersed in Season 5, which is the best so far. But House is like that--whatever season you are watching seems like the best season. Despite considerable emotional difficulties brought on by immediate, unexpected fame and success, Hugh Laurie never loses a creative edge, and makes the devices of the show--like the predictable third act AHA! that both ties a and b story lines together and solves the diagnostic puzzle of the week--seem authentically fresh, no matter how many times he has to do it.
Originally conceived of as another procedural show like CSI, the creators quickly realized that the damaged-genius protagonist was their creative vein of gold, and season 1 evolved from the individual puzzles he solves to relationships and character development. House is a maverick, an unparalleled diagnostic genius, a musician of substantial ability, and a practical joker--he is also mean spirited, lacking in empathy, self-absorbed, and a pill-popping drug addict, as gifted in inflicting pain on those he purportedly cares about as he is in manipulating a differential.
At first the supporting characters are wooden devices, there to prop up House--but by Season 2, they've each become their own enigma, and the writers undress them slowly, confidently. One character in particular had the potential to be cloyingly inauthentic, the necessary sidekick Dr. James Wilson. House, a narcissist who doesn't feel that communication is particularly essential, and asks no permission before acting makes Wilson a necessary device (see Don Draper and The Nick Caraway Effect) as he probes in order that we may find out what the impenetrable doctor might be thinking or feeling. Gregory House is modeled on Sherlock Holmes, of course--the name is a play on Holmes, and Robert Sean Leonard's endearing Dr. Wilson is Laurie's Watson. Wilson is the key to knowing House, and finding him sympathetic in anyway. It would be easy to forget the difficultly in believing that a man like Wilson would be such a loyal and dutiful friend to someone as frustrating and pain inflicting as House--but even that is a secret eventually laid bare and the answer is satisfyingly believable, and extends Wilson from two dimensions to three and possible four.
There is a lot of careful planting and sowing in Seasons 1-3, and seasons 4 and 5 are harvest time; I give the writers the Joss Whedon Award for unanticipated and gut wrenching character story twists--the kind that almost leave you angry that the creators manipulated you into something akin to authentic grief.
Expert storytelling aside, what is so fascinating about House is not only why the characters in the series put up with him but why we do. Shore, the creator of the character who he claims was inspired by Holmes and Dr. Perry Cox from Scrubs, was really concerned that, in the wrong hands, House would be just hateful. And Laurie succeeded in creating a character that is horrid, reprehensible and self-indulgent. The question is, why do we care about Laurie's House? Why do we put up with a character who is a selfish, manipulative, sabotaging, misanthropic, atheist, who not only refuses to have faith in humanity, love, and God but goes to great length to destroy such belief in others?
The writers give us the means through the characters who love him--the more sympathetic the characters around him become, the more we love the great big boil of a foil in their midst, and the writing provides conflict in their desire to work with House and to understand the man behind the virtuosic abilities. And Hugh Laurie's authentic talent for music is also a glimpse into the man behind the Vicodin--his love of music in listening and performance, makes you believe that he does in fact have a soul, and one worth saving, too. There is one episode in particular where this is crystal clear--House fails to attend an event in support of a close friend, and stays, hermetically sealed, in his man-pad. Inter-cutting scenes of the event with his impassioned improvisation on the gorgeous, jet black baby grand Yamaha that sits at the center of his cave, it is not only the feeling in the performance but the choices in his improvisation that read. His improvisation evolves from something typically House-y-blues-y, to something atypically traditional, foreign, and, indeed, something religious. Even before it morphs back into a funky mixolydian mode, it is undeniable what we have just heard: House is playing for his friend, sending a spirit that desires to be there and participate in the joy of loving another, even as his deeply flawed personality and scarred, crippled body refuse to attend in a deliberate and despicable adhedonia (a pathological inability to experience pleasure--a diagnosis, that actually emerges in two patients in Season 5).
Hugh Laurie is an unknown to most Americans, though to those who are fans of Rowan Atkinson's outrageously funny British comedy series Blackadder, he is a lovable and familiar face. But even those of us who know his considerable comedic gifts, experienced something of a revelation in his creation of Gregory House. He is uncanny; he portrays the inner contradiction of a character who spews a hateful and scientific materialist view on the world, yet somewhere, unspoken, and perhaps even sub-cognitive--we believe that the force with which he launches that black-pit world view emanates from a dark and desperate desire for it to be proven false.
There is an over-riding arc in his character--House is a man who solves riddles in a search for a God he can't bring himself to believe exists. He continually performs metaphysical experiments using patients to prove to the world and himself that things like love, God, and belief, are nothing more than irrational aberrations, biochemically produced, and that the afterlife is a fairy tale we tell ourselves when we are afraid of the sleep-dark of death. Laurie makes us believe that his determination in proving these things is not that he doesn't believe that they are true. Rationally, he is convinced. But there is an emotion in House, a sort of auto-erotic sadomasochism, where he continually needs to prove it to himself, in order to feel the pain of realizing it isn't true. He is a spiritual self-mutilator.
Here is where contemporary television writers have found a mode in which to keep a pluralistic American audience composed of various layers of belief and non-belief, atheism, and theism, hooked in. They create a God through the desire for Him--sometimes, that manifests as a painful and ardent desire for a God who doesn't exist. Even the most ardent atheist, must admit that they have at least, once, perhaps when they were children even, wished there was a God, even if they can't quite believe there is one. Who can deny the desire for immortality? For eternal happiness?
Laurie's words and performed attitudes would satisfy the most militant scientific atheist audience member. But his eyes, his pain,--and his music--leave a yawning question that would satisfy the most convicted mystic.
Either way, the space for God and Love, with a capital L, is there, either in Faith or in the presence of His keenly felt absence. The shows has it's skeptical atheist cake--and the spiritual romantic can eat it, too.
