TV Team-Up: House’s Slippery Slope

Written by: The CinCitizens

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Now, Phoebe Raven's attempt to redeem House.

I have written fairly extensively about House, so let me start this off with a little recap from December 2008. It was time back then to come up with the annual Top Ten lists and as my No.1 TV show I crowned House as the winner, saying this about the reasons why:

Even though I still strongly dislike the new team (mainly because they don’t really interact with each other and therefore still lack depth, even after almost a year), I admire the writers of House. In the vast LaLa Land of TV they seem to be the only ones with a plan. A plan for the next two years or so to come at that. And if in reality they don’t have a plan and are making all this up as they go along, then I admire them even more.

I keep saying to friends and family that House is not a show for the irregular viewer, it rewards loyalty. What makes this show the best of the best are the subtle nuances of psychology and its slow development of relationships. The characters on the show don’t change within the course of an episode or even a season, they change slowly or not at all, just like real people. House isn’t CSI, you don’t tune in for the PotW, you tune in for the people and the sarcastic quotes.

I know I won’t ever tire of House, I love most of the characters involved (though I am annoyed with getting Thirteen aka Remy Hadley shoved down my throat) and in a way they are almost friends to me, we have gotten to know them so well over the years. Truly an achievement not many shows can claim. Just like Wilson, I cannot walk away, because at the end of the day, House is still the one hour of television that keeps me entertained the best.

Seven months later I find myself having to qualify this statement, a lot. A couple of shows have surpassed House in my book by now and to be honest, I can’t even really remember most of the second half of Season 5. It’s all a blur of Kutner committing suicide and House entering rehab after seeing Amber for a couple of episodes. The rest is blah, blah, blah in my memory. Believe me, this is harder for me to admit than it is for you to read.

The problem, I believe is this: the writers and producers of House had a plan, they still have a plan, and they always said the viewers were in for a “marathon”. I think their plan all along was to create circumstances that would lead House to finally get treatment and become drug-free, and what elaborate circumstances they created. They took half a season just to arrive at a new team, only to then have to realize the audience loved different characters than the writers had selected to make up the team. Hence they brought Amber back time and time again, as Wilson's girlfriend and then as visions in House’s head, embodiments of his residual guilt. The old ducklings had just as much part to play though in the grand scheme of things, by moving on from House or by moving on up, like Cameron, who even got to be House’s boss for an episode. Slowly, but undeniably, House’s world changed and it finally led him to see that he couldn’t go on the way he did.

See, in my head all of this makes perfect sense when I reflect back over the last two seasons. Yet while I was watching the show, I got caught up in all the little things that bothered me, how nothing really sat right with me ever since the new team started. I don’t care how many times Olivia Wilde gets voted Sexiest Woman Alive (can’t remember if it was FHM, Maxim or whichever other entity releases such lists and I am too lazy to chase it down), I would still dump Thirteen for Cameron any day. And so would House, he said so himself in the beginning of Season 5.

The only guy I ever warmed to, and the only one I think we were meant to warm to, was Kutner, which made it all the more devastating to lose him the way we did. Many have bemoaned this as a sudden departure that made no sense and felt tacked on to accommodate Kal Penn’s White House job. The thing is: it wasn’t supposed to make a lot of sense, which is why House struggles with it so intensively. The man who prides himself on never missing anything, missed the fact that the one guy on his new team who actually thought like him and had outrageous ideas that lead to diagnoses, was depressed out of his mind.  Sounds to me like one of the most realistic portrayals of suicide on television in a long time, because the people really intent on killing themselves don’t write endless bad poetry about it and tell all their friends. They just do it.

Another point of frustration for me was the relationship, or non-relationship, between House and Cuddy. I read somewhere that these two were meant to come together in Season 4 already – in a certain way anyway – but then that damned Writers’ Strike messed with everyone’s plans. A season later we are no closer to a Huddy romance than we were before. Sure, we now know that House definitely wants to be with Cuddy – why else would he imagine her saving him from himself? – but it takes two to tango. Will Cuddy give him a chance when and if he cleans up?

You can see, my journey with House is paved with frustration and disappointment, but I believe I need to go through it to come out the other end loving the show even more than I ever did. Things had to hit bottom for House before they could get better and it’s the same for the viewer. The more I think about this, the more I believe the writers pulled off the incredible feat of making us walk in House’s shoes by proxy, by making the new team, the new dynamics, the entire show increasingly tedious and unstimulating to watch. Like House we need constant stimulation, we need something “interesting”, someone to appreciate our jokes and a team focused on indulging us. House didn’t get these things of late, because the new team was too involved in their own stuff (philandering, Huntington’s, drug trials, suicide) to really care about anything House did. So what is his remedy? More drugs. What is ours? Not tuning in anymore.

Now speak honestly though: tell me you won’t tune in for at least the first episode of Season 6 to see if House really made it through rehab and what kind of a person he becomes through it? See, you want to know. You NEED to know. And that just may be the greatest damn thing this show has ever achieved.

— Phoebe Raven