House, M.D. has been on my to-do list for a couple of years. As you may know, it’s a medical drama than ran on Fox for eight seasons between 2004 and 2012. I watched it back then, and I watched in online since then. I’m now in the second season of rewatching it again.
I’ve got a simple question: What’s it about? Oh, I know, it’s about Dr. Gregory House who’s a world-class diagnostician at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey. What makes it interesting is that House, while a very good diagnostician, is an unpleasant person. He’s rude, self-centered, difficult to get along with, and insists on doing things his way, which often puts him at odds both with accepted medical practice and with Princeton-Plainsboro. Nor is he particularly endearing with his patients. He’s also in chronic pain and, consequently, addicted to pain medication. Each episode is built around a single case, though there may be one or three simpler cases on the side.
Given such a thoroughly unpleasant central character, why was the series popular enough to run for eight seasons a get a bunch of awards? To be clear, I’m not questioning the merits of the show, after all, I’m now on my third time through. No, what I’m curious about is how it is that such a popular show could be built around such a thoroughly unlikable character?
Obviously, there wouldn’t be any show if House were incompetent. He had to have some redeeming quality, medical brilliance in this case. We’ve had medical dramas on TV since the fifties, and I’ve watched a bunch of them. I don’t recall any others where the protagonist was so unlikable and also of such a high level of competence. Those two things go together. Why?
Imagine another drama about a physician with House’s skills but who was more likeable, perhaps married as well, with a beautiful wife and cute children. That would be a very different show, and wouldn’t work. (Or would it?) We also need to emphasize that House is a fairly technical show in it features a lot of complex medical terms, some technology as well, and interior views of the body via special effects. There’s also the activity of differential diagnosis, which is on display 3, 4, 5, or more times during the show. That’s critical to the “texture” of the show. Off hand, the only precedent I can think of is CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, a forensics crime show that ran from 2000 to 2015, was a huge hit, and spawned a spin-off and several imitators. It also featured technical terms, apparatus, procedures, reasoning, and special effects.
I’m thinking that, as American culture is fairly anti-intellectual, ambiguous at best, making the protagonist unpleasant and in pain is a way of taking the edge off his brilliance – Yeah, he’s super-smart, but he’s also an unhappy asshole! I’m not sure I believe that, though it’s been on my mind for a while. It probably needs a better formulation, but I don’t know how to do it, and I fear that it would likely require a bit of apparatus-building.
One final remark, while the unpleasant and tortured genius doctor is at the center of the show, there are other important figures as well: his (female) boss, the Dean of Medicine, his best (and only) buddy (an oncologist), and his three associates, who changed as the show went on. None of these people are unpleasant in the way House is. Getting a good mix of associated characters is certainly part of the formula, but that’s true for all TV shows, movies, dramas, or narratives. What are the specific requirements of “compensating” for a character like Dr. Gregory House?
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Given the prominence of AI these days, I assume someone’s working on a show built around an AI doctor. I note that Star Trek: Voyager has already done it, with its holographic doctor. But when that show aired, 1995-2001, AI was purely conjectural. That’s no longer the case. And that changes everything, no?
