Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:
I missed House entirely when it aired back in the aughts, and that was strange. It was one of the few TV specimens a twelve year-old me could readily access. My sole connection to film of any sort was a CRT, a V.H.S. player, boxed sets of M*A*S*H and humanist sci-fi (Babylon 5, Star Trek in all its flavors, etc.), and a busted “rabbit ears” antenna. These placed my household’s demographic squarely in the thrall of OPB and the local Fox News channel.
Highlights were Star Trek: Voyager on Friday and Perry Mason on weekends. Desultory moods or procrastination meant a helping of sitcom gumbo and dull procedurals—more sitcoms than procedurals, ratio-wise. When your parents work in law and medicine, their offices become your daycare, and you have trouble finding anything sexy about scrubs or litigation.
But what about House? All I had were the promotional materials, an ad here or there. It was enough. Give Hugh Laurie a cane and the surly brows of a great horned owl, and somehow it reminds me of that other Englishman. Everything past that point—their shared 221B address or the blunt wordplay (Holmes; House) is overkill.
Its plain intent might explain why I avoided it. The same blue-jacketed copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes has taken up residence on my kitchen counter(s) for over two decades now. Why settle for Sherlock Lite? Sure, I devoured (and learned to despise) Moffat’s 2012 version when my rations ran low, but by then House was a mere dot on my horizon.
I don’t know what possessed me to marathon it. I had no attachment to this thing. I’ve talked about love. This wasn’t about that. But as I began to chip away at its 177 hours—the 26-episode seasons are so punishing to a brain used to streaming—I began to see a shape.
Detective stories usually invite the audience inside to solve them. Perry Mason’s second season is a refreshing example, its every spring and cog laid on the table and bare to the eye. Others offer merely the illusion of fair play and withhold crucial details until their third act. Either way, they offer a comfort we lack in our senseless, chaotic lives. Puzzles want to be solved, and they all have solutions.
House slams the door in your face. Re-holming—er, transposing Holmes to a modern hospital dissolves whodunnits and howcatchems into a slurry of medical jargon. When the subject is criminology, a viewer can roughly approximate its clockwork. When a TV doctor intones, “He has recurrent bouts of epistaxis, so it could be sarcoidosis plus a pulmonary edema,” you can either fumble for WebMD or accept that the plot will go anywhere the writer damn well pleases.*
(*Due to my own experience working in clinics, the show’s loose understanding of MRIs was particularly discomfiting. It’s not your typical machine; it’s actually incredibly expensive to turn an MRI off. Sometimes characters stood so close to them that I expected pens and belt buckles to whizz through the air like bullets. MRI safety videos are ghoulish enough to rival Sam Peckinpah or maybe even a DMV training program.)
It’s like Star Trek’s technobabble, which makes trapdoors out of incomprehension and simple analogies. That’s because, as in Star Trek’s case, your attention should be on the heavier discussion above and around the noise. It’s a morality play. Episode by episode, the cases are actually slices of life—background pieces. Your attention should really be trained on Gregory House (Laurie) and James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), the gentlemen quarreling about optimism and pessimism around the edges of the frame.
Sure, House uses that noise to good effect; it establishes Greg as the Sherlock of his realm. He’s the “logician who could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other” from a drop of water. To borrow a few words from the late, great Terry Pratchett, he has ground his soap opera universe into the finest powder, sifted it through the finest sieve, and found not one atom of lasting trust. Tipping the cases into pseudo-logic just brings that existential nightmare to the foreground.
Sherlock was already a depressing specter of logical positivism. Author Arthur Conan Doyle’s first characterization of him (through Watson’s POV) is equal parts awe and exasperation. Awe, for Sherlock has such a command of his plane of reality. Exasperation, for he has such a stubborn incuriosity toward everything else. Watson writes up a list: “His limits: 1. Knowledge of Literature—Nil. 2. Philosophy—Nil. 3. Astronomy—Nil. 4. Politics—Nil….” A pitiably limited creature, not a badass or someone to envy.
What would Doyle, a spiritualist, make of this particular incarnation? In the form of House, Sherlock’s materialism takes on the angst and pain of the Information Age. He radiates a peak-Dawkins smarm which seemed so trendy in 2006, and barks out racial epithets like “Blackpoleon Blackaparte” (Season 2, “Deception”). He speaks almost entirely in verbal irony, shifting the burden of interpretation onto others.
“Everybody lies,” after all. One could agree to “I think, therefore I am” and conclude that others exist, but, in addition, conclude that what others say or intend doesn’t reflect what they are. The words I inscribe here could be a connection between two minds, the bridge that we think we’re building when we read. Or they could be an elaborate fraud, a complex of delusions we demolish when our selfish genes turn against it.
But what is the point of all these letters if not to make our intangible selves known to each other before they disappear?
So I wait in the middle distance, equally prepared to meet the musty Victorian tome or the procedural from twenty years ago. They ask the right questions. I’ll listen.
Sean Weeks is a student of classics and mythology who’s wandered slightly off course. If you want to join him in his odyssey, you can visit him at www.weeksauthor.com.
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