Glued To The Screen…

All in all, I’m pretty boring.

Sure, I read a lot. Give me a good thriller and chances are, I won’t hear the phone and for­get to eat. But read­ing isn’t trendy — some would even con­sider it as a shame­ful pas­time. I’m from the MTV Gen­er­a­tion, but when it comes to music, I don’t know many of the new bands — unless you still con­sider Pink Floyd, Guns & Roses, Bob Dylan etc. “new bands (in which case, you are worse than me).

I don’t watch much TV. I never did in France, and pro­grams are even worse in Canada. When I do find some­thing inter­est­ing, I usu­ally lost track of what I was watch­ing because there are so many com­mer­cials. The last TV series I actu­ally watched and liked was Friends, quite a while ago. I watched E.R a bit when I was in high school in France, where it was dubbed and called “Urgences”. Oh, and Heart­break High, an Aus­tralian soap opera which was, for some rea­son, quite pop­u­lar in Europe. I like some Sein­field episodes and the Simp­sons, re-run con­stantly in Canada. That’s about it.

But recently, I fell in love with House M.D. Oh, I know, you guys all know the series already, after all the 5^th sea­son is cur­rently air­ing in North Amer­ica. But I had never watched it before. See? That’s what I’m say­ing. I’m out of touch with pop cul­ture.

I love House. I’m hooked.

Until now, I had always kind of avoided med­ical dra­mas. First of all, close-up of a brain surgery is not a great way to start your din­ner, and sec­ond, well, it’s too much drama. If I want to see peo­ple die, I can just turn on C.N.N. Oh, and I’m a bit hypochon­driac (my friends would say I like to call myself an hypochon­driac just so that I can claim a con­di­tion), so I hate to see that on T.V, headaches invari­ably equal brain tumor, that a sore leg often results in an ampu­ta­tion and that cut­ting your fin­ger will lead to a rare but deadly infection.

But House is a bit dif­fer­ent (des­per­ately try­ing to jus­tify myself…).

First of all, episodes are orga­nized around a med­ical mys­tery, kind of like “C.S.I at the hos­pi­tal”. I like thrillers, I like mys­ter­ies, I like find­ing the truth. Sec­ond, dis­eases are always rare and dif­fi­cult to diag­nose but they are also often treat­able. Eh, I like happy ends.

But the main draw to the series is the char­ac­ters… or even the char­ac­ter, Gre­gory House, Chief of Diag­nos­tic Med­i­cine and major pain in the ass. The thirty-something doc­tor is a genius, a pain-killer addict, “clev­erly has no per­sonal life”, is an end­less round of con­tra­dic­tions, hates patients (but like dis­eases), is an athe­ist, a mis­an­thrope, an “obses­sive son-of-a-bitch”, a a cranky cur­mud­geon… the list goes on. He spies (on his few friends), steals (Vicodin, the pow­er­ful pain-killer), lies (his motto is “every­body lies”), cheats (to get his way)… he is not the kind of guy you would want to work with. Yet, he is bril­liant and quite lov­able. A com­plex man — don’t we all love that?

The series is famous for the “Housisms”, Greg House’s witty com­ments. Sev­eral web­sites offer his pieces of wis­dom (Housisms and House MD Quotes for exam­ple) and I almost love read­ing them as much as I like watch­ing the show:

House: The truth of the human con­di­tion is that every­one lies. The only vari­able is about what.

House: If we don’t talk to them (the patients), they can’t lie to us, and we can’t lie to them. Human­ity is overrated.

House: See that — they all assume I’m a patient because of the cane.
Dr. Wil­son: Then why don’t you put on a white coat like the rest of us?
House: Then they think I’m a doctor.

Dr. House is the anti-hero. He is dis­abled and he walks with a cane because of a leg injury he suf­fered (it wasn’t diag­nosed prop­erly because the hos­pi­tal staff thought he was just seek­ing drugs). He has chronic pain and resorts to large amount of Vicodin to man­age it. He admits being an addict but is fine with that: “I said I was an addict. I didn’t say I had a prob­lem. I pay my bills, I make my meals. I func­tion.” He doesn’t do polit­i­cally cor­rect. He is needy but can’t stand any­body. Finally some­one nor­mal in this ster­ile world!

Try it. You’d love it.

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