The doctor is incorrigible, but we can't stop watching him

According to ratings agency Eurodata TV Worldwide, the medical comedy-drama House snagged 81.8 million viewers in 66 countries last year, making it the most watched television program on Earth. So how has this ambitious but uneven series, currently cliffhanging between its fifth and sixth season, become so popular?

Well, not by trying to be liked, that's for sure.

Even by recent standards for television anti-heroes, the show's protagonist, medical genius Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), is a horrid, horrid man. Words like "grumpy" "cranky" and "curmudgeonly" are far too cute for this misanthrope, who lacks not only a basic bedside manner but also most of the markers for common human decency. Some doctors suffer from a God complex. With House, it's more of a Satan complex, as he revels in his role as the Great Deceiver of Princeton-Plainsboro, the show's fictional New Jersey teaching hospital.

Popping Vicodin like M&M's, he routinely lies, spies and manipulates his colleagues' weaknesses. The defiantly un-PC House tosses around racial slurs, not because he's a racist -- he's too smart for that -- but because it keeps people off balance. He gives the glad eye to an underage girl and scores jokes at the expense of a nine-year-old cancer patient. He deliberately prolongs a hostage situation involving a teenage boy because he's intrigued by the hostage-taker's medical condition.

Counting heavily on Laurie's funny, finessed performance, the show's creators seem to be calculating how far they can take House toward fascinating awfulness before he tips over into unforgiveable.

So why do we love him? Or, if not love him, at least watch him?

Maybe because the only things nastier than House are the diseases he fights with such single-minded commitment to truth. Like all shows set in hospitals, House is about the terror of losing control, the terror of sickness and death. But even more it's about the terror of not knowing.

The series was conceived not as a conventional medical show, which approaches disease as an epicentre of emotional drama, but as a mystery, in which disease becomes an intellectual puzzle. House is essentially a crime show, in which the bad guys are diseases -- rogue fungal spores, rare genetic disorders, parasites picked up on long-ago tropical vacations -- and the detectives are doctors.

Viewers don't have to worry about the patients because, frankly, nobody on screen does, except maybe token nice person Dr. Allison Cameron. House actually hates patients, not just because they lurk in the halls, trying to drag him into messy family situations, but also because they screw up his case histories with their fibbing. House prefers to view patients as clusters of symptoms, which accounts for his coldness, rudeness and hazy notions of informed consent. "Humanity is overrated," he says, just one of those "House-isms" that regularly get worked up into T-shirts and sold over the Internet.

Clearly, the show flies in the face of our contemporary expectations of the health system, which demand open and equitable relationships between doctors and patients and medical approaches that treat the whole person. The deliberately retro attitude works, though. There's something flattering about the way the show lures us onto the doctors' side, bringing us along for those urgent walk-and-talks, with their technical lingo and ghastly gallows humour. And there's something bracing about House's hardboiled rationalism, which holds the dread of disease at arm's length.

Sure, a doctor writing in Slate magazine suggests that House is an arrogant medical monster who would have been fired years ago for his outrageous and unrepentant flouting of professional codes. What we want from real life and what we want from television are two different things, however. House might be a bad man. He might even be a bad doctor. But he makes for good TV.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 27, 2009 F1