"House" faces new challenges in season 2
- From: David <dimlan17@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2005 14:23:05 -0400
from the L.A. Times
Bedside manner
What will Hugh Lurie's gruff superdoc do to lift season two?
By Mary McNamara
Maybe it's the cane.
Nobody involved in the creation of the Fox medical drama "House,"
which begins its second season tonight, will cop to consciously trying
to conjure a character who would make TV Guide's list of television's
sexiest men. Not creator David Shore, who says it never occurred to
him that sardonic, physically damaged and often quite unkind doctor
would stir the hearts of American women.
Certainly not actor Hugh Laurie who resorts to a Woosterian stammer of
surprise when asked what it's like to have millions of women swooning
over him, or more precisely him as Dr. Gregory House. The response may
even be sincere; known mostly for his comedic abilities, Laurie has
used those baby blues more often to express oblivious charm or idiotic
bafflement than smoldering intensity.
But they're beauties, no doubt, so it could be the eyes. But more
likely, it's the archetype. From Edgar Allen Poe's Cesar A. Dupin to
"Star Trek's" Spock, the eccentric, emotionally detached genius is a
staple of female fantasy?a thinking woman's substitute for the bad boy
in leathers.
And Shore's surprise at his lead's sex appeal may be a bit
disingenuous. He did, after all, consciously resurrect the most famous
cerebral hottie of them all. Complete with requisite drug addiction,
musical ability, sidekick whose name begins with W and the uncanny
ability to draw enormous amounts of information from the smallest
detail, House is a post-modern Sherlock Holmes, with the added
endearment of Watson's famous limp.
Shore, who also has an Emmy nomination for Writing, Drama Series,
admits freely that he owes much to Arthur Conan Doyle, though the
limp, he insists, was his own. "I wanted House to be damaged
emotionally and to have a physical manifestation of that," Shore says.
"I didn't add that to soften him, I didn't want to soften him. I
didn't set out to make him sexy. I just wanted him to be interesting."
But interesting in a way guaranteed to drive a certain type of
pain-tolerant, female literary geek?"oh Mr. Rochester"--absolutely
wild. It is the women who have read and re-read "Jane Eyre" with its
gruff and broken hero, who have sat patiently through countless
remakes of Pride and Prejudice in fluttering anticipation of that one
teeny tiny moment when granite-faced Mr. Darcy at last gives way who
are signing up for their own personal House fantasy camp.
House is, after all, a super man, and way more Nietzsche than Clark
Kent. Still, in the end, he always comes through, he just uses his
wits and eye for detail rather than the Batmobile or an Uzi. Which
makes him a much better fit for the contemporary feminist-ish working
gal who still wants to surrender, just not to some big sweaty guy
surrounded by broken bodies.
Emmy noms notwithstanding, a character like House is tough on the
writers?if serialized, the man of mystery must reveal something to
keep from being static but not too much or he will become banal. The
sexiness has been suitably acknowledged by various plot developments
(none of which involve so much as a kiss?the kiss must be saved for "a
very special 'House' " possibly a holiday episode) but it can't become
the staple of the show or the seductive power of the non-romantic
romantic lead will be lost.
Add to that the larger issue of building a show around any super
hero?when you know for a fact that he will save the day, where is the
dramatic tension??and the question for the second season becomes: is
there life after archetype?
There is a very temporary feel to the production offices of "House,"
which are in building adjacent to the New York "Mulberry Street" set
on the Fox lot. Pieces of blue paper printed with people's names and
positions are taped to doors as if the moving men are expected any
minute. The carpet is grubby, as are the walls, and an attempt to find
a bathroom brings the term "warren-like" to mind. Still, there are the
hallmarks of the trade?computers, a conference table, a pool table,
the smell of microwaved popcorn and lots of empty soda cans. Yes,
indeed, a television show is written here.
Shore's office is at the end of a long hallway and it is filled with
mismatched furniture. Only the pale table-top desk is his, the rest
has been inherited in pieces. "There's just not a sense of permanence
in the television industry," he says. "We've been here a year, but,
you know, we could go anytime."
Shore has been in the business for more than 15 years, working as a
writer/producer on "Law and Order" and "Family Law," among others, but
this is his first time as a showrunner. "House" began as much great
literature has begun--because Shore needed the work. He and executive
producer Paul Attanasi, heard there was some interest in a medical
procedural show, a CSI with doctors. So armed with the New York Times
Magazine Diagnosis column (the writer of which now serves as a script
consultant for "House"), they decided to take a shot.
But while white counts and lesions can be compelling reading for
hypochondriacs and medical students, they do not provide the drama
necessary for a television show. (As the canceled "Medical
Investigation" recently discovered.) What was needed, the two men
decided, was a detective, a doctor with powers above the ordinary and
character flaws just as outstanding, whose personal pathology would
keep the show from becoming too medical and too maudlin. A doctor who
hated people.
"I used to be an attorney," Shore says. "And I would still be an
attorney if I didn't have to deal with people. I think human
interaction is the most annoying feature of most jobs. So I started
thinking of a doctor who hated patients and when I began embracing
that, I came up with Holmes."
Holmes didn't hate people, he just wasn't particularly interested in
them. And as a character study, he is far too cool for modern
television. A true Victorian, Doyle never dreamed of psychoanalyzing
his detective and where's the fun in that?
So House would need more of an emotional back story to satisfy
Oprahfied audiences. Hence the limp?here is a doctor whose chronic
pain was caused by a missed diagnosis, and there is a reason for both
his tenacity and his general grumpiness.
"We need a reason why people would find a nasty, anti-social doctor
likable," says Shore. "So we gave him pain."
Also humor. Even Shore did not realize how important the humor was
until he saw Hugh Laurie's audition tape. Laurie had not been the
first name to pop into Shore's head, or even the tenth. But with his
flexible voice and even more flexible face, Laurie manages to convey
brilliance and damage, arrogance and self-disdain in equal measure,
becoming an intellectual-chick magnet.
"Hugh's comic timing absolutely fuels the show," he says. "We can give
him the most outrageous things to say and he says them and somehow
they're dark but they're also very very funny."
Pain, humor and an ethos that can be summed up in a sentence. Holmes'
was "You see but you do not observe." House's is more post-Watergate:
"Everybody lies."
"That is from my own deeply cynical convictions and experience," says
Shore. "But I did want to make a point that we have gotten to a stage
where we lie about everything; we will even lie to our doctor who is
trying to save our life."
Around House, Shore and his writers created a team?a loyal sidekick to
provide the show's conscience, the trio of young doctors who actually
do things (including ransacking people's home which seems to stretch
credibility though not as much as the MRIs that are dispensed as if
they were Tylenol), a boss to keep House in line and an assortment of
patients to keep him entertained.
But entering season two, certain challenges present themselves. To
keep the crush-quotient high, there will have to be cracks in the
emotional veneer. Which explains the appearance of Sela Ward who
showed up at the end of last season as the former girlfriend/ Only
Woman House Ever Loved. Who, as luck would have it, will be joining
the hospital staff in season two.
Pretty in a smart, sassy way, Ward is the perfect stand-in for smitten
audience members. She stands up to House which is, of course, part of
the fantasy?while in reality, mean men with limps often believe they
are entitled to Cindy Crawford, a man like House would be looking for
a girl with her own set of prickly issues. (Including the ability to
emotionally betray her husband as he hovers between life and death,
but whatever. She's feisty and that's what matters.)
"I think the attraction may have to do with women viewing themselves
as healers," Shore says. "They think that they could fix him. Make him
forget."
The show is just edgy enough to have actually addressed this very
issue. Due to plot complications in last fall's second to the last
episode, House found himself across the table from the young and
lovely Dr. Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison).
"Cameron:...I want to know how you feel. About me. About us.
House: You live under the delusion that can fix everything that isn't
perfect....I'm not great looking, I'm not charming, I'm not even nice.
But what I am is what you need: I'm damaged."
So, emotionally screwed up and keenly self-aware. Co-dependents
everywhere, how sexy is that?
Cameron, and the rest of the supporting players, offer a way to
advance viewer attachment without wearing down the House mystique and
Shore says that their characters will indeed be given layers and
complexities. But in the end the show is about House. So the trick, he
says, lies in creating situations in which his personality illuminates
larger truths about culture, or medicine, or life.
"House is blunt because he literally wants to be shocking, he wants to
shock people into action," Shore says. "He stands by his belief that
it doesn't matter what your motives are, what matters are the results.
House does what he wants," he adds, offering a neat enough description
of a post-modern hero, "and doesn't care what other people think. And
he's not always right.
I mean, he is, in the end," he adds quickly, "but he's wrong
sometimes, on the way to the end."
And that may be the key to it all. Even Sherlock Holmes muffed a case
or two?just ask Irene Adler. Failure is what makes success remarkable.
For House to remain remarkable, he will have to fail. But while Holmes
could blow a case that involved an incriminating photograph, House
only deals in life and death. Which is probably exactly why he's so
darn sexy.
.
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