House Jumps The Shark

My many readers (last estimated at well into double digits) may recall an early post of mine on Inactivist praising Fox’s House as one of the few broadcast network shows worth watching. Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), the brilliant, crippled, drug addicted misanthrope – what’s not to like? – wasn’t exactly the first of his sort; from Ben Casey through Hawkeye and Trapper John in the original film M*A*S*H, the trope of the cranky and cantankerous but uber-competent physician prevailing against institutional mediocrity and ineptitude is an enduring figure. Let’s just say, though, that Hugh Laurie’s character has managed to ratchet it up a quantum level or two. Notwithstanding the entirely formulaic episode structure (House and his team struggle to diagnose a medical “zebra,” succeeding at roughly 55 minutes into the hour), the banter and the interpersonal relationships among the principal characters have made for three seasons of enjoyable television.

Never mind that no hospital administrator this side of Bedlam would let Dr. House within a hundred yards of the hospital cafeteria, let alone real patients. Ignore the fact that no malpractice insurance underwriter alive would cover Dr. House at any price. Forget that House and his gang are routinely performing surgeries of every imaginable variety in an age when mutually exclusive medical and surgical specialties have multiplied faster than a virus. The show still works, maybe because it is so damned implausible. One need not merely suspend disbelief to watch House, one must drive a stake through its heart.

Last week, however, was simply too much. I refer not to the ultimately discovered medical problems of the almost incidental patient, a Marine claiming Gulf War Syndrome, nor to the nonsense about House’s dream about the Marine and subsequent snooping into his background. No, I refer to what the official website episode recap calmly describes as follows:

At home, House inserts a catheter into his bladder through the urethra and finds instant relief. He shuffles to his bed.

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me ease your minds about this once and for all. Having once had a Foley catheter inserted through my urethra into my bladder, I know with near Cartesian certainty that there isn’t a man alive capable of doing that to himself. The Marquis de Sade, himself, would wince, grimace and faint dead away at the very notion. Not to dwell on the gruesome details of my own experience, but at the time I was experiencing such acute abdominal pain that I had already received both a shot of Dilaudid and of morphine just moments before and I would still have gladly opted for, say, chopping out my tongue before performing that particular procedure on myself.

It is the curse, I guess, of the series writer to have to top previous episodes, lest jaded viewers lose interest. (“Next week on Lost, Jack discovers that he and Ben were Siamese twins separated at birth!”) Even so, much as I still enjoy the show, next time perhaps they could have House do something just a teeny bit more believable like, oh, say, leaping over tall buildings in a single bound, finding a cure for cancer using ordinary household products or bringing lasting peace to the Middle East?

(Title explanation here.)