House Season Premiere(!)

Warning, warning, *SPOILER ALERT*

I don’t know about you, dear readers, but I was as excited as a baby kangaroo taking gymnastics lessons from a tiger to see the two-hour House season 6 premiere, and I thought that it delivered with the full scripting and acting genius that I’ve come to expect these last 5 seasons, though I have some doubts about the future.

Now, obviously the show House is about, well, Greg House and his personality. House’s quirky ways are really the essence of the show, as he is a character that we can relate with and be repulsed by at the same time, the dynamic that makes the show as great as it is. In fact, this premiere plays on that more than any so far, since, having been with House for 5 years or so, we know how he works and acts, and expect heavy emphasis on these things. However brilliant Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of this cynical, peoplephobic doctor is, though (and it is brilliant), House (the show and the character) really shines through the interactions between the titular doctor and other people. The most ingenious, and entertaining, device of the show is the way in which the writers have secondary characters react to House’s alternately absurd, tragic, pathetic, and admirable traits.

Unfortunately, the show’s premise and character-developing banter has grown to be, while still well-executed and insightful, a bit predictable. For example, whenever House hatches some crackpot plan to cure the patient, the most likely reactions are: Foreman sighs, Thirteen cries in outrage at first but then submits to House, the late Kutner happily signs on, and Taub looks indifferent. Of course, the other characters have to get involved too, involving such shocking developments as: Cuddy refusing to allow House’s treatment (which he ultimately gets around), Wilson giving House good advice that he doesn’t follow, Cameron trying to distance herself from the situation, and Chase looking generally confused.

Because of this, I thought that one of the best things that the show could have done, and the best thing that the show did during the premiere was to introduce a new and untested plethora of characters. When House spends most of his time around the same group of people, the personality insights tend to run out, the only source of new intellectual stimulation usually being the patients, who are generally not very smart. In the premiere, not only was House thrown into a building with at least eight new personalities, but few or none of them had any preconception of House going in. This opened up new avenues of development for the character, as he isn’t used to people attempting to approach him in an amiable of even compatriatic way. And in this case, instead of House wholesale dismissing the characters, through the course of the program he begins to open up, to build relationships, and to help people. In essence, House starts to feel good about what he does, a major change to the series, and one that I hope keeps.

The most moving and effective character was Dr. Nolan, the head of the pysch ward, who is not only as stubborn and resilient as House, but is about as intelligent as well. House isn’t used to having his cage rattled by an equal, and this let Hugh Laurie expose some emotional context that helps us understand our favorite mysanthropic doctor a bit better.

The rub is, I’m not sure how long this innovative and welcome change is going to last. At the end of the double-episode, House is in fact released from the ward back into the free world, a development I did not expect, having thought that the creative team would keep him in the ward for at least a few more episodes. The reason this doesn’t sit well with me is that we just lost to the closed halls of the crazy house a multitude of dynamic and new characters that were in many cases in a position to become an important part of the show. Because of this, nex week we will see House interacting with the same seven people he’s always hanging around with, and will lose a lot of the novelty and uncertainty that was felt in the premiere. In addition, it seemed to me that the previews of next weeks episode looked like the same old House again, which disheartens me, as I wanted to at least see this newer, slightly altruistic, happy-ish House show his new self to his posse. I hope that they manage to maintain his newfound attitude though the drudge of medical mystery and misery that is sure to abound in the season to come.

All in all, the House premiere was a fresh take and welcome change on an amazing show that is managing to age extremely gracefully, and in fact get better and fresher with time - let’s just hope the production team has the nerve to stick with their guns through what promises to be an interesting and certainly surprising season.