The Doctor Is In: House Hobbles Back

Fox’s star show is back for its sixth season, and the premiere bravely breaks from the show’s heretofore religiously adhered-to formula. It is extremely well-acted, but it’s also fairly drab, predictable, and stretches into two hours what it easily could have done in one. Gregory House is not my favorite television doctor. That title will forever go to John Becker. But House is one of the most worthy and memorable tv characters in years, and he and Hugh Laurie deserved a better script (and a better haircut). This premiere is basically a low-rent road show version of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, with House taking over the R.P. McMurphy made famous by Jack Nicholson.

If you’ll recall, last season ended with House checking him in to the loony bin after he realized he was going nuts and hallucinating dead people and events that never happened. Yeah, that’s definitely not what you want in a doctor extraordinaire. Thus, this episode takes place entirely in said loony bin. None of the other series regulars are involved in this premiere. It is truly a standalone episode, and in my book that’s a real treat, because save for Cuddy, I hate everyone else on House and have for quite some time. Foreman is neither likable nor interesting, Taub is a tool, Cameron’s a sanctimonious twit (why oh why does she have to share my namesake), and no one else is even worth writing about.

While I didn’t love this premiere, it certainly proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that Hugh Laurie really is the whole show, that you don’t need any of the other people to make it work. By the end of this episode, the groundwork had been laid for House to return to his job and for the season to get back to the medical mysteries, status quo formula that the show has always had. But I would much rather see Hugh Laurie and House continue to go in new directions, maybe travel more. What about having him travel to a new place every week and solve a mystery? After all, I’m pretty sure not every impossibly obscure medical mystery crisis occurs in New Jersey.

At any rate, we open with an artsy montage sequence showing House detoxing at the loony bin, accompanied by moody music and jump cuts. Um, did House check into the loony bin or the French New Wave Land? Actually, they aren’t all that dissimilar. Either way, House does slowly clean up and proceeds to try to leave the clinic. After all, he checked in voluntarily, he should be able to leave voluntarily. But the head honcho, Doctor Nolan (played by the always dependable, veteran character actor Andre Braugher) has other ideas. Nolan believes that, though House may be off Vicodin, Vicodin isn’t his problem. His problem is much more deep-seated. He is, as Roy McAvoy half-jokingly described himself, “chock full of inner demons.” Thusly, Dr. Nolan refuses to write a letter reinstating House’s medical license unless he stays to be cured.

So House then devotes his every effort to driving the loony bin staff nuts (no pun intended) until they happily boot him out of there. He goes out of his way to mock his fellow nutcases, especially his manic depressive Puerto Rican roommate Alvie. Besides Alvie, there’s a druggie, a claustrophobic, a paranoid, an anorexic, a world-class cellist who hasn’t spoken in ten years, and a guy who thinks he is a superhero. Watching House do his thing on these people is very entertaining, but you’ve seen it before. That’s the problem. You pretty much know everything that’s going to happen.

The other significant element of the premiere is the character of Lydia, who is the sister-in-law of the silent cellist, who comes by weekly to visit. She’s played by Run Lola Run and Bourne veteran Franka Potente. She and House slowly form a bond, but I’d be lying if I said that I was foaming at the mouth for them to get together. Which they do, by the end, though of course it can’t last. Potente and Laurie play off each other really well, but the best scenes in the episode are the ones between House and Nolan, two stubborn doctors vying for control.

There’s also no real medical mystery that House solves this time, though there is a mini-mystery. But again, it’s nice to have a break from the formula. House is such a strong character that he can exist free of a formulaic enclosure. House is somebody worth watching in any situation. So really, I guess if I had to sum it up succinctly, I’d say that I admired the episode for daring to break from a well-established formula and for ditching a sensationalist disease-of-the-week mystery for the sake of pure character study. It’s a bold move, and, to be a broken record, Hugh Laurie is still mesmerizing. He makes the episode worth watching. But it’s only merely worth watching, and House ought to be must-see.

For another take on this episode, check out Yay or Nay to a Smiley House? by Stephanie Jaar.

Season 6, Episode 1: Broken (Originally aired September 21, 2009)

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Photographs courtesy of Fox, NBC Universal, Larry Watson, and Michael Yarish