Cuddy’s House

Last night’s House took advantage of Lisa Edelstein’s considerable charm and talent in an episode that blissfully broke the medical mystery formula and focused solely on a day in the life of Cuddy. Some people might venture to call it a filler episode designed to take the production burden off Hugh Laurie and cut costs, but even if all that were true, I was still rather stunned by it. In fact, I’d almost go so far as to call it revolutionary. Network television is all about repetition these days, which isn’t always a bad thing. But when you spend so many hours a week watching variations on the same formula over and over again, it’s hard not to start feeling numb towards the characters as the whodunit/what’s the mystery this time format subsumes them.

This episode felt so wonderfully, briskly fresh for being different. There were no patients dying of mysterious, impossibly obscure illnesses, but the emotional stakes were as high and enthralling as they have ever been. I give major props to showrunners David Shore and Katie Jacobs and Fox for committing to breaking out of the box. But this wasn’t just a well-written episode. It was flawlessly put together in nearly every regard, especially the editing, and the fact that it opened with Cuddy getting out of bed in the morning and ended in the same way provided a nice bookending effect.

That’s the whole conceit of the episode: spend a day in the House universe with Cuddy and experience it entirely from her point of view. It’s perhaps a quintessential portrayal of the 21^st century career woman that makes House an important—but peripheral supporting character—in his own show. Get a chance to see Cuddy do things we never get to see her do, and interact with other people at Princeton Plainsboro we weren’t aware of. It could have been boring if it were just any day, but Cuddy has a lot going on today. Her infant daughter is sick. Her boyfriend Lucas is being a pain in the ass. Oh yeah, and her entire career might be on the line.

Why? She’s at the end of an eight-month contract negotiation with AtlanticNet, the key medical insurance company Princeton Plainsboro brokers with and that the great majority of their patients use. Since they are the big guys and Plainsboro is a comparatively small hospital, they seem to have all the leverage and, therefore, their top priority is screwing the hospital by giving them as crappy of a contract as they can legally get away with. They don’t care that Cuddy runs the best diagnostic center in the country. They keep waiting for Cuddy to give in and accept their sub-par 4% increase while Cuddy keeps insisting on 12%. But after all these months of tortured stalemate, the hospital board—made up of mostly men of course, with one or two shrews thrown in for good measure—are running out of patience.

When AtlanticNet presents Cuddy with the same—to quote Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich—lame-ass offer, she presents them with an offer of her own: give her the 12% by the end of business or she terminates the contract. The weasel negotiator guy is stunned at the proposition. It’s almost as cool as when good old Mel Gibson—back when he was still good old Mel Gibson—turned his son’s ransom money into a bounty on kidnapper Gary Sinise’s head on national television in Ransom. But the weasel doesn’t take the bait and walks out with his confidence intact, certain that Cuddy will give in.

If Cuddy doesn’t close this deal, the hospital board makes it clear she’ll get the boot. Never mind that she’s right. Never mind that she had to climb an unforgiving and misogynistic mountain to get to her position in the first place. They’ll can her ass if she doesn’t close. So now we’ve got great, solid dramatic constructs in place. We’ve got a ticking clock and we’ve got Cuddy smack dab in the middle of a moral doozy. Does she cave in to the slimy corporate bigwigs and accept a sub-par deal in order to save her job, or does she hold out for what’s right and risk losing everything? If you know Cuddy at all you know which option she’ll go for, but that doesn’t make the journey any less compelling.

As if all this weren’t enough, she has all the insane everyday-isms to contend with. She has to put up with House’s infantile power plays and veto his every move. She has to referee a million different fights. She has to find out why her babysitter won’t return her calls. She has to deal with a lawsuit being brought against the hospital by a carpenter suing because they sewed his thumb back on when all he wanted them to do was stitch it up because the bill would have been cheaper. And she has to confront a seven-year model employee she suspects of forging DEA prescription pads and stealing drugs from the hospital. And did I mention that this employee turns out to be more of a sociopath than the chick from the other week?

What’s great about this episode—besides Edelstein—is that everything is done so well that you really actually believe that Cuddy is going to lose, that the little guy (or gal, in this case) can get trampled by the big dog. Even House tells her that “Sometimes the bigger they are, the harder they kick your ass.” The other thing I really appreciated was that the writers didn’t have House swoop in and bail Cuddy out. It would make sense. Contract negotiations are all about manipulation and House is the master manipulator. But to have had him rescue her, while maybe being fun, would have cheapened who Cuddy is. She kicks ass on her own, and by the end of the episode, if you haven’t cheered a couple of times then you’re made of stone.

For another take on this week’s episode, check out A One Woman Show by Stephanie Jaar.

Season 6, Episode 13: 5 to 9 (originally aired February 8, 2010)

For more on House, click here.

Mondays 8/7c on FOX

Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal and IMDbPro.