Samstag, Juni 13, 2009

The House of life


Why is House the most popular TV drama in the world? I read of its international popularity today, and while I have known that it is a successful show nationally, this news moved me to realize that I haven't really thought about why that is. I'm a fan of the show, but I'm an odd duck, and it had seemed to me that many of the things I liked about the show appealed to the odd duck in me, not the everyman.

One of the most precious things to me about the show is that it consistently endorses a nihilistic, atheistic philosophy. While most every other hospital show has a miracle sprinkled in here and there to force you to think, what if? (as if.), every apparent miracle is debunked as coincidence in House. The good doctor himself always gets the last word, which is a bleak one. Others on the show occasionally endorse prayer and belief and all that, and their beliefs are for a while shown sympathetically, but ultimately House explains that they are deluding themselves, and that ends up being the last word.

Now the show goes on to suggest that House's bleak philosophy is both symptom and cause of his misery, but it seems finally to assert that House's viewpoint is, after all, the true one. It is a bleak world, life is short and bitter and pointless. It's all fine and well for the self-deceivers that they are able to deceive themselves and be happy, but for people like House, whose gravest fault is their honesty with themselves, such happiness is impossible just because it is based on lies and castles in the sky.

So is House popular because the atheists love it? I'd like to say yes, that it is a sign of a further secularizing world, but I suppose there are many other things in the show that would appeal to lower appetites - for one thing, like Archie Bunker, House is given license by the ironic tilt of the show to say all sorts of racist and sexist things that many people like to hear. As with Archie, many of House's fans are probably laughing along with him, despite the screenwriters' best intentions. Hugh Laurie and Omar Epps are terrific actors, each with his own magnetic presence. Then there is the soap opera aspect, which is played lightly but is kept interesting by the characters' nearly universal social ineptness. Finally, as if to throw in the kitchen sink, there is an engaging buddy-movie-type story line between House and oncologist Dr. Wilson. This kind of pseudo-close, heavily co-dependent male friendship is almost completely absent from TV drama, which tends to portray men as perfectly isolated from other men.

But finally, there is some hope for the idea that the popularity of the show says something positive about the human addiction to religious fantasy. For some reason, the religious nuts are not all up in arms about House. Apparently a show that regularly discusses the deeper questions of existence, and consistently ends up on the side of materialism or nihilism, is tolerable today. That's good to know.

Pic is Hugh Laurie in Blackadder. "For me, socks are like sex: tons of it about, but I never seem to get any."

Keine Kommentare: