COLUMN: House of the Seven Putdowns

By Tobin Barnes
I’ve been watching the TV show “House.”

A lot, I’m afraid.

Lately anyway.

I’m kind of a new arrival, but I’m catching up. Been watching a couple times a week, I guess, as they’ve been running new shows one night and reruns another.

And yes, I’ve got a life beyond TV, thank you. Well, kinda. But that’s neither here nor there.

Thing is, if you haven’t taken the time to watch the show yourself, it’s about this grumpy doctor and his put-upon doctor assistants who take a lot of guff from him, mostly because he’s so good he can get away with it.

The grumpy doctor’s name is House, as you may have supposed, and he’s not only grumpy, but also sarcastic, rude, mean, egotistical, and not particularly communicative in a touchy-feely sort of way.

He’s the embodiment of just about all the things women hate in men. Women on the show are always rolling their eyes at him, and deservedly so. But then, so do most of the men, who, unlike House, seem to have become gratefully enlightened and reconstructed.

The nagging problem for all non-Neanderthals in the cast is that House is very good at what he does. And that’s solving medical mysteries and saving lives.

The patients come into the hospital with some deathly condition that no one can figure out...except for House, that is.

Of course, they’ve got to make a show of it, so the problem takes some analysis. House and his minions, as he readily refers to them (not to mention worse epithets, like lackeys), have to wrack their brains during white-board sessions visualizing the puzzle. This is where House gets to sarcastically scoff at his assistant doctors when they come up with their obviously lame solutions.

In the meantime, between predatory gabfests, the doctors torture the living hell out of the patient with all kinds of nastily invasive tests. Big honking needles all over the place emphasized by screaming patients. House and friends particularly like spinal taps. (God spare me from one of those.)

The patient generally gets a heck of a lot worse, oftentimes due to the trial treatments, before they’re finally—usually anyway—cured by the end of the show. It’s a tough row the patient has to hoe with House at the helm: mentally, emotionally, and physically.

His bedside manner is akin to that of Attila the Hun. The patient is often left pondering the old saw, “What’s worse, the cure or the disease?”

But men like this show. It’s about tough love where the love part doesn’t have to be obvious, just the tough part.

Yeah, House is a man’s man.

He’s great at what he does. Men like that.

Though he suffers with a painful gimp leg, he soldiers on. Okay, he has to take handfuls of pain meds, but he diligently dodges warm-fuzzy therapies that might actually help him, so that makes him even with men.

And most of all, men like that he, if not them, gets to say what he wants when he wants and never apologize, and not only that, but you’ll never see him taking out the garbage, either.

Grrrrrrr!