dailyeatings

This started out as a wall post on Facebook which grew too long for the comment entry box and thus was posted here instead.

i could write a house episode.

teaser intro where some otherwise healthy person falls over to the shock of all around them.

{massive attack’s “teardrop” plays as we zoom into hugh laurie’s disdainful eye}

house makes somebody mad, makes fun of underlings.

patient presents, house dismisses the case, makes underlings do trivial things. patient gets worse.

house berates underlings, makes them do something slightly less trivial, and takes on secondary plotline (either external antagonist or another medical case)

2nd less trivial procedure makes patient worse, usually nearly fatally so. house calls meeting with underlings, berates them socratically, while lacking the answers himself. after much debate and squabbling underlings suggest a third procedure which house accedes to.

house attends to secondary plotline while underlings perform third procedure. generally this secondary plotline reveals either house’s extreme competence at medicine, his mendacious, dissembling misanthropy or likely both. meanwhile, the underlings discover via the third procedure something previously unnoticed about the primary patient, something that destroys all their previous hypotheses and leaves the patient unquestionably at death’s door.

house and underlings call yet another conference, where everything is recapitulated once again, every false lead examined and tossed aside. house and usually one or more underlings lose their composure, showing us how truly concerned and passionate they are about their work. house’s personality flaws frequently figure into these arguments. the underlings present a final, middling solution while house contemplates a drastic, high-risk intervention. house is almost invariably voted down in favor of the middling solution, quite often via the intervention of cuddy. somebody usually walks out or threatens to quit or is actually fired during this part of the show.

we now pause for closeups of long, thoughful stares. everybody contemplates the gravity of their decisions as a fashionable, moody AAA song plays in the background, much like those featured in other medical dramas primarily concerned with the petty self-absorptions of health professionals. at the 11th hour, house either silently and spontaneously resolves to unilaterally execute his course of action despite the protests of both his underlings and superiors, or some trivial mundanity produces a moment of clarity which drives him to do the very same.

house does what he wants, over the severe objections of his peers, and despite their assurances that he is a mistaken, self-righteous and unhinged asshole, he proves himself correct and cures the patient. none of the other characters seem to assimilate this fact or notice it over time, so at no point in subsequent episodes is he given credit for being the one who is always right in the end. likewise, he is also incapable to accumulating experience over time, and so does not learn in future episodes that his 1st, 2nd and 3rd guesses are invariably and sometimes disastrously wrong.

also, the culprit disease agent is almost always sexually transmitted in nature.

at the end of the episode, yet more moody music plays, with more longing, slow closeups showing the anguish the doctors go through having to deal with so many kids messed up in the brain because they have 3rd-stage syphilis. house both makes a joke and then manages to piss somebody important off, and ends up alone.

there. 99% of all house episodes. it’s so formulaic it makes law and order look experimental, improvisational theatre.

where’s my emmy award?