Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Diana Broeders.
It took me a long time to get around to the two-hour (okay, hour-and-twenty-eight, minus commercials) premiere of House this season, because two hours is a big commitment, and Mondays are busy, those jerks are taking away my beloved Cameron, and because I've been distracted by all the shiny new toys the networks have been throwing my way. And sometimes I have a life, too! But now that I've seen it, I'm profoundly unsure how I feel about it. Readers of this blog know that this is somewhat rare. But I thought the contrast between how the show depicts medical and mental health treatment was striking. And I'm extremely curious as to how Hugh Laurie's history of severe depression, something he's discussed candidly in interviews, influenced his portrayal of the curmudgeonly doctor as a mental patient.
First the contrast between kinds of treatment. Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, where House practices on the show, may be a hospital, but it's a pretty nice place. There's a lot of glass and Ivy-league stone in interior and exterior shots of the place. House may be an utter jackass, but almost everyone else who works across at the hospital comes across as decent, or at worst, harried. Most of the time, medicine works: sick people get better, except when a teenage girl has to die so Cuddy can have a baby. Or a baby has to die so Chase can feel guilty. In other words, medicine is a sleek, sexy, effective profession.
In contrast, the mental ward where House admits himself, and where he spends an extended period of time, is a grim place. He sleeps, and sweats, in a small twin bed. The exercise yard is extremely small. Everything is gray. The plastic chairs in the therapy room have clearly been there a long time. The show presents medications as generally helpful (and doesn't show them wearing out, or having negative side effects). And the episode doesn't make much of an effort at talk therapy, because, hey, House is a jackass. And besides, his therapist is a Magical Black Man who encourages him to have an affair with a patient's sister-in-law and asks House for a second opinion on his father after the older man has a totally incapacitating stroke. No one suicides or tries, except when House encourages their delusions that they're a superhero. Women are magically cured by music boxes. In other words, mental health care looks simultaneously haphazard and risk-free.
It's not that House has ever pretended to be an accurate description of how diagnostic medicine works (though I'm told by a friend who is studying to be a doctor that it's inspired many, many jokes about lupus). But there's a different between a consistent and fictitious presentation, like the one at Princeton-Plainsboro and an inconsistent and fictitious one like the one at the mental hospital. I wish the show could have spent more time with House in the mental hospital, since I think having a conversation about the different kinds of medicine could have been an interesting new idea for a show that's running out of them. But for that sojourn to be effective, I think the writers would have had to figure out some more coherent ideas about mental illnesses and their treatments.
I'd have liked to see that, but I guess we're back to curing dictators and drama with the team. Weirdly, I didn't miss them as much as I thought I would in that hour and twenty-eight minutes. Only Wilson had a brief appearance, and he was fine. But it's a rare case that I can watch an actor be the center of every scene for that long, and not get remotely bored, or that a show can rest so entirely on the work of a single performer. I would watch Hugh Laurie attend the opening of an envelope. I would watch paint dry on him, except I have no idea to subject him to that discomfort for my own amusement. I have no particular desire to demand that Laurie dredge up whatever demons bedeviled him in the past so I can understand his performance last season and in this episode better; that's just not fair, especially to a guy who seems dignified, decent, and really largely private. But I bet he knows a ton of things about mental health care that House has no inkling of, and never will.