If you take the first season of House, MD as a demonstration of intelligence, it’s pretty dumb and bad. I’m not even talking about the medicine, though that’s a good place to start; now-defunct medical blog Polite Dissent made the convincing case through tracking wide patterns that the show’s knowledge of both medicine and medical bureaucracy was at best shallow and at worst deliriously incoherent. Look, people like to say things like ‘they made things up to increase the drama’, but it’s impossible to have a real connection to the morality of a story when the action is unmotivated and the connection between action and consequence is muddy. There’s a clear distinction between an extreme situation and random shit happening.

But I would question the very approach it takes to logical thinking. I don’t know if Boston Legal is accurate to the legal profession, literally or emotionally, but it definitely makes the stakes, procedure, and necessary action for success very clear to the viewers; its take on courtroom drama is a lot more subjective than medicine, but the characters are aiming for a coherent narrative for why their client should not be considered legally responsible for the crime.

The Shield is much closer to the objective reality House ostensibly needs; as he explains to Danny at one point, Dutch incorporates an element of subjectivity in that he feels the need to prove why the crime occurred in order to convince a jury, but the detectives just need to connect evidence and suspect; often, the characters know exactly who did it and are just trying to find them, and almost as often the difficulty is trying to figure out how to get the suspect to confess and attempt to lessen their consequences with a plea bargain.

(For both these cases, I could easily use the ‘they exaggerate for drama’ argument: both shows use exaggerated situations and simplify the process, but the process itself is internally logical)

The medical drama of House is less coherent, and in fact actively fights against real deductive reasoning. House’s process is that he writes down the symptoms on a board, gets his team to suggest ideas, and then tries a treatment as they conduct more research (i.e. break into the patient’s home and go through their stuff). The basic theory is sound – indeed, it’s much the same logic as the meetings and studies of Star Trek: The Next Generation – but the way House goes about it seems counterintuitive.

On TNG, the characters all provide clear, distinct specialisations that mean they bring information the other characters definitely do not have. Geordi has a stronger understanding of engineering than Worf, for example. Not only are the characters much less well-defined, at one point House throws out a suggestion from a member of his team specifically because they specialise in the area they’re suggesting is responsible. Now, this is apparently a real issue that pops up in the medical community (a specialist will see their speciality) but it raises two questions: why would you automatically dismiss their suggestion? And if it’s that serious, why did you hire them in the first place?

Further, it points to a larger issue with House’s leadership, and another difference from TNG: not only does he antagonise and compete with his team, he frequently has them competing with each other. You may recall that I complained that the Stargate TV franchise frequently has unmotivated conflict in which an easy antagonist is knocked down just to have a scene in which people yell at each other. This goes a step further: conflict as a way of life. There is a very childish and very American understanding of victory over conflict as the sole marker of success. Every conversation is two people against each other with an eventual winner; everyone is looking to be the winner.

In House, this is articulated through a survival-of-the-fittest approach. It’s not that he should uncritically accept whatever idea he has, but berating and humiliating his team for less-than-perfect ideas would, in reality, discourage them from suggesting ideas at all, and within the specific context of the show leads them to attempt to berate and humiliate him right back (as well as each other). They’re not really a team with a shared goal, they’re four people fighting each other for dominance.

This is partly because of the single worst element of House’s attempts to find the truth: he wants the most interesting thing to be true. Returning to medicine, I understand the most basic idea of medicine is “when you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras”. House attempts to will zebras into life, and the show constantly rewrites reality to give him those zebras. If I’m to take this show seriously as a drama, it constantly makes up new complications to artificially extend a conflict beyond its natural lifespan; if I take it on its own terms, House is an idiot who jumps to conclusions and endangers his patients before seeing all the facts.

This show simply doesn’t work as a model for rational thinking – even if the medical science was sound, from my perspective as a viewer, House might as well solve his problems by throwing rocks at a bottle while thinking of diseases. However: the show is entertaining. It’s not high drama; in fact, I kept being disappointed by the potential that it continuously wasted. House’s team are frustrating in that there’s potential in the three characters and performances. 

Foreman in particular comes so close to giving this show something interesting to say dramatically about its curmudgeonly protagonist. It’s partly because Omar Epps is skilled enough as an actor and forceful enough as a presence to challenge both Hugh Laurie as a performer and House as a character; I genuinely believe Foreman has the exact same instincts and intelligence as House – a sheer force of will combined with a head for all the little details – but significantly less experience and with that sheer force of will pointed to being a good person as opposed to a smug prick. 

I also believe Foreman argues with House not just because he thinks he’s right (like most of the characters do) and not just because he’s annoying and in the way (like Cuddy does) but because he wants to take down the idea of House. Jesse Spencer and Jennifer Morrison are weaker actors with less interesting characters, but there is something there in how Chase often comes off as just wanting to do his job and go home (with House having warped his idea of what ‘doing his job’ means); Cameron comes off as a woman written by men, but I like the idea of a character who romanticises the idea of House – a curmudgeon who ultimately does the right thing – but doesn’t have a great grasp on the reality.

In terms of actual drama? There’s isn’t much here. An antagonist (in the form of a billionaire who funds the hospital) wanders in, then shuffles off, with the only effect being a temporary loss of Cameron, who comes back like nothing happened. They go on one date and then their relationship goes back to the way it was! There’s nothing to be learned and nothing of consequence.

Its entertainment is entirely within its shock value – both the fucked up medical shit that happens and the outrageous, socially unacceptable things that House says. The only way that I could reconcile my interest in this show with its obvious dramatic deficiencies was that, through a mixture of its overt goals, inherent construction, and clear weaknesses, it ends up being a clear demonstration of the process of creativity.

By this, I don’t just mean the fucked up shit that happens to human bodies – I also mean House’s ‘character’. Hugh Laurie as Gregory House is definitely one of the all-time TV performances where the performance outstrips the writing by a country mile; he puts so much effort into House’s expressions, selling when he’s genuinely wounded by a one-liner on top of every derisive eye-roll or ‘eureka!’ moment. It reflects the work – if not the talent – that the writers put into developing the character, relentlessly generating his cutting quips based on everything he sees around him.

In fact, one can see the connection between House’s quips and his diagnoses; the former is designed to sound funny and the latter is designed to induce shock, but both are essentially riffs on data he is presented with by the world. He is less a character and more a tic, but if you’re just there to see variations on ‘cynicism’ and ‘body horror’, you’re in for a good time. Further, the structure is less about pushing a story forward and more a process of ‘yes-and’ing oneself. 

This is why the infamous ‘did you try the medicine drug’ gif is so funny; it 100% grasps that House’s diagnoses are based less on rational medicine and more on what would be funny and fucked up. Whoever made this was brilliant when they specifically said ‘mouse bites’, because a) that would totally happen on the show, and for all I know did and more importantly b) shows how arbitrary the setup was. From this season, I specifically remember the guy who had a million packets of Tic Tacs, with Chase missing the importance but any reasonable viewer by now realising this would be setup for the solution.

Stripped of any philosophical aims like TNG means House ends up abstracting itself into the general concept of creativity – the shallowness of the characters means that, in the meetings where they brainstorm ideas, rather than representing different points of view, they represent the very concept of a point of view. The ironic thing about House’s hated clinic hours is that they end up demonstrating how creativity is formed by cross-pollination – House comes up with new ideas specifically because he looks for data outside of the problem itself.

I believe what it ultimately shows is the process one should do before writing a story – the slow process of deciding what would be a fucked up thing to kick off a plot. It’s a useless external battle but a very useful internal one. Indeed, it matches my process of essay-writing; I choose one question I’m trying to resolve, and I allow conflicts to emerge through the natural rising of seemingly contradictory ideas that demand resolution. It would be interesting to come up with ideas for stories that way.