I vo’ed a bunch of House episodes last week, including a marathon running on USA. This weekend I’ve started watching through, from the pilot, and I’ve been overall pretty impressed. It’s an entertaining show that gives the typical medical drama a comedic touch, with a bit of mystery mixed in as well. The show received an Emmy for it’s writer, David Shore, and Hugh Laurie, who plays Dr. House, won a global globe.
House is about Dr. Gregory House, and his team of doctors. They get a mysterious patient, and the episode is about them finding out what the problem with the patient is, and how to cure it.
It sounds pretty formulaic - and it is. Each episode starts with the patient getting sick, then the doctors try to diagnose the problem, but fail. Finally, House comes to an epiphany, complete with Beautiful Mind epiphany music, and then all is good. Usually mixed in is some comedy about House dealing with normal patients.
It happens every episode, and you’d think it’d get boring. Yet after many, many episodes back to back, it’s still holding my interest. One big strength of the show is the dialogue - House is crass, abusive, sarcastic and condescending, and this is, sadly, amusing to watch.
The show offers something for both sexes: an emotional “sick patient dying, doctor must save him” for the women, and the maverick “House is smart, doesn’t play by the rules, but is right in the end and proves his doubters wrong” thing for the guys. It’s brilliant, and works very well.
Oh, one more thing - they have a lot of cool CGI medical scenes - for example the camera will fly into someone’s nose, and into their lungs, and you will see the blood pumping through them. It’s neat, sometimes a bit gross, but neat.
One thing that’s a bit weird about the show is that the episodes seem really very separated from each other. There are not many underlying storylines that run from one episode to the next, and the characters pretty much keep their same personalities throughout.
You can tell this is the case when you see and old rerun and the most recent episode of the show, and can’t tell that they’re separated by a long period of time. I realized this when I skipped from the rerun recordings to the more recent fox recordings.
At most there is some relationship stuff here and there, and some basic character development - but not much at all. I think this aspect of the show needs some work - it’d keep viewers wanting to see each new episode, and breaks out of the typical show mold that House is already strongly set into.
But with that aside, it’s very entertaining - it was hard for me to stop watching the episodes that I had recorded. New episodes are on fox, reruns are already on USA.
Last thing - Hugh Laurie actually has a british accent, but on the show he is american. It’s weird, his american accent is good, but you can tell there’s something different with the way he speaks - very subtle, but it actually fits in with House’s character in a weird way.
New Century Financial (NEWC) announced today that they are seeking bankruptcy protection. We have yet to see how this is going to send ripples through the investment community. I haven’t followed how New Century debt is trading but I’m sure its a disaster. I remember that a few weeks ago there was some news that Barclays Plc was demanding payment for a large amount of NEWC debt they held. I wonder if that pushed the situation over the brink. Like I said before in previous posts, keep an eye out for major bulge bracket banking losses in relation to trading this stuff. The worst scenario would be increased scrutiny or a new law that “tries” to fix lending problems.
Seems like a great idea - instead of smoking harmful chemicals, why not simply inhale a tar-free stimulant. Something well known…effective…over the counter..jpg)
The New Yorker has 
