With another $119 having gone to Amazon to renew Prime, I felt justified in sampling a TV series I’ve never watched, that my subscription makes available for streaming. I think of “House” as a recent show, but it started a couple of years before this blog, which is coming up on its 15th anniversary.
The series is old enough that it was written to a formula that isn’t ideal for binge-watching. The sequence of events is essentially repeated in each episode. “Okay, here’s where they try the wrong thing and it causes a heart attack or seizure,” etc. So, like my experience watching “The Walking Dead,” I was losing interest at the start of the second season. Then I saw this scene in S2:E3.
My mother lived for seven years after surviving a deadly Aspergillus fungal infection in her lung, by undergoing an extremely difficult course of Amphotericin treatments. Two of my sisters — one an MD, the other an RN — installed the central line themselves, after brushing aside the attending physician and nurse. The drug’s side effects are so awful it deserves to be called “amphoterrible.”
The impossibly intertwined personal lives of the “House” characters is typical TV soap opera writing. But physicians breaking into patients’ homes to find clues to the cause of their illnesses, and never getting caught during or afterwards? Ludicrous! But… hmm… come to think of it, there were times at work when the quickest way to fix a problem was to open a VPN tunnel to a hospital without prior permission, and use RDP to access a system console with administrative privileges. (Note: This is the method cyber criminals prefer to introduce ransomware.) Okay, so the idea isn’t so ludicrous. Maybe the breaking-and-entering plot device is resolved later in the series.
As expected, Hugh Laurie is fun to watch. I’m sure he made a lot more money playing Gregory House than he did appearing with Rowan Atkinson on “Blackadder”…
… or when he teamed up with Stephen Fry. This is about as British as British comedy gets!
