Hugh Laurie is one of my favorite actors. I loved him as Bertie Wooster in the BBC Jeeves and Wooster series. So I watched the medical series House from its beginning. Laurie plays a sort of Socratic character, only viciously acerbic rather than genial. House plays a doctor who heads a medical team whose job it is to solve mysterious cases. Like Socrates, his nose is always sniffing for the difficult problem. More like Sherlock Holmes, House is easily bored and lives only for the apparently unsolvable problem. His art is a distraction from the otherwise meaningless flow of life.
But House is interesting because it does present us with an unfashionable idea: that happiness and excellence might be mutually exclusive. House does his job with marvelous effect precisely because he is, psychologically speaking, damaged goods. At one point, due to a near death experience, one of his team becomes suddenly happly. House has to wreck this happiness because, as he puts it, "I need you to be insecure, second-guessing yourself. Otherwise you are no good to me." That is not a direct quote, but it gets the drift. All this flies in the face of the self-esteem movement. For that reason alone, it is good televison.
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