Unsettling move to rehab House

BY JANE CLIFTON

OPINION: The return of House (Tuesday, TV3) was some of the best television you will ever see, although quite what's going to become of the series now that the recreationally vicious doctor has had his head shrunk and is taking happy pills, heaven knows.

This two-hour premier was as much a roller-coaster ride for the viewer as it was for Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), and left a sinking feeling that the crotchety one's next big feat might be to transform himself into Dr Kildare.

The very idea of House going into rehab to get himself off the painkillers that have so underpinned his subversive personality these several years is both hilarious and worrying.

The fear, unspoken until near the end of the show, is that replacing his hallucinatory quantities of Vicodin with anti-depressants which might lighten the murky depths of his restless soul might mute his personality and lessen his genius.

His psychiatrist, the muscular, if long-suffering Nolan (a lovely turn by Andre Braugher) insists that Van Gogh would still have painted his vivid art had he had the benefit of Prozac, just not from within an asylum, and with continued possession of both his ears.

House isn't buying it - and, with a nervous glance to the likely future shape of the series, neither are we yet. A calm, fully self-actualised House, in control of his emotions and empathetic of others is not the House we make our joyful weekly appointment to watch.

We want the guy whose rudeness makes Michael Laws seem genteel; the guy whose antisocial behaviour and self-destructiveness is pursued as a matter of principle, and on purpose to annoy others.

We want the brilliant misanthrope, and this psychiatric treatment is going to mess with a seriously beloved TV formula.

Nevertheless, here it comes. After a harrowing series of petty and ingenious rebellions in the psychiatric ward, House is both humbled and brought to despair.

At times, you can hardly bear to look at his face, stripped of its bravado, collapsing into something terrifyingly close to self-doubt. He actually accepts the need to try to attack his chronic - if crankily functional - depressive state, with professional help. And there's no witty, cutting punchline to that whatsoever.

This is not what House fans will have expected, perhaps until the very end of the show. He staged a series of hilariously devious sabotages of his treatment, stirred up his fellow inmates, insulted all-comers and routed the medical staff at pretty much every turn. House business as usual.

But right when we thought he had prevailed, as he does every week in the teeth of the most obscure medical conditions and the most iron-clad bureaucratic requirements, Nolan turned the tables in a manner that trumped even House's most definitively "up yours" swifties.

Suspecting that House was "cheeking" his medication, Nolan had secretly been giving him placebos. Thus, when House faked his urine test, by getting a fellow inmate to fill the bottle, he was snookered.

Bottom line: Nolan was not going to give him back his medical practice certificate until he made a sincere attempt to let himself be helped. Step one: take the pills.

House made one last bid for autonomy, subverting another patient's treatment, but this ended in near-tragedy when the hopelessly overstimulated chap tried to "fly" from a parking building.

House at last submitted, a process complicated by his falling in love with a regular visitor to the ward, Lydia, desperate to help her catatonic sister-in-law. This process, doomed as it was, since Lydia is married with children, was also hard to watch. House falling in love is like a snail going about without a shell. Unpractised as he is at non- combative relationships, he was husked by the experience.

The risk is that all this makes House less idiosyncratic, more conventional and less entertaining. We simply have to trust that the writers will not belabour us with a new, brow-smiting, Hamlet version of him, and that his new strategy for wrestling with inner demons will entail plenty of pratfalls.

This has been among the most reliably entertaining and fresh TV series of the past decade, and there's plenty of mileage in it yet.

My pick is that House uses his new, more chilled-out persona to torment and derange his colleagues backhandedly. After all, what could be more sinister, more subversive, more alarming, than House being nice?

* What do you think of House? Post your comments below.

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