I don’t remember that - was it when he was berating the woman for not getting the tumor removed? If yes, then I think it was another example of House lying just a bit to get someone to do what he thinks is right. He does that a lot.
I didn’t think it was out of character. There have been a number of small references to Chase not really fitting in with House, as well as a bit of “well, I’m going to look after myself first and foremost.” Given that, brownnosing to a higher power was completely in character.
I do think the whole romance thing between House and Cameron is a bit forced.
That’s an easy one - the character is a very devious bully, and House is the only one in the hospital he hasn’t been able to control. He will thus take any chance he can get to prove that he’s the one in charge.
Again, I agree with you - that seemed a bit quick.
I do realize that medicine is about making a good guess based on available information, but they *damn near kill * every patient with the wrong treatment before settling on the correct one. Somebody get those people some lab rats!
I watch the show, mostly because I started watching it as big fan of Hugh Laurie, and I kept watching because I watch American Idol which leads into it. It’s my crap TV night.
It’s a good cast, but the writing is wretched. I laugh quite a bit at the stuff they get away with, like having a doctor burst in on a doctor in the middle of an exam and carrying on a conversation about another patient. Extremely disrespectful, AND illegal. There’s stuff like that in every episode. I really have to start writing it down.
But that doesn’t make the show less entertaining. For me, it’s part of the entertainment.
Last night was in fact the first one I watched and it was so awful, incredible, tortured, and ridiculous that I couldn’t believe people actually watch it. I’m glad to know that it’s the worst one yet. I’ll probably never watch another one because I don’t have a TV, but I guess I’m glad that it’s not always the load of crap that it was last night.
Many of the points in Walker’s list annoyed me, too, but the worst was the “pick one” nonsense. Arrggh!! As has been mentioned, it was so obviously conflict-for-conflict’s-sake that it was painful to watch. Only the most non-functional of businesses would operate as such. How could Chi McBride’s character possibly have become a successful, wealthy businessman if he uses the following:
*Originally posted by *BobT:
The Chairman of the Board’s (Chi McBride) motivation is to just tell House that he’s the boss, he sets the rules, he calls the shots and he’s in charge.
as motivation for such an asinine, morale-killing, and idiotic business practice?When he said that it wasn’t about the money, he completely lost me. I know that my points have all probably been made, but I specifically looked in Cafe Society tonight to see if anyone had written about this episode, and aha! someone had. I needed a chance to vent. Thank you.
Wait, I forgot to say that this also annoyed me: It seems to be to be an attempt to copycat CSI’s success with: medical-themed show with senior male supervising eager, smart disciples; cool (but the one I saw, not nearly as cool as CSI’s) inside-the-human-body shots; and shiny, unrealistic lab/hospital sets with huge glass windows and other cool-looking stuff. They even have whats-her-name who looks sort of like Jorja Fox. Whatever!
Working in a clinical lab myself, I laughed my ass off at the one or two lab scenes I saw on House. For starters, how about the fact that it’s the doctors themselves that run down to the lab to run all the tests in their spare time? Like this lab is sitting there idle, chock full of equipment, just waiting for the doctors to come on down and put them to good use. Then there’s the fact that they kept saying “running gels” like that’s some sort of actual test. “I’ll stay here and run gels all night if I need to!” I seem to recall one of them saying. Of course, the lab itself is much nicer looking and more dramatically lit than any lab I’ve ever seen, but that’s true throughout TV and movies. They all suck at depicting realistic labs or labwork.
To give them credit, though, they actually had a LightCycler PCR machine in the lab, complete with the correct software loaded on the computer next to it. Unfortunately, they showed one of the doctors busily typing on the keyboard while the monitor showed a screen that only accepts input through the mouse, but I don’t think many other people would have caught on to that…
Reading this discussion, I caved in and watched the show this week, despite my misgivings. As I predicted, the nasally American accent that Laurie is forced to use really grated on me. Overall, though, the acting was good. My wife kept groaning at all the bombast and melodrama, but I expected as much.
What really bothered me was the bullshit scene between Chi McBride and House at the end. House is a highly skilled doctor in what seems to be a spectacular specialty – he doesn’t need McBride’s bullshit. He could go into private practice or take his department to another – probably richer – hospital in half a minute.
This is the way the scene should have gone down –
McBride: You either fire the black guy or your girlfriend or I’ll close down the department.
House: Fine. I’ll take my department and get even better funding for saving lives and diagnosing obscure diseases on a weekly basis. Go fuck yourself.
I stand by what I said earlier–I liked what I saw of the show. I am relieved to know that it gets better, though! The acting was the best part, and I saw the inconsistencies but sloughed it off as “trying to write good medical drama,” not “trying to write accurate medical drama.” I guess both are possible, and I hope that the more glaring inaccuracies will be avoided in the future.
And there was NO WAY that girl was over 200lbs. She might have weighed 150, but she wasn’t “morbidly obese.” They did a pretty good job showing the plight of the fat girl, though. The skinny blonde “buddy” being all, “She’s lying! There’s no way that tub o’ lard is taking diet pills!” was classic junior high material.