House

Over the Christmas break last year I picked up the first season of House on DVD, and a couple late night marathon viewing sessions later, I decided that it had been an excellent buy. I'll probably pick up the second and third seasons some time soon and get back to more viewing excellence.

There are two definite phases of house, first team and second team. While I like the characters from the second team alright, and Thirteen is definitely hot, I still tend to lean to the first team more. It seems to me that if you take Foreman out of the equation because he is still there in the second team, Chase and Cameron are more interesting than Kutner, Taub and Thirteen are. It seems that even though there are more story lines about Taub and Thirteen than there were about Chase and Cameron, that doesn't translate into more character development. And Kutner is just kinda boring.

Of course the story is all about diagnosing the mystery illness, and it's done in a way that even though you don't know anything about medicine, it's still interesting. Most of the time House or one of his staff figures out what's happening near the end of the episode, and the patient recovers. In a few episodes, the correct diagnosis isn't a good thing, and the patient dies from some uncurable malady. What I haven't seen yet, and maybe I've just missed it, is where either some test or treatment that House is wrong about kills the patient, or where they get the right diagnosis, but not in time. I guess you could say that the episode where they gave two babies with the same disease two different treatments and one of them died might fit into that, but House had decided that one of the babies had to die anyway to save several other ones, so House wasn't wrong.

House is just one of those newer prime time dramas that I am kinda into. I don't know if it is just because some of the dramas of the past sucked, or that I just am getting older and more mature that I like more of these shows than I used to. I guess it also shows a break from the science fiction I like so much too, but oh well, I don't still do all the things I used to do either.