ABSTRACT
Fox's House substitutes the spectacle of CSI 's dissected cadavers for the not so forthcoming diseased but still pulsing body. This complex and highly volatile organism is no match for the morally earnest, law-bound characters that haunt prime-time procedurals. Such a body needs to be coaxed into revealing its secrets by a similarly wounded and duplicitous trickster. This explains why Dr Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), the misanthropic prodigy gifted with curing the incurable, overshadows each formulaic 42-minute episode. Left partially crippled and permanently in pain from a clotted aneurysm in his upper leg, House is a self-medicator who hoards the narcotic Vicodin with all the cunning of a junkie. As he limps through the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital (PPTH), considering himself special and so above authority, the very colleagues he emotionally abuses glorify him as a latter-day Asclepius. There is not a great deal of `meat' in this character-driven series without its drug-riddled heartbeat. Wresting him from the text (even abstractly) is a bit of a struggle, so this discussion of healing, trickster and the dis-ease of identifying with an in¯exible persona, would not even attempt to shift the spotlight.
