Criminal Minds: I had the priviledge of speaking with an incredibly famous & respected writer and producer last night who is not associated with Criminal Minds. Sounds great? It would have been if I was a tv watcher and had known who she was. Note to self: ALWAYS check IMDB before asking somebody on the phone who they are!!! You can't imagine the speed in which I typed my apology after the conversation for asking this women who she was. She emailed back and was so gracious about it. In my email I promised to watch an episode of her show when the strike is over. Could someone please send me a primer on the show "House" so I have a clue as to what I am watching! Thanks. Head to desk...IMDB!
**Update: Thank you to Angel and Kirsten for their recaps! I am now reclosing this thread for future comments. Thanks gals! :)
Hello again Jill,
ReplyDeleteFor whatever reason I can not be the first one to post on a thread, so here is the info on the show House. Gregory House is the name of a doctor in a teaching hospital in New Jersey. He looks at the most unusual or difficult medical cases and is thought to be the best. His leg was injured 5 plus years ago and he walks with a cane and is addicted to viscid, or however it is spelled. Anyway, girlfriend at the time of his injury (Stacey) a lawyer, tricked him into having the surgery that left him with only needing a cane. Otherwise he would have been to stubborn and would have to have had it cut off. He had a team of 3 young doctors assisting him, a girl named Cameron, an Australian named Chase, and an African-American named Foreman, Chase and Cameron use to be in a relationship, Cameron's first husband died of cancer and she is now thought to be to soft on patience and has a tendency to fall for hopeless cases. Chase comes from a family of doctors and never feels loved or accepted by his father. Foreman and House are constantly butting heads,so House fires Foreman and the others quit. They have all returned to the hospital under different areas and now he is looking for a new team. He has to narrow down the people he is looking at to three. He makes them do dumb things, jump through his hoops to see if they are what he is looking for. He is cranky, sarcastic, bitter, and mean to everyone including patience and his best friend a Dr. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) an oncologist at the hospital. Wilson has been married and divorced 3 or 4 times and always manages to screw up every marriage for one reason or another. House is thought to be part of the problem. The unspoken love interest is between House and Dr. Cutey, the head honcho of the hospital. She blatantly wears thong underwear and low cut tops. She is career oriented and is seemingly driven nuts by House's antics. I hope this helps.
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God Bless,
Angel
Hi, Jill. I'm am here to give you a run down on my other favorite show, House. Sorry it's long, but there is three plus seasons of stuff, and I'm only hitting the major stuff.
ReplyDeleteSeason one introduces us to Dr. Gregory House ( Hugh Laurie), who is a brilliant doctor, but lacks any kind of bed side manner. He runs the Deferential Diagnosis Department at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital inPrinceton, NJ.
He has a team of three people- Dr. Eric Foreman ( Omar Epps), a neurologist; Dr. Robert Chase ( Jesse Spencer), an intensivest; and Dr. Allison Cameron( Jennifer Morrison) , an immunologist. We also meet Hous'e best friend, oncologist Dr. James Wilson ( Robert Sean Leonard), and his boss, endicronologist Dr. Lisa Cuddy ( Lisa Edelstein).
The first season sets up what is considered to be the House formula. The Patient Of The Week ( called POW in House circles) falls ill with some bizarre symptoms. House tries hard not to take the case, but his curiousity always gets the best of him. He and his team do a deferential diagnosis, come up with a theory, and throwing legalities and ethics to the wind, try to cure, sometimes with no actual proof of the disease House believes it is. House has his teams do things like breaking into the patient's house, ignoring requests of parents or the patients, and lying through their teeth. The first couple of guesses always seem to fail, but then something happens ( like House and wilson having a discussion) which clicks something in House's brain, and he discovers what the patient really has.
Season one also had a couple of story arcs outside of the medicine. House is confronted by a billionaire named Edward Vogel ( Chi McBride), who has donated $100 million to the hospital. The problem is Vogel works in pharmacuticals, which irks House. He does not want how he does his medicine dictated to him. Vogel takes an immediate dislike to House, and tries to get him fired. When that doesn't work, he tries to get House to fire one of his team. Foreman doesn't liek the politics Vogel is trying to get him to play, Cameron is loyal to house, but Chase is an oppotunist who decides to spy on House for Vogel. It ends with Wilson getting fired by the board and Cuddy almost following him down the rabbit hole, but instead Vogel pulls his money from the hospital. house looks at this as a victory, but Cuddy tells him that they should be saddened by this whole experience.
Another prominent story arc is the Cameron- House ship. Cameron has a crush on House, which he uses to amuse himself. During the Vogel crisis, she quits. House goes and tries to get her back on his team, and offers money and other perks. The only thing she asks for is a date. He agrees, but the date goes horribly wrong. Cameron is told by House that the only reason she likes him is because he's damaged. The story hasn't been a focus in subsequent seasons, but there has always been an undercurrent of it.
The best episode of the season is the penultimate episode, " Three Stories", when House is forced by Cuddy to teach a diagnostics class. He presents the students three patients, all suffering from leg pain. During the course of the episode, he tells the stories of a farmer who suffers a dog bit that leads to an amputation, a teenage girl who suffers from bone cancer, and a patient originally thougt to be an addict seeking drugs. It eventually becomes clear that the last story is actually about House, and how he ended up losing full use of his leg.
The final episode introduces us to Stacy ( Sela Ward), the love of House's life. She is now married, and her husband is suffering form some mysterious symptoms. She goes to House because no one can find anything wrong with him. House hates the idea of treating her husband, but does it, with his own special brand of bed side manner. The husband, in return, does not trust House, and it nearly kills him. House does find out what's wrong, and save the guys life. Cuddy tells House that since the husband needs a lot of therapy, she has asked Stacy to work as the council for the hospital. House tells Cuddy he's okay with it.
Season 2 starts off as a game House plays with Stacy. He is convinced she is still in love with him and sets out to prove it. He tortures her husband with innuendo, shows up at their house to be " helpful", breaks into her therapist's office to read her file. Stacy, though, is drawn to House, and while on a trip to Baltimore, they kiss, and then back in Princeton, they spend the night together. In one moment of total rationality, House realizes thta Stacy really is better off with her husband and cuts her loose.
Foreman, on the other hand, is turning out to be House redux. He steals a pper idea from Cameron and is published, leaving Cameron in shock. He later tells her it isn't personal, for he really doesn't care about her or her feelings. Chase gets into serious trouble when he kills a patient by forgetting to ask one very important question during a routine followup. He is suspended, and House is also taken to task for his lack of scruples. Cuddy places Foreman in charge for a month. Foreman quickly learns that House will not listen to anyone, and soon gives up trying to prove he is a better boss than House.
In a two-part episode of House called Euphoria, Foreman contracts a mysterious disease while treating a racist cop. The cop has been shot, but is also laughing like a maniac. When Foreman starts showing symptoms, he is put in isolation with the cop, while House, Cameron, and Chase search desperately for a solution. Foreman sees the cop die a rather painful death, and becomes desperate, even sticking Cameron with a needle to convince her to work harder. It takes a visit to the cops home to show the team what my have caused the cop's symptoms, and they use the information to cure Foreman, but not before performing brain surgery on him.
In the finale, House is shot by a man in his office. House is later seen in the ICU, where Cameron has been by his side the whole time. In the next bed is the man who shot him. House is told that security got him as he was trying to escape. House proceeds to try to diagnose a guy with a swollen tongue while in recovery. The symptoms get more and more bizarre ( you really should see it to believe it, but it is quite gruesome,so be forewarned), and eventually we see House trying to perform surgery on the guy with a robot. House cuts, and the guy blows up like a balloon and explodes. Then House sees the guy drop a bullet, and he realizes the whole scenerio was a hallucination. We then see him being wheeled to the ER, where he tells Cameron he wants Cuddy to okay an experimental Ketamine treatment for chronic pain.
Season three opens with House no longer using a cane or Vicodin. He is feeling so euphoric he begins to beleive he is infallible. His first patient back is someone who has been incapacitated for years due to brain surgery for cancer. House becaomes convinced that he can make the guy walk again. The team fears that House will kill someone if someone doesn't stop him, so Cuddy puts the breaks on. When the realization that he may not be so great sets in, House starts drug seeking again. Cuddy, though, decides to try the treatment House told her about, and lo-and-behold, the man gets out of his wheelchair. Wilson tells her not to tell House, because he will kill someone someday if he is not checked.
Season Three deals a lot with House's addiction to Vicodin. The pain does start to come back in his leg, but he is popping pills like he did when he was at his worse. He's stealing scripts from Wilson's pad, and hoarding drugs in every room he spends any time in. One day, House is working the clinic, and is given a surly patient ( David Morse). Not liking the attitude he was getting, House decides to humiliate the guy by leaving him alone in the room, pants down, thermometer up his butt. Turns out the guy's a cop, and he pulls House over for speeding. He searches House and finds Vicodin in a bag. Detective Tritter, we soon discover, is House with a badge. Tritter uses the law to have DEA rights taken away, bank accounts frozen, the whole ten yards. House's friends and team may not approve of his drug use, but they are all very loyal to him ultimately. Tritter gets nowhere, until one day House almost amputates the arm and leg of a six year old girl, believing that she has the flesh eating bacteria. Chase tells him that no, she has an allergy to sunlight, but House punches him. chase decides enough is enough, and tells Wilson so. Wilson decides that Chase's career would ultimately be ruined by House if Chase told, so Wilson decides to come foreward first, and tells Tritter that yes, House is getting drugs illegally. House, though, becomes more desperate with his drugs being regimented, so he steals a bottle of oxycontin from a dead patient. He ends up overdosing, but survives. Wilson and Cuddy both tell him to take the deal Tritter is offering, which consists of rehab, but he agrees to late. They end up going to trial, where Cuddy presents evidence that saves House from jail.
The last part of the season focuses on House's relationship with his team. He fakes brain cancer to get himself into a new pain study, which leads his team to try and cure him, only to find out the truth. Chase and Cameron begin a secret affair, only to have it come to a still when House discovers tham in a closet. Chase, though, refuses to give up, and tells Cameron every Tuesday he likes her. Foreman, though, is fearful he is turning into House, and when he one day decides to take bone marrow from one sick brother to give to another who is dying, he realizes that he doesn't want to be this kind of doctor. He hands in his two weeks notice. House is furious at Foreman, and in turn fires Chase. Cameron is apalled by that move, and resigns. The season ends with House having no team.
Season four begins with House alone. He thinks he doesn't need a team. Cuddy believes otherwise. House tells her if he cures the case she gave him, he can work alone. Cuddy bets him he can't. While House does eventually cure the patient, Cuddy tells him if he had a team, he would have cured the patient faster. She tells him to hire people, and she doesn't care how. So house sets up his own version of Survivor- forty candidates, three positions.
He puts his new ducklings throught he paces- illegal, unethical, car washing ( that was just for fun). He is haunted, though, by the thoughts of hius old team. He's convinced he sees Chase and Cameron, but Wilson tells him that they moved to Phoenix. Turns out they both work at Princeton in different capacities.
Foreman is now in charge of the Diagnosis department at Mercy Hospital in NYC. But after going over the chief of medicine's head and doing a treatment he was told not to, he was fired. After failing to find a job because he has been "poisoned" by House, he returns to Princeton, hired babk by Cuddy to work with House. This make bith House and Foreman angry.
As season four progresses, we see many of the new doctors leave, and recently they have been selected- Dr. Taub ( Peter Jacobson), a plastic surgeon who left his practice due to a sex scandal; Dr. Kutner, a young, enthusiastic doctor who is unafraid of shocking hearts in a oxygen chamber ( he is a bit of an idiot- he also shocked a patient who was wet); and a doctor we only know as Thirteen, who is young and beautiful ( much like Cameron), but seems damaged in a way Cameron isn't.
New episodes of House don't start again till January, and it is the show running after the Superbowl. I highly recommend the show, because it is smart ( even if the medicine isn't always right), and Hugh Laurie is totally charming even while playing the biggest jerk in the world.
Kirsten ( Palais on the boards)