[SPOILER LERT]

I had a meeting to go to last night, and when I got home everyone is huddled around the TV like it’s the last source of information on a dying planet.  So I ask what is going on…

“SSSSSHHHHHHH!!!!!”

Sheez, just askin’ a question.  No need to spring a leak.

Well, it turns out that they were watching the new episode of House, in which they killed off Lawrence Kutner (Kal Penn), probably the most interesting character introduced lately and one of my favorites.  I’m still not totally convinced it is suicide, although that would set up some interesting plot twists in later shows.

I mean, it didn’t bother me too much when they killed off Amber, other than I enjoyed watching her try to get to House.  But why Kutner?  Why couldn’t it have been Thirteen?  Nobody would have even noticed she was gone until it was time to write in a superficial personal drama scene that required staring and glaring and knitting together those wonky eyebrows.  If they kill off Taub next, I’m seriously gonna be ticked.

But you know what’s really depressing?  My kids didn’t know who Meat Loaf was until I told them he was the guy singing in the Go Phone commercials.

I wondered how long it would last, and it seems about this long.  Hugh Laurie, television’s resident curmudgeonly hunka-hunka burning doctor on House, is canning his long-distance relationship with his family by finally moving them to America:

After nearly four years of living a trans-Atlantic life which has done little for the depressive actor’s mental state, not to mention his 19-year marriage, the Mail can reveal that Hugh’s family are moving to America to be with him.

Until now and despite the unhappiness the nine-month separations have caused, the actor has always refused to uproot his family.

A determined pessimist, he was certain that the moment he moved the family and disrupted his children’s schooling, House would be cancelled.

‘I’ll probably be confident enough to move them in about ten years time,’ he semi-joked earlier this year. ‘I can never really believe the thing [House] is going to last. The whole of the first year I was in a hotel. I didn’t even unpack the suitcase.’

But after a particularly difficult year, during which he was forced to forego his usual two-month summer break with his family thanks to the Hollywood screenwriter’s strike, it was clear that his nomadic lifestyle was not doing him any good.

Hugh has long struggled with depressive episodes and has always been upfront about them:

‘I get anxious about a lot of things, that’s the trouble,’ he said. ‘I get anxious about everything.’

Even the plaudits heaped upon House, and himself in particular, have done little for his confidence.

He has won two Golden Globes and three Emmy nominations for his role as the crotchety and rude Dr House, who specialises in finding out the causes of mystery illnesses.

The show regularly gets 18 million viewers in the U.S and is syndicated around the world.

Meanwhile, Hugh was recently voted second sexiest TV doctor ever and one of the top five most popular U.S. television personalities.

He also has hundreds of websites devoted to him; even Rolling Stone magazine has dubbed him ‘the most rock and roll actor on TV’.

But he admits that he still suffers from crippling self doubt and doesn’t even think that he has a convincing American accent on the TV show.

‘Every show we do, every scene we shoot is a disaster, I’m convinced of it,’ he says. ‘I go home at the end of the day and my head is full of all the mistakes I’ve made.’

It sounds to me like Hugh struggles with OCD, something I’m very familiar with.  Is his American accent perfect?  No…but he speaks American better than some Americans I know.  Besides, House himself isn’t perfect, so we don’t expect perfection out of his alter ego.  However, Hugh himself has an “escape clause”:

Hugh – pessimist to the last – has insisted on a get-out clause in case things do go wrong.

If any member of the family is unhappy in America by this time next year, they will all return home to London.

From what I have seen and read about this family, if they all love each other enough to make such sacrifices, then they should be happy no matter where they are.  Their conditions don’t dictate their happiness, as long as they are together.  Or, as Gregory House would say, “Everything is conditional. You just can’t always anticipate the conditions.”

I loves me some Hugh Laurie, and here is one reason why (besides the obvious)…he has things in perspective.  Didn’t I just do a piece on overpaid actors?  Well, Hugh realizes that what he does for a living ain’t curing cancer:

Your dad was a doctor. What would he have thought of House?He couldn’t have been more different to House. He was a hero to me. A very gentle man who would take any amount of time with patients.

You never thought about going into medicine?

I think I was too lazy to be a doctor. I do feel bad that now I’m pretending to do what my dad did and getting paid more for it than he ever did.

Now there is a statement I can get behind.

Seriously, you gotta watch this show.  I watch VERY little network TV, and this is a definite DVR timer for me.  If anyone wants to know what they can get me for Christmas, the series DVD set is right behind the Monk series DVD set on my Santa list.  tia

I’m probably a network television executive’s worst nightmare, in that I very rarely watch network TV.  Pretty much the only time I tune in is for a sporting event, or when one of my kids is watching something like Celebrity Apprentice (yeah, I know, but I gotta see if Trace Adkins takes the whole thing).  There is one exception…House.

House has been a recent addition to my viewing habits, but a welcome one.  For those of you unfamiliar with the premise, Dr. Gregory House is the head of a team of diagnosticians at a teaching hospital, who’s patients typically come to them after having failed to receive a diagnosis, or an incorrect diagnosis, at other hospitals.  He’s cranky, irritable, egotistical, cynical, unorthodox, curmudgeonly, and a medical genius.  Oh, and he also abuses Vicodin, due to a past infarction in the quad muscle of one of his legs (the dead muscle was removed), which requires him to use a cane and keeps him in constant pain.  While this addiction hasn’t caused his grating personality, it doesn’t help it any.

Hugh Laurie, the ruggedly handsome, extremely talented, and versatile British actor who plays the doctor, has recently admitted to experimenting with Vicodin to get a better feel for his character:

Not that he’s been labeled a realistic Method actor before, but Hugh Laurie admits he attempted to get closer to the character he portrays on House — by experimenting with Vicodin, the strong painkiller to which Dr. Gregory House is addicted.

“I wouldn’t recommend it — we have to be careful,” Laurie, 48, tells Britain’s Radio Times magazine, “But then again … if you’re not in pain it gives a floaty, pleasurable feeling.”

I haven’t been able to find the rest of the interview (it is advertised as being in the new issue, so maybe it just isn’t online yet…I’ll have to visit my local bookstore).

While I believe that the show provides a balanced view of House’s drug addiction, (he doesn’t believe his addiction is a big deal, since it doesn’t interfere with his work, while it is obvious to all around him that it is…however, no viable alternatives are suggested or tried, other solutions having been attempted and discarded), and I don’t see the show glamorizing his drug usage in any way, I am uncomfortable with this admission that Hugh tried Vicodin and admitted that yeah, they do make you feel good.  If you’ve ever taken one, you already know how they make you feel, so that’s no big surprise.  I don’t necessarily think some kid is going to think it’s okay because some actor who isn’t on a teen drama did it, I’m just uncomfortable with the whole thing.

Fortunately, it doesn’t seem that he’s repeated the experiment.

His father was a doctor, and Hugh has a view on that which is one of the most balanced I’ve heard:

Your dad was a doctor. What would he have thought of House?

He couldn’t have been more different to House. He was a hero to me. A very gentle man who would take any amount of time with patients.

You never thought about going into medicine?

I think I was too lazy to be a doctor. I do feel bad that now I’m pretending to do what my dad did and getting paid more for it than he ever did.

Just don’t repeat that little experiment with the Vics and we’ll be fine.  I have to get my weekly dose of the good doctor, you know.  It hurts when I do this…