Television: Scorn Is the Best Medicine

You’ve heard of killing with kindness? Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) believes in curing with contempt. He is a gifted diagnostician who is fascinated by disease. But patients he can do without. He insults them, talks down to them and forgets their names–when he speaks to them at all. “How can you treat someone without meeting him?” asks a patient’s father. “It’s easy,” he says, “if you don’t give a crap about him.”

House is, in other words, the opposite of what a TV doctor is supposed to be–and the most enjoyable new character of the fall. Without him, House (Fox, Tuesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.) could have been a bland disease-of-the-week exercise like NBC’s stultifying Medical Investigation. Every week House and the staff at a New Jersey university hospital treat a different mystery illness. But House is working under protest, forced by his hospital administrator (Lisa Edelstein) to spend a few hours a week seeing actual patients face to face. Hobbled by an excruciating leg condition, he pops Vicodin like Tic Tacs as he suffers hypochondriacs with the sniffles. (He does connect with a bitter office worker trying to milk her insurance before she gets fired; admiring her spite, he orders up an expensive, unnecessary scan.)

Laurie, a British actor known for playing comic twits, transforms flawlessly into an American jerk. (In both accent and attitude he’s a little like Survivor’s Richard Hatch.) His brilliant, arrogant lead is buffered by a likable confidant (Robert Sean Leonard) and three young doctors (Omar Epps, Jennifer Morrison and Jesse Spencer) who hold patients’ hands for him. The show also sports CGI effects that, CSI-style, bring us nose-to-cell with platelets and parasites. But unlike CSI, House is more interested in ideas than technology: Is the human touch overrated? Are concepts like “death with dignity” just feel-good lies? Funny, probing and unsentimental, House may shock the systems of viewers used to sweetie M.D.s like ER’s Dr. Carter. But as an honest look at techno-medicine and the prerogatives of genius, it’s a tonic. –By James Poniewozik