Oh House! Not Another Anti-hero

Oh no! Last night on Fox Dr. Gregory House just decided to cop a plea on his forging of prescriptions for the prescription painkiller Vikodin, but when he turned up at the detective’s office, it was no deal.

Why? Because the acerbic House had signed for a dead patient’s prescription for painkiller, and the DA was going to hang him on that instead of the testimony of colleague Dr. James Wilson.

But the next exciting episode of Fox’s hit series House M.D. won’t be aired until January! How are House fans supposed to wait until then?

OK, so this was my first experience of House, on account of visiting my sister in Colorado to celebrate the 90th birthday of our mother. I had no idea, no idea about House at all, until she introduced me to her addiction. Of course, I never watch network TV. Never.

House M.D. is certainly a fully modern TV experience. It has an anti-hero in the title role, a crew of main characters right out of diversity camp, and the eternal chick draw of loved ones with their lives at stake.

Gregory House is said to be modeled on Sherlock Holmes (Holmes, House, get it?) and that raises the interesting idea that Arthur Conan Doyle was a writer before his time. Who thought about anti-heroes in Britland back at the turn of the twentieth century? Well, Conan Doyle did.

But I am underwhelmed by yet another anti-hero. I mean, haven’t we done that already?

Instead I am waiting with baited breath for the end of the anti-hero era. What is it that makes the anti-hero such a necessity in our era? Is it the pervasive power of government, the endless rules, that Gregory House must overturn if he is to get anything done?

And we will leave aside the utterly unbelievable careerist female physicians in the series. Sorry, pal. Women just aren’t like that. Never were, never will be.

Here is the nagging question for me. Why are we lying to ourselves so compulsively, lying about the provenance of anti-heroes in an age of stifling conformism, and lying about women who act and talk just like men—except when the plot requires a dose of tear-jerking emotion?

What is it? And what will it take to break out of the Age of Lies into a new age?

I know. Every age is an age of lies, because life is a lie: the eternal hope that rises irrepressibly every morning against the inescapable fact of death.

But I’m ready for the dawning of the age of the New Hero, whatever that may be, and whoever he may be.