…and this is a 
House jumps the shark
Category: Entertainment • Science • Stupidity
Posted on: September 13, 2006 10:36 AM, by PZ Myers
True confession: I try to watch the medical drama House when I can. It's lead character is an acerbic and brilliant atheist M.D. (played by Hugh Laurie, a comedic actor—which was a smart casting decision), and the humor is snarky and dark. That's just the kind of thing I enjoy. It's been going downhill, I think, because the episodes have gotten far too predictable—there's always a weird illness which is handled via increasingly wild semi-random diagnoses that always, and I definitely mean always, ends with the complete cure of the patient. The infallibility is wearing a little thin.
Last season's finale almost made me give up. They turned the gross-out factor up to 11 (exploding testicles and eyeballs popping out), and resolved everything with the lamest, laziest television cliche: it was just a dream. I hoped it was just an aberration.
Last night's episode, though, blew it. I have lost faith in House. <spoilers below>
The premise was a sick kid with rectal bleeding and hallucinations of being probed by aliens. To jump way ahead to the resolution, the kid was chimeric, the product of a fusion of two zygotes in utero, and so he had cells of two genotypes in his body. That isn't too unlikely a possibility, but everything else was. How they figured it out peeved me no end.
First, there was a problem with blood pressure, so after the usual series of confusing red herrings, they do an echocardiogram of his heart. It's an amazingly pretty pseudo-colored rendering of a valve opening and closing which had me a bit dismayed, but OK—the CSI-ification of science continues apace on TV, with the most wonderful technology always doing the job with the most glitzy interfaces. I'll let it slide. It's stupid, but I'm trying to watch it for the characters, OK?
They notice that a part of the heart wall isn't contracting properly, so they go in and snip out a piece of tissue from the heart of this 7 year old. That was cold. You'd think they'd then try to figure out why it wasn't contracting, and they'd send it off to a histologist, but no…continuing the show's history of randomly picking some inappropriate diagnostic tool, they send it off to have a DNA comparison done. Why? I don't know. It comes back as a different genotype than the kid's other tissues.
I figured that one out immediately: it's tetragametic chimerism. And this is the instant where the show completely lost me: these brilliant, insightful doctors sit around wondering instead whether the kid might have consumed a mutagen, a possibility that made no sense at all and wouldn't produce the kind of variation they were seeing. Dr House sees it later in a flash of insight.
Their treatment is then baffling. They want to find all the cells of the foreign genotype, so they whip up a tagged monoclonal antibody (in the space of hours; curse you, CSI), inject it into the kid (What? Provoke massive antibody binding to the tissues of your patient?), and trundle him into an MRI to visualize the binding (MRIs are magic imaging devices, you know.) Poof, all these trouble spots light up: there's a patch in the bone marrow of his leg, which is why his blood sometimes fails to clot, there's a patch in his heart causing hypertension, there are some in his eyes, which is why he wears glasses. Later they find more in his brain, which is why he has hallucinations.
Why chimeric tissue would cause all these problems is not explained.
The cure, though, is very easy. They go in and surgically cut out all of the tissue: cut out part of his heart, remove the bone marrow from that leg, scrape his brain. The funniest (unintentionally, I think) bit was where they stick a needle in the kid's eye and somehow selectively suck up retinal cells…and his vision is immediately perfect! Throw away those glasses, all you need is to get your alien photoreceptors to spontaneously emigrate! Chimeric tissues are fully integrated with each other and their functions are indistinguishable from one another, barring some specific genetic difference, so this whole sequence was impossible and nonsensical.
I know these medical dramas are long on false tension and will try to slide past difficult problems with random Star Trek style jargon—I'm hoping one of them will propose examining a patient's Jefferies Tubes someday—but the writers should attempt to at least put up an illusion of competence. You know, run it past a science/medical advisor, and after she's done laughing, ask her to help tune up the plausibility a notch. It doesn't have to be accurate, but there at least has to be an effort at verisimilitude, the tiniest nod in the direction of your viewer's intelligence. All I can see in the show now is that it's about a sarcastic atheist who is also an idiot, and the writers also think I am an idiot.
Comments
PZ, I'm totally with you. And what kind of gel were they looking at when they were analyzing his DNA?
Posted by: Amit | September 13, 2006 10:44 AM
Now you know how I feel if I try to watch one of those goddam CSI shows.
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | September 13, 2006 10:46 AM
Oh. My. God.
I actually missed House last night. Now I'm glad that I did. I annoy my wife enough ranting at the TV over ridiculous portrayals of how medicine is practiced on E.R.. She'd have kicked me out for sure.
On the other hand, she doesn't really like House
Posted by: Orac | September 13, 2006 10:53 AM
Jumping the shark is an understatement. Hugh Laurie needs to go back to playing Bertie Wooster.
Posted by: Nancy | September 13, 2006 10:54 AM
I usually enjoy House also, but this episode had me screaming the whole hour. What killed me what the monoclonal antibody approach- I nearly collapsed myself. The medical advisor was interviewed on the Absolute Science podcast several months ago- Dr. David Foster. I'd suggest forwarding this post to him.
Posted by: Zachary Moore | September 13, 2006 10:55 AM
I would assume it's an autoimmune reaction of some kind, if the immune system is of a different genotype than the other tissues.
Posted by: Orac | September 13, 2006 10:55 AM
House is great. But I never get how they can "cure" someone in what seems like 3 days.
Knowing the healthcare system in this country, it would take that long just to get the test done nevermind the results.
They need to get away from the CSI formula.
Posted by: Steve_C | September 13, 2006 11:02 AM
ha ha, you guys remind me of me when I'm watching the movie Hackers. It can be hard to watch something that deals with your area of expertise.
I LOVED this episode. The medicine was meaningless to me as usual, but the Wilson/Cuddy/House drama was great!
And just a nit
"and I definitely mean always, ends with the complete cure of the patient."
I can think of several episodes that didn't end in a cure at all...
Posted by: Jakanapes | September 13, 2006 11:04 AM
It always drives me nuts in movies and on tv how much "sound" a computer interface makes when someone is working. All that beeping and clicking and whooshing...
Posted by: Steve_C | September 13, 2006 11:07 AM
As a math/ecology type with no training at all in human physiology, I really love the show. I always imagined they were making plenty of factual medical errors, but I don't really care. Kind of like I didn't care in Star Wars when lasers, explosions, and R2-D2 made cool sounds in a vacuum.
It's probably difficult on their production schedule to come up with plots with the right balance of tension and remain scientifically accurate. The writers come up with a good story, send it to the fact-checkers who nix a crucial third of it, the writers have to redo two thirds of it to work around that, the fact checkers nix half of that, etc... the process would take much longer. All to please the (probably
I agree that more accuracy is better, but I can understand why they'd make the trade-off.
Posted by: Troutnut | September 13, 2006 11:12 AM
There are some that don't end with a cure? I haven't seen them all, so I'll defer to that...but man, he sure seems to cure almost everything. And the subplot in this one was that he thought he failed to cure one guy in the last episode (even though he really did -- they were keeping secret from him to correct his hubris), and that one failure had him in the throes of self-doubt.
I've also got a bit of background in computers myself, and with a background in biology that means I've got a vague and distant awareness of medical issues, so almost all the medicine and technology bafflegab on TV is hopelessly annoying. It drives me away from all of these shows eventually. I can't abide CSI anymore because of it (although one of the spinoffs I can't abide because of that annoying skinny red-haired guy.)
Posted by: PZ Myers![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/nav-commenters.gif)
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September 13, 2006 11:13 AM
It's amazing to watch how many times you can spot people randomly typing on a keyboard. The script lines just must say "Mash Keyboard In An Arbitrary Manner."
I really feel for experts watching CSI though. Some of the things they come up with... oh man. My favourite was they found some motor oil in a driveway and then came up with the "only one model of Lamborghini uses that oil."
Posted by: Silmarillion | September 13, 2006 11:13 AM
It always drives me nuts in movies and on tv how much "sound" a computer interface makes when someone is working. All that beeping and clicking and whooshing...
The beeping and clicking makes it easier for them to find the data they're looking for; the whooshing produces the crystal clear interface that highlights exactly the parts of data they need and inconizes it.
Posted by: Lettuce | September 13, 2006 11:15 AM
I agree that House is going down hill. The first season was great. That's the season where he wasn't always able to cure everyone. I haven't seen any from the second season where he was unsuccessful. I also didn't like the second season as much.
Posted by: Claire | September 13, 2006 11:31 AM
Oh yeah an office full of people with their sound on would be such a lovely place to work.
Posted by: Steve_C | September 13, 2006 11:31 AM
I'm a big HOUSE fan, too, but predicted -- to any friends who would listen to my ranting -back in the excellent Season 1 that the writers couldn't sustain the premise beyond a second season. [Ditto, incidentally, for CSI.] IMHO, it jumped the shark early on in Season 2 with the whole ex-girlfriend plotline. The difference is my objections have nothing to do with the scientific inaccuracies because, while one might prefer a higher level of accuracy, this IS television, intended first and foremost as entertainment. We can address the inaccuracies with humorous, intelligent corrections like PZ's post, and perhaps educate one or two TV viewers in teh process. But when a show fails as basic entertainment -- well, then, it's time to pull the plug. :)
Posted by: Jennifer Ouellette | September 13, 2006 11:31 AM
There used to be cheap programs you could buy that would add all the whooshes and beeps as you clicked around your computer. I had a couple of them.
They got turned off within days. I still have the sound files for one of them, though. Ahh, nostalgia.
Posted by: Kesh | September 13, 2006 11:39 AM
Here, let me help you guys out:
It's a fantasy world. There are elves, they just don't get sick so House doesn't see them. It's not meant to be Real Life. If you can suspend your disbelief and enjoy action movies and sci-fi books and anything else, then you can do it for House.
If you can't, don't watch TV shows. They're all fantasy. All the characters have super powers (scriptwriters). House is a superhero (with a bum leg). Grissom and Horatio are superheroes (one with the personality of a wood plank and the other with a speech cadence that hints at some sort of defect). They can do the impossible.
For something Real, watch Mythbusters (a show i greatly enjoy).
Posted by: cephyn | September 13, 2006 11:44 AM
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, when I taught physics, I used to give students an assignment to list as many physics impossibilities as they could find in the title sequence to Star Trek. (My favorite is the title sequence to Voyager, in which the reflection of the ship on planetary rings relative to the curvature of the rings implies that the ship is several thousand miles in length.)
But at the same time, I keep reminding myself, "It's a STORY!" Stories aren't supposed to be true. I hate to break this to you, but a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there never was a kid named Luke Skywalker. A story is a collection of falsehoods that, taken together, communicate some larger truth. Light sabers, FTL travel, humanoids with tentacles coming out of their heads, and so forth are all complete and utter balderdash -- but the basic coming of age message of that movie IS true.
The problem for me comes when the story is presented as true in its details. The obvious example here is the ABC movie, "The Path to 9/11", which deliberately falsifies events to push a political agenda. Nobody takes Star Wars seriously, but plenty of people will take "The Path to 9/11" seriously -- and that's wrong, wrong, wrong.
So then we get into shows like CSI. Sure, they play fast and loose with scientific truth. But consider this: the core message that they present is "follow the evidence". Over and over they show that gut feelings about suspects are misleading and the evidence can surprise you. Is that not the quintessence of the scientific worldview?
Posted by: Chris Crawford | September 13, 2006 11:45 AM
When I saw the "alien DNA" my first thought (and my wife's as well) was chimerism. But then when they showed where the foreign tissue was (the knee, heart, and eyes), I changed my mind. Would a chimera be likely to have his "other" cells concentrated in such disparate spots in the body? I assumed at least some bit of symmetry would happen since the two blastocysts fuse so early in development.
Posted by: argystokes | September 13, 2006 11:50 AM
I am a physician who usually does not like doctor shows, and House was no exception, it was three episodes and out for me. I do love SCRUBS though, even if entire premise and first season were lifted without atttribution from House of God. I have to admit to arguing for CSI shows on the grounds that even though the science and police procidure are both (mostly) nonsense, that they take the idea of science seriously is important. And better than all the faith and anti-science based shows out there.
Posted by: dr.steveb | September 13, 2006 11:51 AM
I just try to pretend that House isn't really a medical drama. I prefer to see it as a character study in assholes. If any of these jokers were my doctor, I'd just ask for Theoderic of York and his leeches.
As for the occasional failures last season, there was the woman with rabies, the kid whose dad gave him the highly radioactive good luck charm, and the cop who got the snootful of parasitic ameobae.
Posted by: John Bode | September 13, 2006 11:53 AM
Why chimeric tissue would cause all these problems is not explained.
I would assume it's an autoimmune reaction of some kind, if the immune system is of a different genotype than the other tissues.
Probably not. The immune system would likely have been tolerized to the 'twin' tissue.
Posted by: Peter | September 13, 2006 11:53 AM
My beef with this program is the way a patient will come in, then the doctors (5 of them!where are their other patients?) will sit around thinking about what might be wrong, then they decide what they think it is most likly to be and test for that. Then the test will come back negative, so they'll go to their next choice, and test for that. What's wrong with running a bunch of tests at once? Not only that, it's one of the junior doctors who runs the test themselves, and if proof of some sort of environmental contamination is required (and it will be required as they can't possibly diagnose/treat without first finding the thing in the persons house that has caused the illness) then again, one of the doctors goes out to find it, all dressed up in their ET suits. Me thinks the script writers have been watching too much Quincy.
If it weren't for Hugh and Billy from Neighbours, I don't think I could watch..
Posted by: Eliza | September 13, 2006 11:58 AM
This season just doesn't feel or look right to me, I'm trying to give it a chance but I don't know how much longer I'm going to give it.
There have been a couple glaring examples of "WTF, these guys were supposed to have gone to medical school?" that I have noticed but let go. Getting fluid from the liquid part of the eye, you know, the vitreous humor, was good for a snicker.
My sister went to the University of New Haven and had Henry Lee as a teacher. Her issue with CSI is that he told the class to take off their gloves whenever they stepped away from the evidence or body and to throw them out. Use as many gloves as necessary. I haven't watched CSI except for a couple things here and there with her but she tells me that they leave their gloves on when they answer their phones, use their computers, and in a particularly disgusting scene there was a body that had been in the tub for days and they guy reached in to get a sample of goo and the adjusted his glasses. Nothing like contaminated evidence!
As for Hugh Laurie, he should go back to playing Prince George. Sing along with me: "Black Adder, Black Adder..."
Posted by: Mena | September 13, 2006 12:04 PM
I know, from a point of actual science, TV always does a hack job. But why do they do it?
Many reasons, I would imagine. Surely budget and time constraints make the main characters do everything, simply because it's cost-prohibitive to hire twenty actors to stand around on camera for a minute each, doing the correct tests with the correct equipment taking the correct amount of time. Would confuse the audience to no end. Plus you only get about 38 minutes of film in these so-called 'one hour dramas' any more. You simply can't spend time on things that don't drive the story forward.
Drama demands events be compressed, chronologically, spatially, and persona-lly. A few people doing a finite thing in a few locations over a small period of time. This goes way back to greek theater, and we still use it for the most part because it helps the audience keep up, and after all, the audience is the thing, the only thing.
One last thing, I have to say you should feel lucky that the entertainment industry finally finds you interesting enough to film. They'll keep improving at the technical details. I hope.
Posted by: Stogoe | September 13, 2006 12:04 PM
I haven't watched House, but I have seen Hugh Laurie in a number of British comedies, not the least of which being the magnificent Black Adder. I think it was Black Adder the Third, in which he played the spoiled, dimwitted Prince Regent, where he had one of the funniest lines I have ever heard -- a line that, for whatever reason, has been coming to mind steadily for me since, oh, January 2001 or so:
"Well, I may be as thick as a whale omelette, but...."
Trust me: with Laurie's delivery, it is just devastating.
Posted by: nashtbrutusandshort | September 13, 2006 12:06 PM
It's an amazingly pretty pseudo-colored rendering of a valve opening and closing
I didn't see the episode, so I don't know how "pretty" it was, but I remember when I got an echocardiogram being pretty impressed with the quality of the images they got, and the display used Doppler shift to add color indicating which direction the blood was flowing in. So the show may actually not be that far off there.
Posted by: Chris | September 13, 2006 12:07 PM
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | September 13, 2006 12:10 PM
Posted by: Warren | September 13, 2006 12:12 PM
I thought that the immune system recognises all of the tissue present in utero and learns, somehow, not to attck those tissues (as is opposed to immunosupression being genebased). If this is true, chimerism shouldn't cause immune reactions the same way donor tissue, which is only present after birth, wouldn't cause immune reactions?
Michael Fox
She's a brick house; she mighty mighty just lettin' it all hang out.
Posted by: Mike Fox![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/nav-commenters.gif)
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September 13, 2006 12:14 PM
Very much to my credit, I sent this note to a friend yesterday after seeing the "House" preview:
"Anal bleeding that a kid claims was caused by alien probes. Oh, geez--maybe that's the shark-jumping episode!"
It was way too convenient that several symptoms converged on the possibility of alien abduction. No, not convenient--unbelievable. A story has to be believable, at least on its own terms. If a vampire entered a home uninvited in "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer," that's a problem, not because of the vampire, which we've agreed to accept, but because of the violation of a story convention. Applied to "House," it is not fair to, on one hand, ask us to accept the evidence of highly sophisticated science, while on the other hand expect us to swallow a string of outrageously implausible coincidences. It's not fair.
Last night's show was stupid because I figured it out long before House did, and I have only the most basic science background, augmented by reading on my own. I couldn't believe that I could have gotten what was going on so much ahead of a supposedly brilliant doctor. And I didn't like it--it seemed patronizing to me, like the writers decided to throw me a bone by allowing me to figure one out.
But even given all this, I'll keep watching, because nothing on TV makes me laugh more than the dark humor on "House." I'll just have to consider it a comedy with some science and medicine thrown in. If I can view comedy as the main point, I might not be so bothered by the other stuff.
Posted by: Greg Peterson | September 13, 2006 12:22 PM
Funny, that's the only CSI spinoff that I actually like, mainly because of its extreme cheesiness and the hammy acting of the aforementioned skinny red-haired guy. Come on, you know you love it when he dramatically takes his sunglasses off before delivering some bon mot. I know I do.
Guilty pleasure.
Posted by: Orac | September 13, 2006 12:25 PM
Well... this would be one of the few times I come on here and strongly disagree with the majority of posters, but I'm legally restricted from doing so.
If you ever take a close look at the Consitution, you'll find a little known amendment guaranteeing the People "The right to bitch and moan and masturbate their own sense of self-worth, by nitpicking, unto death, literature, radio and moving pictures, which attempt to build dramatic plot around topics in which the viewer is, professionally or by hobby, particularly well versed."
Seriously, it's a character drama. It could be "House, ASE Certified Mechanic," for all that it matters to the show's strong points. Anyway, there's more bad military, police procedural, "hacker" and legal fiction out than medical or hard science by like a factor of ten, so I fricking win.
Posted by: Fox1 | September 13, 2006 12:28 PM
I like Hugh Laurie. I kind of think the only point to watching that show is to enjoy them characters making faces at each other. The rest is about as far from reality as possible.
Four doctors concentrating feverishly on your case to the exclusion of everything else, desperate to find out what's wrong with you - personally going and examining your house to find possible causes? WTF? It almost feels like AMA propaganda. (No, I'm not an anti-AMA crystals and pyramids nut.)
If pretty much any of the life-threatening cases shown on the show were real, the patient would have died unless things just happened to go their way and they got lucky, the Dr. got the diagnosis right on the first try, etc.
Posted by: Craig | September 13, 2006 12:30 PM
The only medical show I watch is Scrubs..Wish they were back already. At least they don't try to be too technical in it. Plus the situation comedy gets me every time. I'm a simple person.
Posted by: Markus | September 13, 2006 12:32 PM
(although one of the spinoffs I can't abide because of that annoying skinny red-haired guy
That annoying, skinny red-haired guy is the WILLIAM SHATNER OF HIS GENERATION.
You insensitive clod.
Posted by: schemanista | September 13, 2006 12:43 PM
Would a chimera be likely to have his "other" cells concentrated in such disparate spots in the body?
Generally yes. When making transgenic mice, one uses two different strains with different fur colours. That way you can distinguish chimeric offspring from the your run of the mill di-gametic ones. The chimeras have plottchy coats (and by extension, splotchy insides).
As for Hugh Laurie. the man is versatile. I tuned into House once and recognized him thinking, "isn't that the idiot from BlackAdder?" The man is seriously brilliant with no trace of a British accent at all.
As for accurate sci-fi films/shows, there are some that try. Star Wars was never a'sci-fi' film, it was more of a fantasy film (wizardz, warlocks, elves, and MAGIC as in Obi-Wan, Darth Vader, the Emperor, Yoda, the force) with an element of Flash Gordon serials thrown in there. Lucas has said so numerously...
But there are some interesting series such as the late babylon 5 where here were no sounds in space, where space ships flew in straight lines in accordance with the laws of physics (no banking and diving plane-like space ships here), where gravity was generated by rotating sections on vessels. The new Battle Star Galactica is pretty good in this regard too. And then there were films like 2001: Space Odyssy that were quite accurate until all the weird supernatural hoky pokey near the end.
Posted by: Krakus | September 13, 2006 12:48 PM
As far as I can tell, in any drama in a high-tech setting (spaceship, hospital, forensics lab, etc.) faces a trade-off.
1. Be extremely specific and technical, use lots of expository dialogue ("DNA is unique, like fingerprints!" x 100 per season), and have technically competent people in the real world nit-pick your show and scream at the TV.
2. Be vague and use made-up words as much as possible, so nobody knows what you're talking about and detailed analysis is impossible. Star Trek is famous for doing this - they never actually explain why, for example, Gold-Pressed Latinum is somehow valuable in a world where your kitchen consists of a box that glows and produces anything at all.
Both the above are extremes - so far, House seems to be doing OK, somewhere a little more towards 1 than 2. Last night's episode was a little more extreme than most of the others I remember from last season, but whatever, it's the second episode of a new season, they're obviously trying to attract and hold on to as large an audience as possible. Get people in the habit of "Tuesday night - must watch" and the network is happy. The pretty blinking lights and gory bits are just decoration on a watchable core of acerbic, dysfunctional personality interactions. People like stories about people, right?
Posted by: TheBrummell | September 13, 2006 12:48 PM
Oh, I should mention that four physicians standing around trying to figure out the obvious is my typical experience. If its not in "the book", then it doesn't exist.
Posted by: Krakus | September 13, 2006 12:51 PM
I'd say the "CSI-ification" of science goes back farther, to Star Trek: TNG at least. How many episodes were there where the Enterprise was in some kind of death trap, and Geordie and Data stitch together two unconfirmed scientific theories in the last 5 minutes and save the day? I have no formal science education beyond high school chemistry, but I'm quite certain that's not how science is done. On the other hand, in like mind with Chris Crawford and dr steveb above, I appreciate the core message of intelligent, educated people using their brains and experience to resolve a crisis (as opposed to always shooting your problems: the philosophy of far too many action films is "In Gun and Bomb We Trust").
I have a computer professor friend who gets annoyed with any movie where computers are a central plot point (The Net, Hackers, etc.). As a librarian, I know I get irritated with how information retrieval and storage is portrayed in fiction. Like the Law of Conservation of Information (TNG is guilty of this too): information downloaded from a database is actually physically removed from the database server, and no one else can access it. Kind of defeats the purpose of digitizing information in the first place, eh? The kind of information characters in fiction find online always baffles me too. Or that other great myth: The One Perfect Source--the single book that answers all of the protagonists' dilemmas. The fanciful pipe dream of all the students I help regularly. ;-)
Posted by: False Prophet | September 13, 2006 12:58 PM
Oh, you're just miffed that House is muscling in on your 'obnoxious genius' territory. And being a fictional character, he isn't in on any real science. He's Sherlock Holmes in medicine, and the fun comes in where others try to put up with being around someone so observant that their normal defenses become transparent to him.
I love House as a character story, and pay no attention to the 'medicine'. I especially loved the subplot where they lied to him about his last case.
Posted by: decrepitoldfool | September 13, 2006 12:58 PM
The think that spooks me about House is that it's a little like the Agatha Christie series... in that it's exceedingly unlikely that these statistically improbable events (murder versus staggeringly bizarre medical anomalies) just "seem to happen" around the main character.
By all statistical accounts, I'd highly suspect that they somehow cause the troubles :)
Posted by: Ritchie Annand | September 13, 2006 1:00 PM
I love how all the computer systems are like, running the next OS AFTER Windows Vista, with all sorts of bizarrely unecessary zooming and flipping animations.
Here at Case in Cleveland, the medical software is apparently still command-line shell with a text-front end (like the old library catelog systems). That's right: not even GUI, much less one modeled after star trek.
Posted by: plunge | September 13, 2006 1:04 PM
I don't watch House regularly, but I do like the fact that he's an athiest character on TV. Gives at least some exposure.
The only other athiest character on TV I can think of was Ted Danson on Becker, who was also a doctor. Interesting. I wonder why that's so?
Posted by: plucky punk | September 13, 2006 1:06 PM
I don't watch TV much at all, let alone the major network stuff. I've heard all kinds of people talk about House over the last 2 years or so. I pretty much pass everything off as crap, rightly or wrongly.
But it definitely sounds like they ran out of ideas on this one. When a medical drama is resorting to the storytelling equivalent of Star Trek's magical "trilithium" (a substance that vacillates from week to week as the universe's most dangerous, to its most benign), you know you've got a recipe for a new writing team.
Posted by: BlueIndependent | September 13, 2006 1:13 PM
"I'd say the "CSI-ification" of science goes back farther, to Star Trek: TNG at least. How many episodes were there where the Enterprise was in some kind of death trap, and Geordie and Data stitch together two unconfirmed scientific theories in the last 5 minutes and save the day? "
That's probably the surest sign that the people who write these plots have never programmed anything or done any science. About 80% of the time on any such endeavor is generally spent on dealing with bugs or working out screwy variables that weren't well controlled. In Star Trek or hacker movies, people write totally new software, or try out things based on new scientific theories... and they work on like, the very very first try. That's what takes a huge suspension of disbelief. TV programmers NEVER forget a ; at the end of a line. :)
Posted by: plunge | September 13, 2006 1:15 PM
I must confess that I consider both House and the original CSI guilty pleasures. It probably helps that I'm just ignorant enough about actual police and medical procedures that I can suspend my disbelief for the most part, but I don't imagine for a moment that the shows portray anything close to reality. Even without knowing much about medicine it's pretty obvious that no doctor is going to come up with a cure for every patient within a matter of days.
Being a Systems Administrator I'm in a similar boat to the folks who mentioned earlier their annoyance with magical computers that show up in most movies and TV shows, but I just remind myself that it's only a movie/show and I let it slide for the most part. I usually point and say something like: Look! It's MovieOS! I so have to buy that operating system for my own PC someday soon.
Posted by: Les | September 13, 2006 1:19 PM
So wait, the kid WASN'T possessed?
What a letdown.
Posted by: Stanton | September 13, 2006 1:22 PM
When a show has a good season its writers often get poached, then the next season's worse.
Posted by: Righteous Bubba | September 13, 2006 1:31 PM
Um, yeah - it's called fiction, you know, drama - indeed, House is generally described in program guides as a "mystery."
But no, let's follow your suggestion. Week one: patient shows up, drags around parking deck, finds space, rides rickety elevator to streen level, walks to hospital building, wanders around looking for the department where he has an appointment, checks in, pays co-pay, fills out medical history form, turns it in, takes a seat. Whoa! Heart pounding realism.
Week two: we spend the hour with the patient still sitting around the waiting room because the House team is "a little busy today but we'll get you in as soon as we can."
Week three: Patient is called, their vitals are taken, then they get ushered into the lab to have blood drawn. Now we're getting some good, gory action. Then patient gets taken to exam room...and waits. Yes, totally realistic. Happened to me just yesterday.
Come on, it's television. Nobody watches House for the medicine - they watch for the soap opera - the character interaction. You guys are just silly...thekeez
Posted by: Jeff Keezel | September 13, 2006 1:36 PM
Over and over they show that gut feelings about suspects are misleading and the evidence can surprise you. Is that not the quintessence of the scientific worldview?
Perhaps, but I would argue that CSI is actually anti-scientific in terms of regarding its first results as gospel and never questioning whether they, and by extension the people who did the procedure, could be wrong. The only time they were thrown into doubt on the original show that I've seen was in the season finale of 2004. It was one time when they were dealing, ironically, with a chimera. The DNA profile left at a crime scene didn't match the suspect, but the eyewitness identified him. Catherine suggests whether the evidence could be wrong, and Grissom says "You can be wrong, I can be wrong, but the evidence can't be wrong." That in itself is wrong. There are plenty of reasons why a profile might falsely exclude someone or falsely include them, including the generation of a "ghost" profile, allelic drop-out, etc. etc. Instead of looking for horses, they went and chased down a zebra (almost literally--they discovered the genetic anomaly when they saw the guy had Blaschko's lines, which is yet another thing oversimplified).
The biggest possibility is simply user error. To assume that the "evidence can't be wrong" means that they've been infallible in processing the evidence, which they never are. I well remember one CSI episode where Catherine finds the murder weapon, an umbrella handle which has been used to beat a person to death, in a closet. She then hangs the umbrella on the doorknob before getting some phenophthalein out of her kit to test for blood. I literally smacked myself in the forehead watching that, because she not only got blood transfer on the doorknob, but she also may have gotten the blood contaminated with skin cells sloughed off from the last person to close the closet door.
I could go on and on, but I won't test others' patience.
Posted by: Kansas Anarchist | September 13, 2006 1:43 PM
I generally enjoy House, especially for Hugh Laurie (Blackadder fans should have been pleased with last evening's not-so-subtle reference to a "cunning plan"), but this episode was a really groaner. I especially looked forward this morning to checking Scott's analysis at:
http://politedissent.com/
He does a medical review of each episode, with links for more info. Highly entertaining, and today more so than the episode (damning with faint praise though that may be!)
Posted by: Judith in Ottawa | September 13, 2006 1:49 PM
False Prophet:
Or that other great myth: The One Perfect Source--the single book that answers all of the protagonists' dilemmas. The fanciful pipe dream of all the students I help regularly. ;-)
Hey! No ragging on Douglas Adams' Deep Thought! ;-)
Ritchie Annand:
The think that spooks me about House is that it's a little like the Agatha Christie series... in that it's exceedingly unlikely that these statistically improbable events (murder versus staggeringly bizarre medical anomalies) just "seem to happen" around the main character.
By all statistical accounts, I'd highly suspect that they somehow cause the troubles :)
Well, not to spoil anyone's enjoyment but...
***SPOILER***
In Curtain, Hercule Poirot does murder one of the characters. So old Agatha at least saw that objection and built a book around it.
I must admit, mystery series are my guilty pleasure. My most recent favorite reading has been the Jane Austen mysteries, which, of course, do put a retiring 19th century lady novelist in all sorts of improbable positions. However, I was pleased to see her take a much more active stance in Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House, when she actually confronted the murderer in the final scene and stole a vital piece of evidence. If you have to have people placed, improbably, in the middle of murder mysteries, they should at least throw themselves into it.
Posted by: Kansas Anarchist | September 13, 2006 1:58 PM
Don't get me wrong: I think the character House is a great one, and he can make for an enjoyable show. The problem is that the writers keep giving him such brain-dead macguffins that it detracts from the pleasures of watching the performance.
Posted by: PZ Myers![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/nav-commenters.gif)
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September 13, 2006 2:01 PM
No-one's mentioned "Numbers." Is the math in that as daft as the medicine and science in these other shows? As for last night's House, I think they missed a great opportunity by not having the kid hallucinate Jonathan "Alien Autopsy" Frakes duing the brain surgery. That would have lit up those "fear" bits in no time!
Posted by: Clare | September 13, 2006 2:15 PM
I watch for the snarkiness, hubby watches to see which boob jokes House makes regarding Dr. Cuddy. (and there are usually several per episode)
Yes the medical aspect of it takes a great leap of disbelief but there are some fabulous one-liners and the character interactions are usually fun.
Posted by: flame821 | September 13, 2006 2:17 PM
This reminds me of a lecture from one of my physics professors in college. He was going on about relativity and gravity and was pointing out an issue with an episode of Star Trek that apparently tried to make use of gravity in a clever way that would actually have been cancelled out by relativistic effects. I don't remember the exact details, but it involved a bit of calculation and some terms surprisingly cancelling out. He said, "I should write a letter about this to the producers." My first thought was, "This is Star Trek we're talking about. Does he really think he's going to be the first physics geek to write in about this?"
Good professor and fun lecture, anyway.
Posted by: Troublesome Frog | September 13, 2006 2:22 PM
Plucky Punk: I don't watch Bones as a rule, but I have caught a couple of episodes, and the eponymous character (a forensic osteologist) appears to be a strongly outspoken athiest.
The most recent episode I saw had her discussing the parable of Abraham and Isaac; she was of the opinion that the underlying myth was all about doing the right thing for your children, even when it seems wrong (without of course, explaining how murdering them might be the right thing). The lesson I took from this is that it's OK for a TV scientist to be an athiest, so long as they never say anything bad about the Bible, or point out that God condones murder, slavery and torture.
On a couple of tangents:
I used to be a fan of 7 Days, a fun time-travel romp, with a distinctly Christian gloss. One of the chief scientists was a Russian Christian (though, apparently, not Orthodox). When asked if she shouldn't be an athiest, given that she was brought up as a good communist, and taught not to believe in anything but the State, she responds that she was brought up to be a good scientist, and not believe in anything but the evidence. I suppose this represents the other acceptable view of American TV scientists.
My most favourite sciency moment (and a medical one, no less) in Star Trek came in DS9, when they discovered a crash-landed Jem'Hadar ship, and determined that the crew had all died of "massive osteonecrosis", or "bone death". I've just discovered that this term is actually in real use, but somehow I doubt that "a disease resulting from the temporary or permanent loss of the blood supply to the bones" was what they meant, so I feel justified in continuing to laugh at them...
Posted by: wintermute | September 13, 2006 2:27 PM
Oh, and one more thing I missed:
I have lost faith in House.
That's for the best. You should leave faith in fictional characters to the theists.
Posted by: Kansas Anarchist | September 13, 2006 2:31 PM
Oh, does he sing?
Posted by: windy | September 13, 2006 2:33 PM
Wintermute:
I don't see Bones often, but the most recent one I saw was regarding zombies in the American South. She compared Catholisim with Voodooism (both revering the dead and zombies) The male lead took exception to the comparison, her response was something along the lines of:
He dies, you bury him for a couple of days and he gets up and walks around,isn't that what a zombie is?
Posted by: flame821 | September 13, 2006 2:43 PM
When will we get a drama about grad students?
"Arrgh, the developer is down, will I ever get this western developed?!"
OR
"Zounds, the SysAdmin deleted my account accidentally while upgrading network privelidges. No!!!!"
OR
"The boss is away on conference, quick, to the pub!"
Tune in next week, when our hero tries to decide between buying a case of beer and eating.
Or maybe not...
Posted by: Krakus | September 13, 2006 2:46 PM
Best medical prog around? Green Wing, no debate.
It's on Channel 4 here in the UK - I don't know whether it's ever been shown in the States, but it's one of the funniest things I've seen. There again, the humour may not translate - an American friend of mine couldn't see how funny The Royle Family was...
Posted by: Graham Douglas | September 13, 2006 3:02 PM
Oh, does he sing?
That's SPOKEN WORD, you insensitive clod!
Posted by: schemanista | September 13, 2006 3:04 PM
That's a big reason I can't stand Tom Clancy novels. US military and intelligence operatives are given brand spankin' new gadgets and they work as advertised their first time in the field. I've studied too much military history and military hardware to swallow that nonsense (For example, the engineers of Nazi Germany--the same guys who created the V2 rocket and by extension, the rudiments of space travel--had trouble designing a four-engine long-distance bomber aircraft that didn't kill its pilots!). Some of this stuff is right out of James Bond, too. I can't believe that asshat is taken seriously as some kind of military expert.
Posted by: False Prophet | September 13, 2006 3:11 PM
I am a CSI:TOS fan. I stop flipping around for Miami, sometimes, but they've killed off nearly all the characters they started with. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but they haven't replaced any of them, and the ones they left alive are all preening jackholes.
CSI I watch for Grissom and Greg, oh, and the cop Brass. Everyone else is background for me.
Don't even get me started on CSI:NY. They had a good thing going, and then they chose the most stereotypical locale for the third series. Idiots. the charm about CSI is they don't take place in cliche New York, LA, or San Francisco. If you wanted a metropolis, why not go Portland, or Seattle, Chicago or Detroit? Heck, even DC. New York City's been strip-mined of all entertainment value. There's nothing left but Jerry Orbach clones and that crazy streetcar/scene change noise.
Posted by: Stogoe | September 13, 2006 3:19 PM
I still like House. I know the medicine is pretty much wrong; I don't care. I don't care that these doctors are doing tests and procedures they very clearly wouldn't really be doing (a common complaint at Polite Dissent) in real life because it's a TV show. I'd never want these people as my doctors -- but that's ok, because they're actors pretending to be doctors.
Bones is starting to suck -- spirituality is often winning out over science.
Also, Angel once did walk into a house without being invited -- that show where he saved the cop (who was the 'Is it because I'm a lesbian?" DA on LO:SVU). Very obnoxious.
Posted by: wolfa | September 13, 2006 3:29 PM
Graham Douglas:
Speaking as a born-and-bred Brit, I think the problem your American friend had with The Royle Family was that it simply wasn't funny.
It's not true that humour doesn't translate between Britain and America - Everything from Monty Python to Blackadder/i> to Black Books is laughed at heartily in America, just as British audiences take to Scrubs, Family Guy and Cheers. Barring the problem of translation, I don't think that there's a "humour barrier" between any two nations, any more than there is between London and Liverpool.
I think (though I don't claim any serious evidence) that humour is a universal, and if you discount translation issues, I would be surprised to know that there was a comedy that was only considered funny by one nation (or any other essentially arbitrary group) and not by another...
Posted by: wintermute | September 13, 2006 3:30 PM
Well, I like the series also because of Laurie and I chose to ignore the not so good parts. Question from abroad: Is it like that in american hospitals that the consultations/examinations take place in glass cubicles with open shutters and open doors to the public? Also, are there no technicians, I mean, all the MRI/CT scans are done by the doctors themselves who are, well, not really qualified for this kind of work, are they? Is this drama or based in reality?
Posted by: bcpmoon | September 13, 2006 3:31 PM
I predicted the seizures, later figured out chimerism. Would have been very impressed if they had gone for something that hadn't been on CSI a couple years ago. Like a flurry of activity from retrotransposons.
Posted by: Robster | September 13, 2006 3:33 PM
Star Trek is famous for doing this - they never actually explain why, for example, Gold-Pressed Latinum is somehow valuable in a world where your kitchen consists of a box that glows and produces anything at all.
This is actually explained in one of the very few Star Trek books I have. Basically, gold pressed latinum isn't technically "gold pressed". It has a gold color, due to small molecular anamolies. Supposedly, due to the nature of those, its nearly impossible to replicate, though someone in the book was able to manipulate the "surface" of bars of normal latinum, making it look like the more valuable material. Needless to say, the Ferrengi found out about it somehow, kidnapped the fool that invented it and then tried to buy something with a massive amount of counterfeit latinum.
Anyway, as t