Can friendship of House and Wilson be mended?
Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) always has the medical answers, but he rarely has a clue how to handle personal issues. That character flaw is at the heart of tonight’s season premiere of the popular Fox drama “House.”
At last season’s end in May, the acerbic doctor’s relationship with his sounding board and only friend in the world, Dr. Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), was put in jeopardy.
Dr. Wilson’s girlfriend, Amber, (Anne Dudek, now of AMC’s “Mad Men”) died after she went to help a drunken House and subsequently was involved in an accident on a bus she wouldn’t have been on if she hadn’t been on a House mission.
It might cause some people to have guilt, but that’s only one emotion that escapes House.
The mission for the show now is to deal with the House-Wilson fracture and try and get on with the medical cases at the heart of the program.
It succeeds tonight with an episode, “Dying Changes Everything,” that does come perilously close to overexamining the friend
ship at the expense of the medical drama about a case involving a 37-year-old female assistant to a powerful female executive.
The case has special meaning to the character known as Thirteen (Olivia Wilde), who last season learned that her productive years won’t last that long because she has a life-altering illness. With House off trying to repair his friendship, Thirteen and her colleagues on his medical team are on their own trying to find the medical culprit, and we all know what that means. Mistakes, mistakes and more mistakes.
The House-Wilson dynamic helps the show explore the meaning of unspoken friendship, the counterproductive practice of being unable to express one’s feelings and the different ways people deal with guilt and grief.
Next week’s episode, “Not Cancer,” deals with the Wilson-House rift in a more comical way. There is some danger that the continuing storyline can go on too long, but the first two episodes strike a decent balance.
‘Fringe’ files
Speaking of doctors, there may not be a stranger one on television than Dr. Walter Bishop, the fringe scientist and cow lover on “Fringe” played by Australian actor John Noble.
Last week’s premiere of the heavily hyped J. J. Abrams series had a decent 8.5 rating on local Fox affiliate WUTV. That wasn’t spectacular, and the ratings dropped by the end of the 95-minute opening episode. However, tonight’s second episode should get a boost from the lead-in from “House,” which now airs on WUTV at 8 p. m.
Tonight’s episode has an incredibly tense start and sends the series off in a direction that makes it look even more like a clone of “The X-Files.” Notably, the credits list Darin Morgan of “X-Files” fame as a consulting producer.
With an entertaining mix of compelling characters, gripping suspense, dry humor, far-out pseudoscience and strong twists, “Fringe” only has to fear that viewers don’t have time to get caught up in another conspiracy series.
‘SNL’ starts strong
Finally, the season premiere of “Saturday Night Live” hosted by a comically impaired Olympic star Michael Phelps peaked early with the hilarious opening skit in which Tina Fey gave a dead-on portrayal of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, John McCain’s vice presidential running mate, alongside Amy Poehler’s usually terrific portrayal of Sen. Hillary Clinton.
You may have read a story about what the actresses said, but that didn’t do justice to their performances.
Fey, who may be too busy these days writing and starring in her NBC sitcom, “30 Rock,” to make continuing “SNL” appearances, had Palin’s voice inflection and cheerful mannerisms down to perfection. The most mocking line about Palin’s candidacy came when Fey played off last week’s interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson by saying, “I can see Russia from my house.”
While most network analysts seem to have gone out of their way to avoid stating the obvious about Palin’s shaky foreign policy performance in the Gibson interview, late-night comedy shows and radio disc jockeys don’t have to worry about fairness issues and couldn’t be happier about the material that McCain’s surprising choice has given them.
‘Doctors’ deliver
The new 4 p. m. syndicated show on Channel 7, “The Doctors,” could be part of the cure for the ratings woes of 7 News. Its first-week ratings were substantially higher than the lead-in the 5 p. m. news has received for years from the canceled “PM Buffalo,” though they gradually declined by week’s end.
The improved lead-in helped 7 News be competitive at 5 p. m., where it has been dying and killing any chances that any subsequent newscasts had of getting an audience, too.
TV Review
★★★½
“House”
(Out of four) 8 p. m. today, WUTV Channel 29
