Amber Tamblyn helps make 'House' my new appointment TV
So many people love House, and I could never figure out why.
Amber Tamblyn helps make 'House' my new appointment TV
Jonathan Storm, Inquirer Television Critic
So many people love House, and I could never figure out why. Poor sucker with some weird withering disease presents him/herself. Doctors yell at each other and run around, often poking through the victim's home to find hidden toxins. Dr. House acts inappropriately and irritatingly. Patient fades, fades, fades, and fades some more. And then, at the last minute, House figures out what's wrong, and all is resolved.
But then they hired Amber Tamblyn to be a sort of Doogie Howser, older, prettier, but nonetheless a child physician among the sharks, burdened by her own two debilitating problems: Her Martha Masters character is "exhaustingly smart" (Tamblyn's words) and has an unwavering ethical sense and concern for being honest with patients. This causes her tremendous trouble in the impersonal world of Dr. House, where the disease is all that counts and the patient is merely an inconvenient receptacle for it.
Tamblyn didn't exactly replace Olivia Wilde, who was given time off to make movies, but her character was designed to add some female spice to the mix. Word is that Tamblyn will not stick around beyond her 13-week contract, which runs into March, and that Wilde will be returning, at least for a little while. There's room on the show for both, but TV is forever disappointing us. How devastating when Tamblyn's last full-time series, Joan of Arcadia, was canceled, leaving her out of our lives and sending the estimable Joe Mantegna, who played her father, off to the skeevy Criminal Minds.
House's Feb. 21 episode, in which the curmudgeonly physician is sent to the principal's office at a fancy private school, was a miracle of originality, with the kind of humor and delightful complexity that hour dramas on the big networks rarely find. I'm hooked Mondays at 8 p.m., and will probably stick around after Tamblyn leaves, enjoying my new-found appointment TV through my tears.
How about you?
