Fox has a new TV show at 9 PM Tuesday night entitled House M.D. about a rather tough, sarcastic, and cutting but brilliant medical doctor working in a hospital solving tough cases. House is played by an incredibly well cast Hugh Lawrie. In one scene (sorry, I can't find the dialog on the web yet) he rips a mother for not giving her young (7 or 8 perhaps?) asthmatic son regular asthma medicine due to her fear of frequent use of drugs. He utters some scornful line about whether oxygen is important and then just walks out of the examination room leaving mother and son there to ponder her foolishness.
I loved some of House's lines so much that even as I watched the show the pessimistic thought came to me that the producers and network will come in for enough criticism and pressure that the show will eventually become more politically correct. House could "grow" to learn how to mouth liberal pieties and the left-liberal media will praise his "growth" like it praises the leftward drift of Republican judges and politicians. The writers could eventually be faced with a much smaller allowed list of targets.
The environment in America today is target rich for a show that wants to let a doctor pour occasional scathing abuse on patients and family members. How about a morbidly obese woman who can't even walk to the kitchen whose husband brings her as much food as she wants? These couples exist and House could rip into a husband who enables his wife's morbid obesity. Will House be allowed to pour scorn on a pregnant junkie who has given birth to multiple babies while using addictive drugs or the legal system that lets her do it? Will he be allowed rip into some HIV positive guy who knew he was positive when he infected some other guy? Or even worse, how about portraying a bisexual HIV positive guy who infected his wife? Or is that all beyond the pale of what Hollywood will do?
Worse, did the producers already decide to make the first show the most politically incorrect and then immediately back off? House skated pretty close to the edge of liberal political correctness in the first episode when he discussed with a young attractive female M.D. whether he hired her for her genetically determined looks or genetically determined intelligence (again, sorry of the lack of dialog but I was too captivated by the show to think I ought to be writing some of it down). I was shocked that I was watching such realism about the human condition on a TV drama. There is a definite strain of Hollywood product that obviously wants the cachet of political incorrectness without the meat of it. Take Bill Maher's show Politically Incorrect. I watched it a number of times and I felt like Clara in that old hamburger commercial saying "Where's the beef?". Will House M.D. become another pseudo-politically incorrect show? I hope not, at least not in the first season anyway.
BTW, if you watched the first episode and thought the kindergarten teacher who was hovering close to death looked familiar she is Robin Tunney who I best remember from the 1996 movie The Craft where she plays a high school witch with Neve Campbell and a couple of other actresses (Rachel True and Fairuza Balk).
For more on House M.D. see Steve Sailer and Colby Cosh.
Update: The second episode had House insulting a mother who won't vaccinate her kid and doing other fun stuff. This show may stay pretty good for a while.
Bernard Chapin of Mens News Daily interviews Steve Sailer about Steve's work as a movie reviewer.
Hollywood tries hard to give the public what it wants, and some tastes have been moving in conservative directions. Adultery, for example, has fallen very much out of fashion in movies. Many young moviegoers grew up in broken families, and they disapprove of parents fooling around. On the other hand, today a nerdier segment of the audience gets a fetishistic charge out of seeing beautiful women engage in violence, so we are besieged by "Kill Bill" type movies about willowy women improbably kicking butt.
Hollywood has done right by a number of conservative authors. Besides "Lord of the Rings," the four Jack Ryan movies from Tom Clancy's novels have all been solid. And could we have asked for a more intelligent and faithfully detailed rendition of Patrick O'Brian's sea novels than "Master and Commander?" The three studios that teamed up to spend $150 million on Peter Weir's film are probably going to lose a lot of money because they didn't vulgarize the movie. Some literate middle-aged guys got together and spent a fortune making a movie for other guys like themselves (and like the people who read my reviews), and, no surprise, it turns out there aren't enough of us.
The whole interview is worth a read. One interesting point Steve makes is that the deals involved in making a movie require so much time to put together that movies take years to make. Therefore it is a mistake to think that if Hollywood puts out, say, a war movie that it is doing so in response to events that occurred within the last year. Any movie about war that came out in 2002 was probably not a response to 9/11 or the war in Afghanistan for example.