at play in the land of prime time

Medical Investigation

This week we had Ice Station wossname, you know, where they fly up because the researchers taking core samples Are Not Who They Are, and then the crazy comes, and the murders, and the storm comes, and they're trapped. MI's what you'd get if you took the early cast of ER and sent them on Mulder and Scully's adventures: renegade NIH docs flyin' from town to town identifying mysterious pathogens in the nick of time and saving the world without fanfare. The cast is sort of yer just-add-water ensemble with the exception of my girl Eva Rossi, more on her later. Neal "Buck Compton" McDonough is Dr. Stephen...something, who lopes around brooding and taking everything *really* seriously, and Kellie Williams is his emotionally stable sidekick, following him around, diagnosing things and telling Dr. Stephen that he should get more sleep. Chris "Jake 2.0" Gorham is DANGEROUSLY cute and plays the same role he played in Odyssey 5, where "young prodigal astronaut" is replaced with "young prodigal doctor." The token black guy is pretty interesting for a token black guy, if only because his job description remains sort of indiscriminate: he seems to be the resident CSI, which mostly means that while Buck and Kellie are talking to patients and diagnosing things, Token Black Guy prowls around the victims' homes with rubber gloves on, taking samples of things and putting them in jars. The internet tells me that critics don't like Eva Rossi, but I think she's awesome if for no other reason than it's been a long time since a TV show had a resident LIAR. Eva is the NIH crew's "press liaison," which, okay, I have no idea what that means, but in the very first episode, to keep a journalist off their scent, Eva seduced said journalist, led him into the hospital's basement, cold-cocked him and locked him down there for the duration. This is probably not ethical, but I find it deeply cool. Aside from that, she mostly has Deanna Troi's job, which is to say, she stands next to Buck a lot when he's interviewing patients, and then mutters "he's lying" under her breath and goes off to unravel the patient's lies. Plus she's really VERY hot.

MI is basically TV comfort food, likeable, interesting enough and easy enough to follow. They did the "poisoned pants" plotline WEEKS before House did it, equally satisfying if lacking any real existential commentary or depth. But I ain't missed an episode yet and I'm still finding it good solid square-meal TV which could end up being NBC's answer to CSI.

House

House is better. I am so over the whole lead-character-is-a-cipher school of ensemble casting, and House neatly sidesteps that by making the lead character a sociopath whose opinion of humanity starts with "all patients lie" and goes down from there. And fuck me gently with a chainsaw, Hugh Laurie is hot. The grumblyness! The scruffyness! The Vicodin addiction! "I don't have a pain management problem; I have a PAIN problem." House answers the same questions as MI, but doesn't really pretend to be an ensemble because all the non-Hugh Laurie members of the cast are only relevant in as far as their relationship with House. Essentially he's a genius diagnostician put to the task of solving medical mysteries, and he's got a fleet of groupie docs who work for him and revel in his brilliance while being perplexed by his dry, utterly unloveable personality. And plus since he's such a genius he gets to stay still at a pleasant ivy-covered hospital in Princeton, NJ where the mysteries come to him and all he has to do is prod his groupies into doing the legwork while he tromps around on his crutch popping pain pills and working one day a week in the free clinic so Bobbi Bernstein doesn't fire him. The groupies are pretty awesome themselves, if indistinguishable from one another, though over the course of the eight or nine episodes Omar Epps has begun to distinguish himself as the workaholic doomed to follow in House's footsteps, and Jennifer wossname, the girl doc, has begun to distinguish HERself as the one who sometimes cries. Also there's Robert Sean Leonard, whose role in the cast is completely indeterminate except for showing up occasionally to flirt with House and give House the opportunity to do guy things like play piano and stare at boobies.

House is as dry and clever as House himself, smart smart smart and therefore doomed to cancellation. They're better than the poisoned pants plotline they RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES!, but the medical mysteries themselves aren't as important to the show as the "differential diagnoses" over the course of the episode, where the groupies try to impress House while saving patients' lives, and House further alienates his docs and shoots down all their suggestions.

Medium

This Arquette is sort of off-putting and I can't figure out why. There's something deeply annoying about her, but yet, every time I think she's an untalented hack she turns around and does something subtle and powerful and all of a sudden I like her again.

Medium is, well. So this Arquette discovers she's psychic, or, rather, has prophetic dreams, mostly about violent crimes, and so she scurries over to the DA's office and volunteers her service helping to track down killers et al. It's got the episodic casefiles you'd expect, but it's really a family drama masquerading as a paranormal mystery show, because the best parts of it are the scenes at home between the Arquette (Allison...something) and her husband (who ROCKS) and her kids. First off, she's a psychic and her husband BELIEVES her, which is already revolutionary and cuts right past all the things that are usually annoying about the set of shows built on this concept (see also: Invisible Man, First Wave, Pretender, anything where the lead's got some paranormal skillz and nobody believes him). Also, she doesn't try to hide it, cutting right past the OTHER usual annoyance of these types of shows. For example, when she goes to quit her job as a paralegal and her boss asks why, Allison shrugs and says "apparently I'm psychic, isn't that weird?" But the BEST best un-annoyance of Medium is that sometimes Allison's visions are WRONG. I have so much respect for a show that doesn't mind having its lead characters visions be WRONG that I'd keep watching this show for that reason alone.

The casefiles are dumb. The show's got a vague Touched by an Angel vibe to it, but because of the details above I think I don't care. Mostly, Allison's husband is sexy and funny and supportive and interested in her visions and good to the kids, and the kids sound like real kids and the Arquette acts like a real mom and wife and woman who recently discovered she's psychic, and all that is absolutely worth watching.