David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place. “House’s” Super Bowl episode: Baby, it's cold outside
As formulaic as “House” can be – patient is in bad shape, patient is in worse shape, OMG patient’s in terrible shape and whew!, patient’s OK – they played with the predictability factor pretty well tonight.
There was a smidgen of the increasingly to-be-expected self-satisfied in-joke (House (Hugh Laurie) wants cable-TV at the hospital and is told he’ll have to make do with broadcast TV, to which he replies, Well, I’m good for Tuesdays, the night “House” is usually on). But the writers cooked up a new complication for the usual complications – the patient was stranded at a remote Antarctica outpost and could only communicate with the doctors via webcam. And, House kind of liked her.
Mira Sorvino was our patient du jour, Kate, a shrink suffering from the usual cocktail of bizarre symptoms. Unwilling to waste the outpost’s limited supply of medications, Kate and House traded wisecracking insults – or, as Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) put it, “House’s version of courtship.” House may have been into her, but she’s into Wilson, and an engineer at the base – initially, a seeming MacGuffin in the storyline – was into her, willing to drink her urine, drill a hole in her skull and refracture her toe (now that’s love), all to help save her life.
So, a nice post-Bowl episode, better than that creep-a-thon episode of “Criminal Minds” last year. But one wonders if it’ll get those huge ratings generally expected of shows that air after the Super Bowl: The game itself (for your edification, here once again is that spectacular Manning-to-Tyree play that saved the game) went way long and the post-game show, for all its lack of insight, went even longer, so “House” didn’t air until after 10:30 p.m. East Coast Time.
And a little oddity during the episode: A “House” promo focusing on House downing Vicodin like they’re M&M’s, backed by Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab.” Given that Winehouse is giving Britney Spears a run for her money in the spectacular meltdown sweepstakes, it’s maybe not the best idea to play that tune for laughs right now.