Sometimes Hollywood gets it right

I’ve taken kind of a shine to the new Fox show House (it’s on tonight.) It’s a pretty formulaic medical show (with some real howlers in the fact-checking department); the twist is that the main character, who is supposed to be a physician with an uncanny talent for diagnosing obscure illnesses, is also a rude, cynical misanthrope. Hugh Laurie plays the misanthrope, and is just amazing. Come for his performance, stay for the allusions to two great literary detectives, ignore the rest as you please.
So I’ve been watching this show, and I know Victor’s been tuning in too. Unfortunately neither of us got around to blogging last week’s surprisingly good episode. So allow me to refer you to S.T. Karnick’s article in NRO today: Must-Believe TV: Christianity gets a fair shake:

…the [nuns] are portrayed as far more complex and intelligent than one might have expected. Both their ideas and their personal histories are quite sophisticated, and in the case of the one stricken by illness, the revelations of her many past sins show not hypocrisy but the redemptive power of religious faith. The nuns argue quite evenly with Dr. House, and though he usually wins through the sheer force of his great intellect and even greater will, the emptiness in his soul becomes increasingly clear. His doubts in his own abilities suggest that for this man, science is not enough.
Throughout all of this, Christmas is prominent in the background. It is Advent, and the hospital staff members are reacting in various ways appropriate to their characters. Dr. House, in particular, increasingly reveals a loneliness and personal despair that has been strongly hinted at in previous episodes. The context, however, points the viewer inexorably toward a spiritual explanation of his problem: Dr. House is a lost soul who desperately needs to find some transcendent meaning to his life. Though he claims to be a strict materialist, his frequent references to Dante’s Circles of Hell suggest what is really troubling him.

(The episode also has a neat reference to the Seven Deadly Sins.)
I do have a couple of quibbles; for example, Karnick writes, “though [House] usually wins through the sheer force of his great intellect and even greater will”; but the way I saw it, House actually doesn’t do too well against the nuns. They have his number, and he doesn’t even know it. In one argument, when the nun is getting a little too close to the truth, he only “wins” by rudely breaking off the conversation; later, in another, he is stunned into silence. But all in all, I thought it was not only fair (which is rare enough) but showed the nuns as being intelligent and good (!) without being sentimental.