What the doctor orders: 'House' on Fox.

Can P. G. Wodehouse teach us anything about Fox TV? Maybe, if we're talking about House, the hit medical drama that--for the benefit of you who missed it the first time 'round--is in reruns all summer. Set in a New Jersey hospital, the series is notable principally for a single performance: the one that brings to life its eponymous protagonist, Dr. Gregory House, a brilliant, emotionally and physically tortured doctor who's so misanthropic he makes Ebenezer Scrooge look like Pollyanna. Sarcastic, rude, defiant of hospital rules, adept at the swift, devastating retort, House might be an intriguing character anyway, but he acquires a mesmerizing negative charisma in the hands of British actor Hugh Laurie.

Although his extensive filmography includes the Stuart Little movies and the British TV comedy program Blackadder, Laurie has been most memorable for his blissfully goofy depiction of Bertie Wooster in the 1990s TV series Jeeves and Wooster (opposite his Cambridge University classmate Stephen Fry). To have seen him in the role of that addlepated fop and then take in his rendition of the intense, acidic Dr. House is to marvel at the actor's range and virtuosity. His very corporeal makeup seems to have changed for this new program: the rubbery essence of Bertie Wooster has given way to a steely gauntness.

The latter quality is, perhaps, responsible for Laurie's scoring the title of Sexiest Doctor on TV in a recent TVguide.com poll--or maybe it's House's permanent five-o'clock shadow. Either way, kudos to the casting director who realized that Bertie Wooster could be an all-American grouch. Fox, too, deserves credit for incorporating this knockout acting turn into its schedule.

With House's super-sized dyspepsia dominating the action, the members of the show's attractive supporting cast--Robert Sean Leonard as House's bemused colleague and friend Dr. James Wilson; Omar Epps, Jennifer Morrison, and Jesse Spencer as House's accomplished underlings, and the targets for his contemptuous wit--mostly serve as cogs that keep the medical-mystery plot clocking along. No doubt in other parts of New Jersey people get the flu, or throw out their backs trying to move of furniture, but, in the course of a day or two, Dr. House's hospital processes enough scientific oddities to fill a medical journal (one episode even featured a nun with blemishes her peers saw as the stigmata). Erroneous diagnoses crop up and fall away as the cranky House finally pinpoints his patient's ailment in a flash of insight, his theory usually proving Sherlock Holmes's dictum that when you have ruled out the impossible, whatever remains--no matter how improbable--must be the truth.

The Baker Street principle notwith-standing, it's from the hardboiled American school of mystery writing that House borrows many of its tropes: not only is its detective hero cynical, shell-shocked, and unable to keep his private life from tangling with his business, he is sometimes forced to flout the law in order to bring about the good. In one episode, for example, House performed DNA testing on an ill boy's parents behind their backs, obtaining the information he needed to solve the bizarre case and effect a cure (he also won a paternity bet against some of his colleagues).

Similarly, when House is acting churlish to patients, the ends tend to justify the means. One consultation scene, for example, found him tete-a-tete with a young mother who had opted out of vaccinations for her baby. "I think some multinational pharmaceuticals want me to think they work," the fresh-faced blonde sniffed to House, who picked up on her anticorporate slant in a snide comment a minute or two later: "You know what's another really good business? Teeny tiny baby coffins. You can get them in frog green or fire-engine red ..." The mother's appalled expression suggests that a conversion of viewpoint may already be under way.

Mind you, the occasional efficacy of House's unpleasantness doesn't entirely excuse it, and he's certainly capable of inflicting emotional distress, especially on the sensitive Dr. Allison Cameron (played by Morrison), who's in love with him. But if House dishes out pain, he's also in considerable torment himself, suffering from a chronic leg condition that has left him lame and addicted to Vicodin. As he hobbles around the hospital, suffering and bestowing cures, it's not too hard to see that the character derives from a long line of mythic, injured figures--Prometheus, the wounded king from the Grail legend.

True, your average mythic figure may not be as surly as Dr. Gregory House. But then, how many mythic heroes spend their existence on the Fox prime-time lineup, shoulder to shoulder with shows like Nanny 911 and Trading Spouses?