Why Americans Love TV's House

The medical scenarios are preposterous, the characters are difficult to identify with, and the episodes have followed the same basic pattern since the show began in 2004. Yet Americans love House. Here's why we tune in week after week.

1. Americans want to believe that doctors are brilliant diagnosticians.

Going to the doctor for a mysterious ailment can be frightening, to say the least. In the best possible outcome, the doctor will immediately diagnose the problem and treat it. In another acceptable scenario, the doctor won't be sure what's causing the condition, but can refer the patient to a specialist who will be able to diagnose and provide adequate treatment.

A secret, nagging fear, however, is that the doctor won't have any clue what causes fingernails to leak blood or foreheads to shrink. Left untreated, the mysterious condition will get worse and worse until it makes life unbearable or kills the patient outright.

Our distrust of doctors isn't that they'll kill us with what they know, but that they'll kill us with what they don't know. On House, the rarest, strangest, and most baffling diseases are eventually given names and proper treatment, because doctors are brilliant people who graduated at the tops of their classes, read every medical journal religiously, and attend conferences to stay on top of the latest developments in medicine. They have both problem-solving skills and encyclopedic knowledge to diagnose any problem. No patient dies on House without every possible medical option being exhausted first.

2. Americans want to believe doctors are personally invested in our care.

While House makes it a rule to avoid patient contact, he never stops puzzling over their symptoms or psychological tics. His team also spends endless hours debating over treatment options and losing sleep over the patient's condition. In the real world, we get pushed through doctors' offices and hospitals like numbers and rarely even have time to ask questions or express concerns.

Though we know it's irrational, we want our doctors to treat us like we are the only patient and our symptoms merit a flurry of activity. At the very least, we'd like to believe doctors really are listening and taking notes when they take our medical histories and listen to complaints about aches and pains. House taps into our deep-seated desire for better medical care and our fear that we might be in real trouble someday without it.

3. House's patients never worry about how they'll pay for their treatment.

Americans love House because his patients get test after test, round-the-clock care, and all the newest designer and experimental treatments without ever seeing a bill. Though clinic patients in minor subplots sometimes express concerns about money, House's patients remain blissfully ignorant of what all that quality care is costing them.

In a more true-to-life scenario, the uninsured would probably never get access to a doctor like House, because it would just be too much of a drain on the hospital's resources. Even insured patients would balk when they found out their insurance companies didn't cover 17,000 tests or the full cost of 23 operations performed in the same week.

Though we can imagine the astronomical bills House's patients probably face, we never have to see them defaulting on their mortgages, charging their prescriptions on credit cards with double-digit interest rates, or filing for bankruptcy. The rest of us who have the misfortune to become life-threateningly ill usually have to pay medical bills for years and years.