The A-Hole as Hero
Two hit TV shows, House and The Mentalist, are taking the concept of the unlikable, arrogant, smart-alecky anti-hero to new extremes.
Last week, I took a look at the harrowing James Franco film 127 Hours, about injured hiker Aron Ralston's battle to free himself from a boulder during a week-long ordeal. Perhaps the most important aspects of this humorous and horrifying character study were the questions it posed about the nature of heroism, of risk-taking and endurance and attitude. And those questions are just as relevant to two of TV's highest-rated and most acclaimed weekly series, Hugh Laurie's cutting (in more ways than one) medical drama House, and Simon Baker's sly and snarky sleuthing series, The Mentalist.
On the surface, both of these deservedly top-rated shows are the kind of routine procedurals that have been solving cases and curing illness on our TV screens from almost the beginning. But what puts House and The Mentalist at the top of their respective games is how gleefully they both "own" and shake up the shopworn conventions of their formats. Often it’s obvious "who dun it" on The Mentalist, and much of House's medical mumbo-jumbo might just as well be in Sanskrit for anyone without a graduate degree in science. Yet these subversive series lure traditional viewers in with case-of-the-week bait, but the switch comes when they play out their stories according to the rules of the finest cable dramas instead of just predictably plotting by the numbers, focusing instead on novelistic, seriocomic character studies of patients, victims, and above all, these mostly unlikable, arrogant, smart-alecky men.
Now in his seventh season, sometimes-diabolical diagnostician Dr. Gregory House is hardly the kindly, reassuring Freudian father-doctor we're used to, from Marcus Welby to St. Elsewhere to most of the docs on ER. (Although in today's era of HMOs and healthcare battles, all too many of us probably have had the pleasure of a doctor as arrogantly nasty as House in real life.) And instead of a hospital full of bravely sympathetic patients, House's roster has often been the exact opposite, including a suicidal, mean-spirited author of Harry Potter-like children's books; a blogger who tweets all the details of her treatment (and the doctors treating her), reducing her life-and-death battle to a reality show; and a thoroughly nasty teenage punk on whom House almost gleefully "turned up the pain to 11." Their worst example came in one of their best episodes, a show that beat even Mad Men, Good Wife, and HBO scripts for the PEN-USA Award for Best Screenplay of 2009, when an Idi Amin-type, genocidal African dictator (played by James Earl Jones) showed up in the US for treatment. Would Dr. House -- should Dr. House -- even bother saving his life?
Indeed, while many of the episodes can be very emotional and lacerating, it is the show's determination not to go for the cheap sympathy ploys and the old clichés that keep the show's vital signs running strong. And while Dr. House may be an SOB, he's fighting infectious disease, cancer, and heart failure -- and usually wins. Who's side are you going to be on?
The Mentalist, by contrast, often does go for the emotional approach and the no-win situation, while keeping a satirically light touch, which breaks the corollary cop-show cliche of making the victim of the week just stick-figure cannon fodder (only Cold Case and The Wire broke that cliche before it, on a recent regular basis.) In an almost equally memorable episode, title character Patrick Jane and his partner, the exasperated, knowing, and sly state police agent Teresa Lisbon, go to a top-secret laboratory that's developing germ warfare to look into the murder of a female scientist. (They arrived just in time to see the doomed doctor saying a tearful Skype goodbye to her daughter as she lay dying in quarantine.) An embarrassed chief smugly intones not long afterward, "We're not the bad guys here, you understand. Our work is in the interest of peace," as realistically credible in his unctuousness as his real-life counterparts parsing their way through a cable news interview. The cost of that laboratory and its bio-tech equipment? Tens of millions, no doubt. But the smirk on Patrick Jane's face as he verbally cut that sanctimonious scientist into fish sticks? Priceless.
The late Mrs. Blankenship once philosophized on an episode of Mad Men (whose "hero", Don Draper, has more than a few thorny qualities himself) that "in every relationship, there's a sadist and there's a masochist." There's little doubt as to which side of the ledger House and Jane fall into, but as manipulative and dishonest as they often are, when it really counts, they are determined to tell it like it is -- even (indeed, especially) if it hurts, no matter how politically-incorrect or insensitive it may be. And they're not going to "enable" anyone to wallow paralyzed in their victimhood. As inconvenient as their truths often are, one gets the feeling that they're sometimes far more compassionate and helpful than many of the seemingly "understanding" people who bill and coo reassurance, and hold hands with empty promises.
And we can respect them because we know as hard as they are on everyone else, they're just as merciless on themselves. When a murder victim's grieving relative, whom he really did care for and took pity on, asked Patrick Jane to "Tell me the truth. Do you think he knows -- do you think they know -- how much we really loved them, how much we miss them?", Jane considered (he could be "nice" and tell her the social lie.) But then Jane looked her in the eyes, grownup to grownup, and sighed, "No," clearly thinking also of his own dead wife and child. The woman thanked him, for his honesty.
Thankfully, while House and Jane would surely be just as sneeringly contemptuous of empty "hopey-changey stuff" as the surliest Tea Partier, that doesn't mean that their shows are completely nihilistic or abandon-all-hope. Far from it; most episodes are leavened with laugh-out-loud humor and irreverent incorrectness. And the women in both of these very difficult men's lives, from whip-smart Lisa Edelstein as House's lover and boss Dr. Lisa Cuddy, to the always-wonderful Robin Tunney as Agent Teresa Lisbon, are just as wryly amused and exasperated by their "heroes" as House and Jane are by everyone else.
But the fact that House and The Mentalist bother to look dead on at the hard character truths they do, without avoiding them or reducing them to inoffensive pap, sets them apart as two of the very few broadcast-network dramas to be truly existentialist in TV history. And at bottom, they also ask the same question that 127 Hours did. Can you be a real hero, and a real a**hole, too? Not to mention, is honesty always "the best policy"? Is it more important to be ruthlessly competent and effective, or to be a "nice" person? And how often are (and aren't) those qualities mutually exclusive?
Yet no matter how much they might grouch and stir the pot and make use of people, we know these knights in (very) tarnished armor will come through for us in the end. Because maybe, just maybe, even though Gregory House and Patrick Jane would never admit it, they need something to believe in, too.