TV review: Tweaks keep Boston Legal, House fresh
Just when we were wondering how they could possibly keep the naughtiness of Boston Legal fresh, series creator David Kelley came up with the perfect foil: the new, straight, ultra-conservative managing partner.
Carl Sack (John Larroquette), who exudes Old Boston like a cologne, clearly has some idea that most of the principals of Crane, Poole and Schmidt are barking, and that its his job, at Shirleys behest, to clean house.
But his progress in scoping the extent of the barkingness is hilarious. Its also clever plot development, because from being affectionate followers of these eccentric characters, viewers now get into the new territory of being their defenders.
You are now rooting for Clarence/Clarice and thigh-clasping Jerry to be left unmolested by Karl, and for nothing to impede the cross-dressing of Alan or the mad Dick Cheney-esque shooting carry-on of Denny.
Its typical of Kelleys cheek that Larroquette was last seen in The Practice, the series from which Boston Legal spun off, as a narcissistic homosexual murderer whom the firm gets off a vicious killing charge. He made this part so memorable he got an Emmy for it. Now here he is a hyper-respectable Old Bostonian. How long before Denny shoots him?
The surprise highlight, however, was the introduction of the vicars tea party escapee, Katie Lloyd (Tara Summers) as the firms new junior lawyer. With her picture postcard looks, and classic English modesty and poise, she initially seems hideously out of place. But sure enough, she, like everyone else in this firm, is a true eccentric. The daffier her behaviour, the more inspired her lawyering.
Each show has a quota of specific ingredients: battiness, sex, injustice, a hymn to liberal politics, and a bit of vaudeville. All boxes were ticked last night.
The new female sex bomb is Lorraine (Saffron Burrows), who more than any of Alans previous love interests, drives him absolutely nuts, leading to a couple of scenes of frantic crashing about in the Crane, Poole and Schmidt elevator.
Alan goes on to make a heart- rending speech about human rights. And in the final scene on Dennys balcony with the scotch bottle, he is so full of the joys of life, he has put on his dress and hair bow. To cap it all, Shelley Berman is still appearing as the No jibber-jabber in my courtroom! judge. Perfect.
Like Boston Legal, House has an immutable list of ingredients for each episode: a patient arriving with an obscure and unlikely set of afflictions, a bizarre series of ingenious treatments inflicted on the patient, sometimes making the patient worse or curing their existing ailments by substituting another lot, an illegal break-in/ burglary to obtain further forensic clues, a standup fight with the hospital administrator, a flirting scene with the hospital administrator, sundry breathtakingly rude and cynical remarks, and a demonstration of some new quirk of eccentricity by House.
Last night, House even tried inducing drunkenness in the near-corpse on his ward, before it was revealed that he was treating the wrong patient altogether. So facially disfigured was this woman after a building collapse that she had been misidentified as a colleague, who, in a clever final kicker, turned out to have died in the rubble. So one family was bereft, another overjoyed.
Again like Boston Legals, Houses writers have hit on a formula-tweak to freshen up their grumpy doctors schtick. Last season he lost his team, and now he is under pressure to assemble a new one. He spends the entire first episode refusing, relishing the chance to work on his own without pesky underlings insisting on their own ideas.
But as we know, and as he refuses to admit, he needs people to be rude to in order to function. In his unconscious desperation, he commandeers the office cleaner and makes him pose as a doctor to fulfil the function of sounding board. Naturally, the patients family finds out and there is hell to pay.
The episode opens with House playing a hideous riff on his beloved vintage guitar %26ndash; Van Halens arpeggio, apparently %26ndash; which kicks off a mad running gag in which Houses boss ransoms the guitar till House agrees to pick a new team.
He redoubles the pressure by making all other doctors, even the most junior, refuse to engage with House. He is sent to Coventry, and bits of his guitar keep arriving in the mail.
In the final scene, he has caved in. But this is a mixed blessing. He addresses a room chockful of young doctors to the effect that he will whittle them down over a period of six weeks. Clearly this will be a process modelled on The Apprentice and Survivor, only with great dialogue, and the distinct possiblity that absolutely everyone will be fired, if not thrashed with Houses walking stick.
No discerning viewer will willingly miss a minute of it.
