Is there a doctor in the House?

I don't watch much television. I keep it on a lot for the soothing noise in the background but mostly it's on the Weather station, which is main reason I even pay for cable. I think I might be hooked on the Muzak on the 8s that comes with the local forecast. At night, I often switch to the station that has Law and Order reruns because I like the sound of the da-dum thingy and listening to lawyer talk in the background is kind of like comfort food to my ears after all the years at the law firm. But in recent weeks, I've become completely hooked on the program House.

I have such a huge crush on the main character I wish he was real. There's something I find so utterly sexy about that curmudgeonly doctor. I can't put my finger on why. Maybe it's the caustic wit, the impossible analogies, his rebellious nature or maybe it's the look in his eyes and the music he listens to when he's alone with his thoughts at the end of the show.

Anyway I just love it but I often miss the program because it plays at 11:00 at night on the station I usually have on. I don't always manage to stay awake that long. So you can imagine my delight in finding out that I've been watching reruns and that the original episodes actually air at a decent hour on another station. I watched it last night instead of blogging, even though those are reruns as well, because they were of the new storyline which I think is terrific and they happen to fit into our theme here.

One of House's quirks is he pops Oxycotin like candy on account of chronic pain in his leg. I'm late coming into the show so I don't know the history of the ailment but he is obviously needs the meds for pain relief. In the new story line, he pisses off a cop when he is examining him and the cop has embarked on a total vendetta against House.

Now in the medical sense, the show is a complete fairy tale. In the real world, four doctors do not spend days and millions on every medical test known to man to diagnose some obscure ailment. Not to mention, the good doctor's residents would be more likely to come up with the diagnosis than he would, and he always is right in the end. But as far as the cop's persecution of him in the last few episodes I've seen, it reads like the DEA's playbook.

The cop arrested House on a drug DUI, He raided his house and took all his pills and is threatening his co-workers and freezing their assets in an attempt to get them to rat House out for faking prescriptions. In the real world, as poor Richard Paey found out, these tactics work.

Fortunately for the story line, it's not working on House's peers in the hospital. One expects eventually, the cop will come down with some obscure disease and only House will be able to save him -- the drama will be in whether he does it or lets the SOB die. I'm betting he'll save his life and the cop won't appreciate it but frankly, the cop character is so horrible you really want something bad to happen to him.

Meanwhile, on a related note, what's up with Christmas programming this year? I remember when the whole month of December was one big Christmas special after another. This year, I managed to catch Its a Wonderful Life -- and cried my eyes out at the end of course -- but there were no other classic Christmas movies. I even checked the listings looking for them.

I mean, I caught Miracle on 34th Street, but there was little else besides cheesy made for TV movies and that BB gun one that I've still never seen. No White Christmas with Bing Crosby. No Meet in St. Louis with Judy Garland. And even worse, No Scrooge movies. I used to love watching every version of that story -- my favorite is the Alistar Cook version -- and there wasn't a single one. What's up with that?