Fox's 'House' Demonstrates How Not To Draw Attention To Yourself

House: Last night's episode demonstrated that this heart isn't the only thing that's a little disoriented. Fox

 

by Linda Holmes

House is a show with problems, and they are looking increasingly severe.

At its best, it was a funny, addictive, engrossing medical mystery show, modeled on Sherlock Holmes, that combined a great personal story (centered around Hugh Laurie's Dr. House) with stories about baffling patient ailments. But now House is totally adrift, and proved it last night.

Gigantic spoilers for last night's episode, which you should not read if you do not want to know what happened, after the jump ...

At the end of the third season, a creative decision was made to cut loose two of the three young doctors who had been on Dr. House's team. The once-central Cameron and Chase went off to become rarely seen nonentities, while Foreman remained to work with House and a new crop of doctors.

One of the new doctors was Kutner, played by Kal Penn, star of the Harold and Kumar movies, who was recently interviewed for this Morning Edition piece. On last night's episode, with no warning, Kutner committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

Now, there are sometimes good reasons to kill a character without any apparent buildup, and in the case of suicide, the show tried to stress that suicide in real life can happen without warning.

But does an apparently unmotivated suicide of a character nobody knows very well make for especially effective dramatic writing? Kutner was a fairly laid-back guy, smart, and often used at least in part for comic relief. There hasn't been much of a story about his character at all, let alone one in which his death might be an effective element.

The show has been struggling creatively ever since House replaced his team, with the brief exception of a lovely arc at the end of last season — which also involved a sudden death.

(Note: As callous as it sounds, you can't kill someone every time you don't know what to do next, or you're going to need an exceptionally large cast. Keeping a television drama going can be like feeding a ravenous furnace, and it's undoubtedly difficult to come up with fuel every time you sit down to write a script. But you can't start throwing in the furniture; all fuel is not the same.)

Kutner's death has precisely that uncomfortable random feeling, as if the loss of dramatic momentum had become overwhelming, and Kutner wasn't that interesting anyway, so the only way he could serve the story was by shooting himself.

As if his death didn't seem tilted enough toward stunt rather than story, Fox closed the show by inviting viewers to visit Kutner's "memorial page," which really exists. Read his obituary! Get your own "embeddable badge," presumably so you can decorate your web page with a salute to his imaginary demise!

Or, if you find this story about suicide so much fun that you can't stand not to be a part of it, you can leave your thoughts in his guestbook, which turns out to be a Facebook page — with close to 9,000 fans already — where you can participate in a very weird discussion in which some people are attempting to go along with the game and leave memorial messages about Kutner, while others are griping about the storyline.