Commentary: Scheduled Heart Failure

I've really been enjoying House this season, so I decided to pick up the Seasons 1-4 DVDs last week to go back and catch up on all the good stuff I've missed over the years. Also, I wanted to see just how formulaic the show really is. And it's true, House virtually always misdiagnosis the patient in a way that will cause a seizure somewhere before the final commercial break. It got me thinking: is this such a bad thing?

I find that even when I'm watching three or four episodes of House in a row, I don't mind the repetition. In fact, I find it somewhat soothing. I can rationalize this by pointing out that the repetition is realistic. Most people's lives are cyclical. My job is basically the same from week to week, and I imagine this is true for anyone who's been in the same profession for a while. On the other hand, a television program about my job would probably cause seizures and ass bleeds, just like on House.

Even fictional formulas get stale after a while. I used to really enjoy Law & Order, and now I always assume that anyone who says they watch that show is joking. Because really, once you've seen one episode you've seen all 8,437,601.

The key to making a formula work is to use it as a tool rather than a template. If your show structure requires you to have a patient almost die in Act II, then you can get creative with that aspect of the formula, occasionally turning it on its head so that the patient actually does die, or the death is only a trick, or the thing causing the near-death-experience is a tick lodged in the patient's vagina.

The show formula can also be used to flesh out the characters. Traits are revealed as we watch the character react to similar but not identical situations each week. Dr. House is virtually always a jerk to his patients and constantly accusing them of lying. But when last week's fitness guru patient concealed her gastric bypass, House was indifferent. Which is how we know that his flirtation with Cuddy was really affecting him.

A television show formula is like the rhyme structure in a classic sonnet. It's not so much an opportunity for fill-in-the-blank writing as a way to reign in your creativity and maintain continuity and character construction.

It's also easy to peg network shows like House and L&O as formulaic while lauding Mad Men or Weeds for being more "original". But from what I know about television writing, every show has some kind of story formula which allows the team of writers to storyboard episodes. Jane Espenson once pointed out that Gilmore Girls was a tough show to write for because the episode structure was unusual, with commercial breaks scheduled in the middle of acts. And GG was a character-driven serial, not a procedural.

Sure, commercial breaks make these kinds of structures necessary on the networks and basic cable, whereas the premium cable channels can get away with more. And that's true. But it doesn't mean that HBO and Showtime don't still use formulas. Most episodes of Dexter, for instance, involve Dexter in a plastic room holding a knife over the face of drugged criminal. And Dexter is a great, original show. But it still has a formula, albeit a highly original one.

Television writing, like all storytelling, requires rules. The mark of a good show is not whether such rules exist, but rather how well the writers, producers and directors use those rules to create a compelling, as opposed to predictable, story.

Plus, audiences gets confused when they don't get their regularly scheduled ass bleeds at the 00:34 minute mark.