Cast articles

Spooks, doctors and the science of being sexy

THREE WEEKS ago, inspired by a claim allegedly made by Channel Nine's news director, John Westacott, that "to make it in this industry, you gotta have f---ability", this column sought readers' help in developing a Desirability Index for television personalities.

Miraculously, 151 readers responded. Here, in order of public preference, are the personalities who received more than three votes.

The most f---able people on Australian television this year are:

1 Rupert Penry-Jones (Spooks);

2 Jennifer Hawkins (Make Me A Supermodel);

3 Todd Sampson (The Gruen Transfer);

4 Jennifer Morrison (House);

5 Jensen Ackles (Supernatural);

6 Kate Walsh (Private Practice);

7 Hugh Laurie (House);

8 Myf Warhurst (Spicks And Specks);

9 Jesse Spencer (House);

10 Diana Glenn (Satisfaction);

11 Daniel MacPherson (City Homicide);

12 Natalie Bassingthwaighte (So You Think You Can Dance Australia);

13 Bridget Taylor (The Gruen Transfer);

14 David Tennant (Doctor Who);

15 Adam Hills (Spicks And Specks);

16 Saskia Burmeister (Sea Patrol);

17 Tina Fey (30 Rock);

18 Olivia Wilde (House);

19 Wil Traval (All Saints);

20 Karen Tso (Nine news);

21 Janice Petersen (SBS news);

22 Hamish Blake (Thank God You're Here);

23 Katherine Heigl (Grey's Anatomy);

24 Shelley Craft (Domestic Blitz);

25 Kristian Schmid (Sea Patrol);

26 Reuben Mourad (The Weather Channel);

27 Ben Damon (Seven sports);

28 Marcia Cross (Desperate Housewives);

29 Daniel Goddard (The Young And The Restless);

30 Marcus Graham (Underbelly).

Now to test The Westacott Hypothesis. We'll define "making it" as being in a show that attracts more than 1.1 million viewers. House, Spicks And Specks and The Gruen Transfer suggest a correlation but Spooks, Private Practice, Supernatural, 30 Rock, Satisfaction and SBS news do not.

Anyway, correlation is not the same as cause. It's possible House, Specks and Gruen are hits because of their brains rather than their beauty, while Penry-Jones, Walsh and Ackles might be counterproductive, as viewers consider them too gorgeous to be a plausible spook, GP or ghost hunter.

Last week, an epistle from the TV cranny listed the 10 most irritating people (TV-related). Nothing better than a good blast of exasperation at the boneheads and egotists. And, as the great Jose Mourinho, soccer boss and natty dresser, declared recently, “Even Jesus Christ wasn't liked by everyone. What hope is there for me?” So, you know, the boneheads probably won't pay the slightest bit of attention.

But fair's fair. There are people we like. There are people we are pleased to welcome into our homes day after day, week after week and year after year. We feel we know some of them better than we know family members and friends. There are people who cheer us up. There are fictional characters we identify with, or feel sorry for. We are decent people and we appreciate those who brighten our little lives or let loose the wuss in us. Herewith, the 10 most endearing people (TV-related).

1. Dr. House (Hugh Laurie). Horrible man. Hotshot doctor. Know-it-all, sociopath. Vindictive and moody as all get out. But a man who has said “Humanity is overrated” and “Reality is almost always wrong” can't be all bad. Millions watch him every week because he's actually adorable. Hopeless with women, awkward with children, and obviously a lonely, tortured soul.

2. Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein). Oh, that poor woman. Her clothes get tighter each season. You wonder how she can move in those pencil skirts and heels. You want to tell her, “Yes, you're skinny and you're hot. Quit worrying.” And then there's the endless taunts and tortured flirting from House. As when Cuddy said to House, “Do you have anything to add to this debate?” and House said, “Wilson's right, Foreman's wrong, your shirt is way too revealing for the office.” And House was hallucinating about having sex with her. Poor woman.

3. Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) on Glee . Track-suit wearing, bossy crank who controls the Cheerios cheerleading team. (According to Fox, she was named cheerleading coach of the decade by Splits magazine.) The blunt counterpoint to any niceness and joy in Glee . But, by heavens, a speaker of truth: “Not everyone's going to have the walnuts to take a pro-littering stance, but I will not rest until every inch of our fair state is covered in garbage. That's why I pay taxes. It keeps garbage men working so they can afford tacos. To feed their families.”

4. Jessica Hamby (Deborah Ann Woll) on True Blood . She's the most perfectly realized teenage character on TV. Made a vampire by Bill Compton, she both loves and loathes her new state. Swears a blue streak when annoyed. Alternately flirty and vicious with boys. On being told she was now a vampire, declared, “I can kill anybody I want, and there's an awful lot of people I'd like to kill.”

5. Amanda Lang. Puts up with mouthy multimillionaire Kevin “I'm just trying to scratch a living here” O'Leary on the utterly ridiculous Lang & O'Leary Exchange on CBC News Network. The woman is slumming on that thing. When she anchored The National recently and was obliged to do it standup style, the fingers on her left hand kept moving to and fro, to and fro. Only emphasized the awkwardness of the new format.

6. Deb Morgan (Jennifer Carpenter) on Dexter . A dame. Looks like she buys all her clothes at Wal-Mart and wears stuff straight from the dryer. Drops the F-word with aplomb. A true cynic: “When things are going good, that's God's way of saying to cover your ass. 'Cause it's about to get bit. Hard.” And we all know that Carpenter is married to Michael C. Hall, who plays Dexter. Cuteness in abundance.

7. Claire Martin. Actually sounds like she understands the weather stuff. A virtuoso with the arm ballet. Makes Pastor Mansbridge grin like a goof. If only they'd just let her do the weather for Canada, not the weather mini-factoids.

8. Chloe O'Brian (Mary Lynn Rajskub) on 24 . Computer geek and genius. Champion sulker. One withering glance from her and you're a puddle on the floor. As deadly with sarcasm as Jack Bauer is with a handgun. One time, that flibbertigibbet Kim (Jack's daughter) says to Chloe, “So how have you been doing?” Chloe says, “This morning I woke up with a guy in my bed that I doubt I'm ever going to see again, and one of my best friends just died in front of me. So, I guess, not that great.”

9. Erica Strange (Erin Karpluk) on Being Erica. The bad-luck babe. With jobs and with men. Not strange, though: utterly ordinary in the best way. An underachiever you want to succeed. You really, really want her to tell Dr. Tom (Michael Riley) to stop already with the quotations.

10 (tie). Pete and Penny. This is just me. Pete and Penny are two penguins who appeared recently on Animal House Calls on CP 24. Cutest couple of critters you've ever seen. Deserve their own show. Pronto.

Also airing:

Deck The Halls (CTV, 8 p.m.) is about "recently widowed Holly (Gabrielle Carteris), who returns to her home town with her eight-year-old son Ben (Josh Hayden) to start a new life and a new job at her father’s toy company. A mysterious co-worker (Stephen Culp), who her son thinks is really Santa Claus, teaches her the true meaning of Christmas.” Hey, it could happen.

Frontline: The Madoff Affair (PBS, 9 p.m.) is a repeat, but worth your time if you missed it. It’s a scathing look at how Bernard L. Madoff’s investment business managed to operate with little oversight and few questions. It was, of course, a Ponzi scheme of colossal scope that cost investors billions. As the program says, “Overnight, Madoff became the new poster child for Wall Street gall, greed and corruption.” A reminder that awfulness exists under our noses.

The TV drama 'House' features a painkiller-addicted loner who offers the fantasy to cure, or at least soothe, the various ills du jour that ail us.

Gregory House is a cantankerous, antisocial misfit riddled with imperfections – physical and otherwise – who is nonetheless successful and loved. Wouldn’t you like to be able to get away with that?

And wouldn’t you like to feel that no matter what ails you, no matter how rare, fatal, mysterious, or terrifying – whether it's your fault or not – someone will save you? That someone will appear, and with calm, methodical, playful, god-like omnipotence, see inside your body and mind, and heal any ill?

Sure you would. Probably now more than ever. And apparently, given that "House" is now the world’s most-watched television show, that’s what millions of people want too.

Of course, "House" is no "Baywatch." That show, broadcast in 142 countries, had an audience north of one billion viewers at its peak. No kind of salvation "House" offers can compete with salvation needed from the dangerous waves of Santa Monica, California, and offered by scantily clothed, dedicated lifeguards. (In case you weren’t one of those billion viewers, "Baywatch" is an ordinary tale about men and women who drive, run and roll around in the sand.)

But "House," watched by 82 million people last year in 66 countries, edged out "CSI" and "Desperate Housewives" to get the top spot, according to Eurodata TV Worldwide. And that’s no small thing in a year that recorded the highest U.S. TV viewership of all time. (Americans now spend an average of four hours and 49 minutes a day in front of the television each, or eight hours and 21 minutes a day on average per household.)

People are spending more of those couch hours on a TV drama featuring a painkiller-addicted loner, because more than anyone right now, the character of Gregory House (played by Hugh Laurie) offers the fantasy of curing, or at least soothing, the various ills du jour that ail us.

The dream of imperfection

No one can argue there’s an increasing focus on physical perfection, an ideal that mutates almost daily, and that diverts our time and energy from things that are actually meaningful and rewarding.

It’s not just that there’s the annoying, annual New Year focus on cleanses and short-lived, guilt-ridden exercise pledges. It’s not just that models are thinner than ever and Photoshopped into near oblivion. Or even that cosmetic surgery and procedures have become so ubiquitous the National Organization of Women has argued that Botox is an economic necessity for women, saying they can’t get or keep jobs without it. It’s that the daily chore of striving for physical perfection has become so mundane, we’ve stopped noticing that it’s taking over. Like white noise or chronic disease, the Sisyphean quest for physical perfection drains our energy and time, yet many of us hardly notice anymore.

Then there’s House. Unlike the more stylish junior doctors, Gregory House doesn’t wear anything special. Physically, let’s just say he’s good-looking, but he wouldn’t have made it onto "Baywatch." He’s an addict. He’s not sucking back wheatgrass juice or arriving late to meetings, fresh from the gym. He’s appropriately wrinkled for his age, rumpled and seemingly indifferent. Oh yeah, and he walks with a limp.

And with all that time on his hands -- time that many people spend trying to be pretty --- he actually saves lives.

Many of the "House" fans I know are women. And for them, House’s side-effect-free resistance to beauty’s pathology carries a special vicarious thrill. Most of us know in our hearts that there couldn’t be a female House, yet we can dream.

In fact, the female characters on the show don’t carry the same resistance to the beauty disease. They are smart and powerful, but they’re perfectly pretty in the makeup, hair and white teeth department. House's boss and love-interest Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), is arguably his peer, age-wise, yet much better maintained, as they say. Would you be surprised if you learned she’d had some cosmetic procedures? Not really, right? I look at her and feel all the anxiety I usually do about aging. Then I look at House and I relax.

It’s pure fantasy that I could get away with being a female equivalent of him – powerful yet disheveled -- but it’s an enjoyable one. And it distracts me from the frustration I feel about how much more time it must take Lisa Edelstein to get through hair and makeup.

The dream of eccentricity

House is often a jerk, and he gets away with it. Sure, it’s partly because he does actually care, is principled, and tends to keep his assaults prejudice-free. But he clearly hasn’t read or absorbed the contents of sensitivity training books, nor does he approach people with the kind of sterile respect that plagues corporate communications. He’s grumpy, he’s sometimes a bully, and he’s annoying.

His abrasiveness makes him more human and appealing than most characters on TV, and more attractive than perfection-seekers in real life. Who wants to watch Horatio on "CSI" (I acknowledge that a lot of people do, but I don’t.)

Characters and people with flaws are more interesting. And I’m not talking about the kind of "individuality" marketed by clothing retailers that actually leaves everyone looking the same. When House is grumpy, I feel relief: could I really just be irascible, I wonder, and somehow get away with it? It’s not that I fantasize about being mean. But I’d love to be irritable, or bluntly honest, and have people find me acceptable or even adorable instead of just bitchy.

The dream of salvation

Despite his flaws, House is god-like. He looks into the cells of ordinary mortals like you and me, and understands things too complicated for our human eyes to see. In this time of large-scale political and economic woes that are beyond the comprehension of most of us, a time when many people have lost faith in authorities to steer the course after too many egregious vices and crimes, House offers the answers of science. If you are one of the lucky ones to end up in his clinic, you can be saved.

"House" fills a similar role in the TV lineup that "Law & Order" once did. That show famously introduced chaos and disorder in the first two minutes, then restored order in the last two. No matter how immoral or amoral, unjust, disorderly, or sinful the crime, those detectives and district attorneys could send you off to bed at 10:59pm knowing that the world was safe, that you could believe in justice and institutions. In this age of swine flu and sub-prime mortgages, "House" provides cures for some ills, and distraction from others.

The dream of fantasy health care

It’s worth pointing out that in this age when not everyone enjoys health care, simply putting a hospital on screen is enough to make audiences salivate. It’s the same reason "General Hospital" is a popular daytime soap (and that characters in other soaps are often hospitalized for extended stays), that "Grey’s Anatomy," "ER," "Scrubs" and even "Nurse Jackie" do well: specialty medical care is aspirational. It’s hard to make a drama about schools popular, for example, because everyone has been through the system and most don’t want to go back. But to be tucked into a bed, surrounded by monitors and visitors and flowers….?

And House’s ward goes far beyond the usual hospital experience. I am Canadian, with access to unlimited taxpayer-funded medical care, and I drool over House’s exclusive enclave. I mean, how do you even access such a place – with its team of world experts focused entirely on you, its dimmed lighting and glass-enclosed offices, its endless supply of tests and machines? My clinic is much more like the one House sometimes works in to please Cuddy: my doctor is knowledgeable, but the waiting room is crowded, and the fluorescent lighting illuminates more worries than those I came in for.

The dream of status

It’s no coincidence that House is a boomer and a doctor. The show wouldn’t work if it was Gregory House, Rock Star. Nor would it work if House was 25 years old.
When those who are now middle-aged were picking career paths in high school (I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong) they didn’t tick the box next to celebrity stylist, "American Idol" winner or real estate developer as often as the younger set now does. Doctor and lawyer were the top picks. Sure, there are folks like Simon Cowell, Donald Trump and Mick Jagger. And sure, lots of young people still want to be doctors. But House has the boomer fantasy job.

So until another show comes along that provides balm for our everyday ailments -- anxiety, perfectionism, poverty, confusion, fear, weariness and sickness – "House" will continue to make the most house calls.

On the show "House," Hugh Laurie plays the titular character, a cynical doctor with an unconventional outlook on life and medicine. But according to the description from this DVD (likely written by a four year old armed with an English to Chinese to English dictionary), he is simply "the character of cynical doctors, a never believe anyone in particular." And there's more where that came from -- the whole back of the box is chock full of Engrish gems. (via Buzzfeed)