How TV Has Turned Me Into a Sadist

I hope she dies.

Don’t worry, I’m not talking about someone real. And what I’m actually talking about is why I love single-story media like books and movies so much more than I’ll ever love series media like TV, despite the way I get obsessed with TV shows. Which I’m going to illustrate by explaining who she is and why, although I like her, I really hope she doesn’t live past tomorrow night.

(In other words, yes, I promise there’s actual general sort-of-analysis of narrative and medium after all the crazy fan stuff!)

POTENTIAL  SPOILERS FOR THE SEASON FINALE AND ACTUAL SPOILERS FOR THE REST OF THE SEASON AFTER THE CUT FOR YOU-PROBABLY-KNOW-DARN-WELL-WHAT (what else do I even read/watch that might have spoilers?)

So… next week is the season finale of House. And, yes, that’s a pig flying through the snowflakes falling in Hell: I have read absolutely no spoilers (well, not on purpose… but I’ve guessed a couple from the promos). Warning for Americans: I have seen the Global promo, which you can take a gander at here. The Canadian promos are almost invariably more emotionally revealing than the US ones — another unsolved mystery of the natural world.

Anyway, for the rest of this to make sense, you need to know the following:

1) Much of this season of House has dithered about how House is in love with Cuddy, but she’s dating Lucas, one of his “only friends” (arg!), who is obnoxious because he only ever shows up to play plot retardant (as in, the opposite of catalyst) when The Powers That Be decide they need to draw something out for a few more episodes. Anyway, this thwarted romance makes House sad.

2) The sneak preview shows House looking very, very sad indeed. It’s strongly implied that Cuddy and Lucas are moving in together/getting engaged/becoming surgically connected as a pair of conjoined twins — i.e. that she may be out of House’s reach forever, and he’s just finding that out this episode.

3) Both promos show House and Cuddy working/arguing together in a collapsed building to help a female patient who may be trapped. Both promos emphasize how dangerous it is to be in a collapsed building with ominous words about how every choice could be your last/”a catastrophe turns into a deathtrap”, etc.

4) The Canadian promo shows Foreman making a “holy $%&@, this is both bad and shocking” face, and House screaming at him about how he couldn’t do anything and “she” died anyway.

So: here are two possibilities*. One, House is sad because Cuddy’s going to marry Lucas, and dead-“she” is the female patient, who is emotionally significant to him/them for some reason**. Two, House is still sad because Cuddy’s going to marry Lucas, but this time dead-“she” is Cuddy, who dies dramatically when their attempt to rescue the patient goes totally wrong.

Of course the story could have a lot of other complications and go tons of other ways, but I’m not really interested in how accurate my “predictions” are. If House can completely surprise me, good for the writers and performers and directors and crew. As I learned from the last episode, cool narrative devices can hold my attention no matter how silly the plot gets. My point here is this: if these are the only choices, I hope Cuddy dies.

Why? Despite the often-sexist plots that involve her, I do like Cuddy — enough to wish there’s some kind of happy ending in store for her — so if she’s gone next season, I’ll definitely miss her as a character, perhaps to the point of dropping the show. And while there are lots of trivial reasons I want her to die (if House gets screaming-upset, I want it to be about his relationship with a character I care that he cares about; I don’t really give a flying you-know-what about the survival of anyone without a title credit; if I have to watch Lucas stall various plots even more, I’ll scream), there are also  lots of not-so-trivial reasons I don’t want her to die (so… the only woman left on the show is Thirteen? And can we say “fridged“? Actually, we’d have to say “second powerful woman fridged on a season finale of this show”. Hey there, Amber!). But the biggest reason I have is pro-Cuddy-death: because if the patient bites it and the Cuddy-angst comes from impending nuptials, then all we have to look forward to over the summer is more drawn-out whining, aka this entire season, redux. But if Cuddy dies, then we get CHANGE, darnit!

In other words: patient dies = House angsts about heartbreak = same old plot from all season is now EVEN LONGER. But Cuddy dies = plot moves = FINALLY SOMETHING HAPPENS. There’s no way that life at Princeton-Plainsboro could be the same afterwards. (Last season, I would’ve said (and, in fact, did say) that it would change the whole story, but Cuddy has slowly been disappearing into the wallpaper. When she pops in for her token scene every episode, she might as well be wearing a sandwich board reading, “Hey! I’m still on this show! Don’t forget me!”)

And this is why I like single-shot books, movies, and plays better than series.

Yes, I admit there’s a bit of a leap from paragraph A to paragraph B. But here’s my logic: I am so frustrated by the glacier pacing of this plot that I’m actually rooting for the death of one of my favourite characters. Such pacing is endemic to television, due to the format of the medium. Let’s face it: we knew there were going to be no major developments until the season finale (or possibly the sweeps). About the only show-changer that’s happened mid-season is Cameron’s gone, and since she’s had, like, two lines per episode for the past couple seasons, so what? (It’s not like they could even be bothered to take her actress out of the title credits****.)

Contrariwise, books (and movies and plays, for that matter) don’t have the same temporal luxury. They have to be written with an end in sight. I’ve gone into this before, but except for certain genres (*cough*epicfantasy*cough*), stuff has to happen in books, and it can happen without the boring filler.

I admit it, if you space major events too densely on TV (every episode has something life-changing happen to the protagonist! Two characters kiss, make out, break up, reconcile, and get back together within a month’s worth of shows!), the story starts feeling like a soap opera***** or fanfiction, especially since part of the conceit of most TV shows is that we’re watching the characters in a roughly continuous timeline — last week’s episode depicted events that happened at most a week or two before the events depicted this week’s episode, and the most we’re ever going to jump into the future is the few months that get rid of the summer hiatus. The House writers can’t really insert a title card saying, “Five years later…”, in part because they can’t get their performers to age that fast, but also because that would feel like cheating.

But we’re more forgiving about time leaps in other media. One of the books I just read was a tense thriller… that took place over two to three years. But it was still fast-paced because the author had the liberty of saying things like, “[protagonist]’s next lead didn’t come until September…” and moving on from there. It’s not a cheat, because you’re allowed to do that in a novel, but it still eliminates the filler, or at least allows the author to condense it to a page or two describing how very bored or frustrated the character is. Similarly, it doesn’t feel like we’re being cheated when Shakespeare takes us from Leontes’s jealousy to Perdita’s marriage, or when Forrest Gump grows from boy to man. We know you can do that to time in a play, book, or movie, because we’re aware that the creators have a very limited amount of space to work with.

Series can condense time, too (hello, TV montages!), but not nearly as efficiently. The way I see it, series are about having all the time in the world (although things like networks, aging actors, ratings, etc. mean a TV show has to stop eventually, there’s no reason its story can’t go on forever) but stuck in a sort of present-like stasis, despite various plot points that occur. We watch TV shows or pick up open-ended (e.g. Nancy Drew rather than Harry Potter) series books precisely because we can expect more or less the same thing from every installment, with the same characters we’ve come to adore in the same sort of plot — the Seattle depicted in Frasier isn’t suddenly going to turn into a place where serial murders happen, aliens attack, or magic exists.

Contrariwise, single-shot stories are about having a very small amount of time to get a very large amount of change across. You can hold a paperback novel between your hands and read it in under a day — that’s a mighty small interval to go through Dorian Gray’s entire life or two whole generations of the Trask family or even an entire kingdom-winning war. And I guess change is what I like in stories. Change is conflict, it’s bad things happening to good people, it’s fresh conflict and character motivations and plot points! It’s everything that makes stories what they are!

So no hard feelings, Dr. Cuddy. If the finale turns out okay for you, great. But if not, well… it is a far, far better thing that you do, than this season has ever done; it is a far, far better hiatus that it goes to, than we have ever known.

Or maybe I should just spend more time at the Toronto Public Library.

* It says a lot about my level of cynicism that the other acceptable-in-that-we-are-finally-done-this-dragged-out-plotline possibility (plot stuff happens, Cuddy and House work out their issues either as a couple for-real-this-time or as friends again) seems more improbable to me than the tragic death of a major character.

** I swear, if “she” turns out to be some one-shot character about whom I didn’t care in the first place, brought back from a previous episode, like Lydia the mental-hospital chick***, I will punch someone. That’s right, maybe you. Through the Internet. Watch out.

*** Lydia the Goth girl who almost ends up in a forced marriage to Beetlejuice would be OK though.

**** Of course, it could be Cameron who somehow winds up in the crazy disaster building and gets fridged, which I guess would work. Actually, it’s sort of like having your cake and eating it, too, since she’s already “gone” and so nobody needs to worry about the practical dynamics of the show as written changing (the way they would have to, say, do some logical wrangling to figure out a new way for House to keep his job at the hospital and interact with his boss if Cuddy bit it), just the emotional fallout among the surviving characters. Hmmm…

***** Not that soap operas are bad stories. Heck, they’ve got pretty much the most numerous audience. People care about them tremendously. That’s a win.