Dr. House is quirky, intelligent, mean, controlling, gruffy, and somehow nice. At times. Hugh Laurie is an amazing actor, whom I've followed since his Black Adder days, and it is very interesting indeed to see him in this type of role.

Right now Swedish TV-channel 4+ is in the middle of a early evening, four times a week re-run of the very first episodes of House and it has been great to see how it all started (which I missed when the show was sent for the first time here in Sweden).

I usually don't like people who are like House, but I think the reason why (apart from the fact that it's fiction) I somehow like this character is because he has an overarching goal I can sympathize with: he wants to save lives. With a goal like that it's easy to be seen as a boring do-gooder, a naïve idealist who, like Don Quijote, might end up fighting windmills, and this would probably not result in good television. By being the way he is, House somehow fights anyone's notion of him as a genuinely good man. This show certainly has good script writers.

Image from Fanpop.