The Fall Lineup

If you follow Fox's hit TV show House, and I know you do, then you could recite the premise in your sleep: Hugh Laurie's character is a drug addict and a sarcastic bully, but also an impossibly good doctor, so it's cool. This is an okay concept for a TV show, but if I were a television producer, we'd see a version of House in which House is not only a huge jerk, but also desperately incompetent.

As formulaic as the original show is, I think it would respond well to this tweak in its underlying plot. Indeed, I can see it now. House cows the other doctors into accepting his ignorant diagnoses. House manipulates patients into unnecessary surgery. House performs countless small cruelties in service of his pet theories -- but they never amount to anything more than cruelty. And when the patients ultimately don't get better, an unrepentant House throws the blame on someone else. House makes smug wisecracks throughout, but here they just sound pathetic and hollow.

Eventually the viewers would begin to wonder why the hospital didn't just fire House, but thematically the answer is clear: They're all afraid of him. This could be made explicit (House has some power of blackmail, or perhaps they don't know what a junkie like him might do) or just be a timid unwillingness to contradict such a self-assured person.

This could play as a black comedy, and a lot of the humor would be derived by contrast with the "real" House, but I think a tragedy would be more powerful. Sure, it would be hard to write a serial tragedy, and viewers might rebel at the enormous injustice. But I think we've all seen enough genius doctors, enough medical miracles, and enough, well, justice on TV to last us into the next century.