TV Preview: 'House' a Home Run, 'Grey's' Dark Matters

A tale of two medical dramas....

Despite my consistent admiration for Hugh Laurie's brilliant work in the title role, I've been only an intermittent viewer of "House" the last couple of seasons, having grown somewhat weary of the medical procedural format. (For starters, I could barely get my health insurance to approve an MRI for a sore shoulder; these guys think nothing of running about a million dollars worth of tests every week, just for the hell of it.)

All that disappears, however, during the excellent two-hour season premiere on Sept. 21, with Laurie's Dr. House doing time in a mental-health facility for his painkiller addiction and running into an equally formidable adversary in the form of the Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital's administrator (guest Andre Braugher). Although House plots to bend his keepers to his will, the two hours explore the character in a compelling way and showcase some of the best acting you're apt to see on television this year.

It's an extraordinary departure, the sort of creative lark (inasmuch as other series regulars go largely unseen) in which established procedurals occasionally indulge, but seldom this well.

A few days later, "Grey's Anatomy" returns, having painted itself into an unfortunate corner in last spring's cliffhanger, which left both George (T.R. Knight) and Izzie (Katherine Heigl) hovering near death, less in the service of drama than backstage shenanigans about who would be leaving the series. (It remains to be seen whether "The Ugly Truth" will scare Heigl straight, as it were, but it's no secret that she'll be hanging around at least for a little while.)

Without giving too much away otherwise, the episode's highlight comes when the doctors indulge in a bout of gallows humor that finds them laughing uncontrollably over all the improbable things that have happened to them in a short span of time. Of course, that also exposes the fact that "Grey's" has indulged in too many plot twists that border on the absurd, in part driven by what appears to be a potentially unhealthy amount of off-screen angst.

There are still fine moments in the premiere -- primarily courtesy of Chandra Wilson and Sara Ramirez -- and there's an introduction of some corporate hospital politics that the program could certainly use, if only to take some of the focus off A) death; B) chronic bed-hopping; and C) marriages, or the lack thereof.

For the most part, though, "Grey's" feels like a cautionary tale about where a good show can go bad. That likely won't prevent the series from running successfully several more seasons, but even so, some new cast additions can't arrive fast enough, since this is a series that needs help, stat.