The Best TV Shows on TV – TV’s Moments of Joy: Good Thing I Brought My Axe-Cane!

So, what made us happy on TV this week?

House – Our favorite medical drama broke format this week with a huge episode.  Hospital administrator (and House’s girlfriend) Lisa Cuddy was admitted as a patient with masses on her kidneys.  She spent most of the episode near death, with House trying to hide just how badly he was freaking out.  Besides some great performances, the episode also gave us a series of fantasy sequences, casting the House characters in other genres.  There was a sitcom (complete with laugh track) that just happened to cast House as a bowling-shirted bad role model, which was awfully timely.  House and Cuddy recreated the last scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and House fought zombies (“Good thing I brought my axe-cane”) in a scene that perfectly mimicked some of Bruce Campbell’s Evil Dead movies.  But the best was easily the musical number that came near the end.  Choreographed by Mia Michaels, Hugh Laurie and Lisa Edelstein put a dark spin on “Come on, Get Happy”, and it was amazing.  Laurie sort of invoked a Cabaret-era Joel Grey, which just proves once again that he can do absolutely anything.  It was stunning and led us into a scene that had us thinking briefly that Cuddy had died.  Happily, she survived.  Unhappily, (SPOILER WARNING) she found out that House started taking Vicodin again, and they broke up.  It was absolutely devastating, and trying to imagine what this is going to do to House, who was only staying clean because of their relationship.  Going into the season’s third act, things look grim.  But that aside, this episode proves that after all these years, House is still one of the best shows on TV.