“The decision to end the show now, or ever, is a painful one, as it risks putting asunder hundreds of close friendships that have developed over the last eight years,” said executive producers David Shore, Katie Jacobs and Hugh Laurie, “but also because the show itself has been a source of great pride to everyone involved.

The producers have always imagined House as an enigmatic creature;  he should never be the last one to leave the party.  How much better to disappear before the music stops, while there is still some promise and mystique in the air.”

Now’s as good a time as any for a post-mortem on one of the quirkiest, most interesting character shows of the last decade. “House’s” focus on a thoroughly unlikeable character was risky, and it paid off; the creators’ decision to make him a thoroughgoing atheist constantly at conflict with others subtly made the case for the bankruptcy of his ideology.  Or, at the very least, it offered philosophical contrast.

Most famously, “House” featured a very pro-life episode in 2007, “Fetal Position,” in which an unborn child reached out of the womb and touched House’s hand, mirroring the famous photograph. That was mirrored by a pro-choice episode that same season that made the case for abortion for a religious rape victim. That was House’s style.

When I interviewed Shore for my latest book, Primetime Propaganda, here’s what he told me about the abortion episodes: “As you can imagine, we’re in Hollywood, we’ve got our share of rabid left wing Democrats here. And … our writing staff has the makeup you’d basically expect of a Hollywood writing staff, and I remember when we were doing ‘Fetal Position,’ there is that image of that little finger of the fetus clasping Dr. House’s hand. And it was a powerful image. And we recognized at the time that’s going to go up on billboards and websites for pro-life organizations. But it was true, and it was accurate, and it was real. And the last thing I want to do is, I happen to be pro-choice, but the last thing I want to do is to give false information or convince people of my argument. I think that’s just not the way to approach things. It’s a difficult choice, and it is a difficult issue.  And I think treating it as anything different than that is dishonest and ultimately counterproductive.”

Shore’s honesty on politics meant that he admitted there was bias against conservatives in Hollywood. As he told me, “there is an assumption in this town that everybody is on the left side of the spectrum, and that the few people on the right, I think people look at them somewhat aghast, and I’m sure it doesn’t help them.” Those are the words of a truth teller. And in its own way, when it wasn’t burdened down with the typical hallmarks of leftist Hollywood (hot bisexuals, open marriages, and the like), “House” was a uniquely truth-telling show.

In the best drama category, the highly-acclaimed and perennial winner “Mad Men” will be facing some mildly tough competition. It will be up against HBO’s “True Blood,” Showtime’s “Dexter,” AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” ABC’s “Lost,” and CBS’ “The Good Wife.” Even though “Lost” just aired its final season, many expect that “Mad Men” will walk away with its third consecutive best drama award. Several of last year’s nominees for this category were snubbed this year (“House,” “Big Love,” and “Damages”) along with at least one departing show that had previously won this competition (“24”).   

In the best comedy category, there is a bit more competition for the other perennial winner “30 Rock.” “30 Rock,”,like “Mad Men,” has won its category’s top award since it premiered and already has three Emmy awards for best comedy. However, this year’s competition seems more exciting with three new series receiving nominations (“Nurse Jackie,” “Glee,” and “Modern Family”) along with “The Office” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Many television critics expect either freshman comedy “Glee” or “Modern Family” will take home the big award and end “Rock’s” winning streak but “30 Rock” still has a chance for another repeat win.

In terms of the lead acting categories for dramas, two new nominees have thrown more tough competition into the mix. I’ve been outspoken about my affection for the drama “Friday Night Lights” so I was excited to see Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton receive nominations for lead actor and actress in a drama. Chandler faces off against “Mad Men’s” Jon Hamm, “House’s” Hugh Laurie, “Dexter’s” Michael C. Hall, “Breaking Bad’s” Bryan Cranston, and “Lost’s” Matthew Fox. I haven’t seen all of the performances nominated but from my knowledge of the shows themselves, Chandler’s character seems to be the most realistic and down-to-earth one in the group and it would be nice if he was celebrated for his stellar work (although I have heard great things about Cranston’s performance on “Bad”).

In the lead actress in a drama category, there seems to be even stiffer competition and several of the actresses play extremely relatable and realistic characters. Britton will be facing off against “Mad Men’s” January Jones, “The Closer’s” Kyra Sedgwick, “Law and Order: Special Victim Unit’s” Mariska Hargitay, “Damages’” Glenn Close, and “The Good Wife’s” Julianna Margulies. Close has won this award for the past two years but some critics have suggested that Margulies will likely win for her role. (I’m rooting for Britton but I would be excited over a Margulies win as well.)

The lead acting nominations in the comedy categories showcase a wide variety of performances highlighting some well-known performers and a few welcome newcomers. Alec Baldwin (who has won for his performance on “30 Rock” for the past two years) will face “Curb Your Enthusiasm’s” Larry David, “Monk’s” Tony Shalhoub, “The Office’s” Steve Carell, “Glee’s” Matthew Morrison, and “The Big Bang Theory’s” Jim Parsons. I have seen each of these actors in their respective roles and it seems like Parsons should have a strong chance in this category for his vibrant portrayal of Sheldon Cooper.

The lead actress in a comedy category features some several comedic actresses who have been recognized in the past. Toni Collette (“United States of Tara”) won in this category last year. The previous year, Tina Fey won for her role on “30 Rock.”  Additionally, Julia Louis-Dreyfus (who was nominated for “The New Adventures of Old Christine” this year) previously won for her work on “Seinfeld.” The remaining nominees in this category are “Park and Recreation’s” Amy Poehler, “Nurse Jackie’s” Edie Falco and “Glee’s” Lea Michele. This category could go to Collette or Fey but I have read some positive stuff about Falco’s performance so she could also pull a win out here.

The supporting actor in a drama category has some strong competition as well. “Mad Men’s” John Slattery will be facing “Damage’s” Martin Short, “Breaking Bad’s” Aaron Paul, “Lost’s” Terry O’ Quinn, “Men of a Certain Age’s” Andre Braugher, and “Lost’s” Michael Emerson. The supporting actress nominees for a drama include “Mad Men’s” Christina Hendricks, “Damages’” Rose Byrne, “The Good Wife’s” Archie Panjabi, “Burn Notice’s” Sharon Gless, “Mad Men’s” Elisabeth Moss, and “The Good Wife’s” Christine Baranski. There are a lot of strong performances in these two categories so both will be very competitive and hard to predict.

Another category that will likely not be hard to predict is best supporting actress in a comedy. In that category, “Glee’s” Jane Lynch will be going up against five other actresses who will likely lose to the villainous cheerleading coach. However, if this category has an upset, Lynch could lose to “30 Rock’s” Jane Krakowski, “Saturday Night Live’s” Kristen Wiig, “Modern Family’s” Sofia Vergara, “Modern Family’s” Julie Bowen, or “Two and a Half Men’s” Holland Taylor. In the supporting actor in a comedy category, “Modern Family’s” Jesse Tyler Ferguson will face “Glee’s” Chris Colfer, “Two and a Half Men’s” Jon Cryer, “Modern Family’s” Ty Burrell, “Modern Family’s” Eric Stonestreet, and “How I Met your Mother’s” Neil Patrick Harris. Like my support for Parsons, I would be really excited if Neil Patrick Harris won for the uniquely funny character he has brought to life.

Overall, with Jimmy Fallon hosting the Emmys, it should be a fun night to celebrate television. Although some past winners will likely win major awards, there will likely be some surprises and there could be a few great acceptance speeches as well.

I can’t wait to watch.

But at least House is well-written. It’s also a relatively balanced show, even though House himself is an open atheist.  For example, Season Three of House featured two abortion episodes: “Fetal Position,” which was so pro-life that it included a mockup of the famous image of a baby’s hand holding an operating doctor’s; and “One Day, One Room,” an episode in which House convinces a raped patient to have an abortion.  Despite the show’s overall liberal tilt (see Wilde, Olivia), there is at least an attempt to be evenhanded.

Not so with Lie to Me, the House knockoff starring Tim Roth as Cal Lightman.  It’s just as formulaic, and the writing isn’t as good – but more than that, the writing has become incredibly biased.  Aside from the repeated snide references to President Bush and constant barrages of mini-rants straight from the Joy Behar playbook, two of the last three episodes have been blatantly leftist to an obnoxious extent.  

First there was “Secret Santa,” in which the show took on the war in Afghanistan.  Essentially, one of the characters had been a recruit for a secret American agency.  Captured in Afghanistan, he was converted to the Taliban.  He is the sympathy player in the piece; at the end of the episode, he redeems himself by saving US soldiers.  The villain of the piece is the Bush Administration, which supposedly abandoned this traitor to his fate in Afghanistan.  

This simply belies the facts.  The American citizens who go to fight with the Taliban aren’t captured Americans – they’re generally American volunteers like John Walker Lindh.  They’re Muslims who think they’re fighting for the ummah when they join up with Sharia law thugs.  They’re not rogue Americans pushed to the brink by President Bush. 

But “Secret Santa” was just a prelude to the climax of the season: “Tractor Man.”  In this episode, those of us who oppose federal overreach are raked over the coals.  The villain in this one is a disappointed taxpayer who wants to bomb US government buildings as revenge for the government’s destruction of his farm.  

This sort of leftist tripe isn’t uncommon on Lie to Me.  The pilot episode featured a Democratic Congressman suspected of picking up prostitutes – it turns out that he’s innocent, and that the prostitute in question is his daughter.  He offers to resign his position in order to protect her.  Meanwhile, in the same episode, a religious boy is suspected of murder.  Turns out he wasn’t a murderer – he was just masturbating over a dead body.  Terrific. 

The second episode of the series, “Moral Waiver,” had a staff sergeant threatening a female subordinate with dangerous assignments in order to get her to give him sex.  

Even the first season finale, “Sacrifice,” which did have al Qaeda as the bad guys, had Lightman spouting Obama talking points about pressuring terrorists for information, including that old tripe about American interrogation methods providing a training tool for terrorists (as though they would be less likely to join up if we read them their Miranda rights).  We also get the CAIR talking points, with an imam lecturing us about how horrible law enforcement is for the Muslim community, and the dastardly FBI secretly bugging the mosque.  

In short, Lie to Me is leftist agitprop masquerading as entertainment.  It doesn’t try to hide its agenda, and it doesn’t try to present both sides of an argument.  It is unabashedly Garafalo-esque.  That could be one reason it has slipped dramatically in the ratings.  Its first three episodes averaged 12-13 million viewers.  The pilot finished #8 for the week.  The most recent series finale averaged half that, with 6.59 million viewers. 

That’s a good thing.  When entertainment is infused with liberalism, Americans will watch.  When entertainment is discarded in favor of liberalism, Americans tune out.  It’s about time the creators of Lie to Me learned that lesson.

Last week’s episode of the Fox Network medical-mystery series House included a Big Event meant to shock the show’s viewers and send the story line in an interesting new direction, as one of the main characters of the series was killed. As it happens, the show’s fans figured out exactly who it would be, several days in advance of the program’s airing, as the kind of public conversation the Internet makes so easy enabled a mass pooling of information and instant critiquing of same.

This almost instantaneous accumulation and processing of information makes the web something of a superbrain. Yes, figuring out the plot twists of television shows may not be the most productive use of people’s time and brainpower, but this somewhat frivolous achievement does indicate the impressive potential of the Internet as a mass information processing tool.

This capability makes the Internet simultaneously a potential source of astonishing public benefits and the most powerful generator of nonsense ever created.

An interesting side note (plot spoiler follows): Entertainment Weekly revealed the morning after the show aired that Kal Penn, who played the character who died in the episode, will be leaving the show to join the Obama administration as associate director in the White House Office of Public Liaison.

I have no idea what that particular agency is, but I’m quite sure it’s a good deal less useful than an entertaining TV mystery series.

—S. T. Karnick

Life’s episode “Initiative 38″ has a fairly unbelievable plot: a woman working on an initiative to ban handguns is murdered and there is one major suspect, P&K, a gun company. Here is some of the dialogue:

Detective Charlie Crews (Damian Lewis): We are saying that someone came here to kill your wife. Can you think of who that might be?

Harold Amis: Yes, I can. Initiative 38.

Woman who works for Initiative 38: Initiative 38 is a comprehensive ban on handguns. Lisa was working to get it passed.

Detective Seever (Crews’ partner): How comprehensive?

Woman who works for Initiative 38: We were working to take back our streets.

Seever: Getting any push back from the gun companies?

Woman who works for Initiative 38: Getting push back? Ya, there was a lot money coming in against us from the other side. From P&K guns. I didn’t think that they would do this though. Lisa was the face of Initiative 38.

Seever: Lisa Amos is the face of Initiative 38. If that passes, P&K guns gets hit hard.

On the one side, the show notes all the carnage from guns being used to kill people. The only argument offered for guns is that they produce jobs for those who make them and that guns are the one manufactured product left that we can produce cheaper than China.

Of course, there is no mention of defensive gun use and that guns are used to stop crime about 4 to 5 times more frequently than they are used to commit it. No mention that while police are extremely important in stopping crime (indeed, my research shows them to be the single most important factor), the police themselves understand that they virtually always arrive on the crime scene after the crime is committed. Obviously, the question of what victims should do when they are facing a criminal by themselves is ignored.

The notion that gun makers, which are fairly small companies, are going to donate a lot of money to defeat an initiative as the episode suggests is also fairly unbelievable. The donations to defeat such initiatives would tend to be a lot of very small donations from people who care about being able to defend themselves and their families and the principle of self-defense.

“House” often goes after gun ownership. It only mentions people not having health insurance more frequently. In the episode “Simple Explanation,” Kutner (Kal Penn) commits suicide with a gun. There is all the normal dialogue about how he probably bought the gun for self defense and instead used it to commit suicide.

For those interested, the National Academy of Sciences released a 2004 report that comprehensively reviewed academic research studying guns and suicide. The panel set up under the Clinton administration surveyed the extensive literature from public health, economics, and criminology. The Academy concluded that, “Some gun control policies may reduce the number of gun suicides, but they have not yet been shown to reduce the overall risk of suicide in any population.” The point is that there are a lot of ways to commit suicides, and you would pretty much have the same rate of suicide even if guns disappeared tomorrow.

However, I would argue that there isn’t even a lot of evidence that gun bans or gun lock laws reduce gun suicide rates.

Kal Penn was killed off in the show so that he could go work for the Obama administration. It is probably somewhat appropriate that he got killed off in a way that provided a politically correct lesson for viewers.

Kal Penn’s character killed himself on “House.” Kal Penn didn’t commit career suicide by accepting a job in the Obama administration. Penn is merely taking Tinseltown’s love of politics to another level. While it’s not unprecedented for the stars of B-movies to find themselves in the White House, it certainly is unusual. Political activism didn’t hurt the careers of Oscar winners Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, and George Clooney. Their Oscars might be seen as recognition of that activism. After all, their awards came as a result of performances in rather politicized films. If Kal Penn felt typecast as a player in raunchy college comedies, he should have no such worries after his sojourn in Washington, DC. He will be a celebrity among celebrities. Roles will be there for the taking. Just watch: the critical acclaim that escaped him in ”Van Wilder” will have no trouble finding him, and Harold will be wishing that he had followed Kumar to the White House.

Penn, best known for his roles as Kumar Patel in the “Harold & Kumar” movies and most recently as Dr. Lawrence Kutner on the television series “House” told EW.com that he will be associate director in the White House office of public liaison.

“They do outreach with the American public and with different organizations. They’re basically the front door of the White House,” Penn said. “They take out all of the red tape that falls between the general public and the White House. It’s similar to what I was doing on the campaign.”

The Chicago Sun Times reports that Penn will be working with the Asian-American and arts communities. His start date is unknown. The office is run by senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett.

Penn was among many celebrities backing Barack Obama in his presidential campaign, and he spent a lot of his personal time volunteering for the campaign. The actor acknowledged that he will take a significant pay cut. “There’s not a lot of financial reward in these jobs. But, obviously, the opportunity to serve in a capacity like this is an incredible honor,” he said. (First daughters Malia and Sasha are also reportedly fans.)

Yes, that pay cut will be tough to stomach for Penn, but Malia and Sasha love him!  He’s doing it for the children!

Incidentally, for fans of House, Fox has posted absolutely preposterous “memorial” website for Penn’s character in the show, who committed suicide in last night’s episode.  It features a photo of the “deceased,” an “obituary,” and a link where fans can bid farewell to the departed “doctor.”  How utterly bizarre and macabre.

Despite all the sit-downs Obama had with the Republicans – apparently too many for Speaker Pelosi’s tastes – and despite the fact that the House version of the Stimulus Bill contained specific tax breaks for which the Republicans had asked – though not to the degree they wished – not a single GOPer would break ranks, step up and vote for the bill.  A surprisingly “my way or the highway” attitude for the minority party whose eight years of good cogitating was a major factor in whipping America into the stellar fiscal shape we find ourselves.

When three Republican Senators voted for the Senate version of the bill – Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, and Maine Sens. Olympia J. Snowe and Susan M. Collins, who in particular worked tirelessly with moderate Dem Sen. Ben Nelson to try and reach a true bipartisan compromise – they were immediately put on a “hit” list by the conservative National Republican Trust PAC.  The PAC’s executive director Scott Wheeler stating: “We just want to send a message that we’re going to have a long institutional memory, and we’re going to remind your constituents of what you did.”

What they did?  What’d they do?  Vote for a bill that might ultimately not be big enough to get the country out of the worst economic mess most Americans have ever lived through?  Wouldn’t it be punishment enough to dis-invite them to some soirée held at South Carolina GOP chairman Katon Dawson’s whites-only country club?  To be fair, Dawson resigned his membership to the Forest Lake Country Club in Columbia, SC last September.  That was just a gratuitous dig I had to throw in because…I wouldn’t have been allowed into the club to hand it to him personally.  But to the point of Trust PAC’s tactics; sure, it’s not unusual for one political party to target another political party over a vote.  But for a party to head hunt their own…?

And then, of course, there’s Judd Gregg.  Never mind that Gregg himself lobbied for the job of commerce secretary, never mind New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch making a deal to appoint Republican J. Bonnie Newman to Gregg’s seat.  When it came time to engage in the greater good Gregg, in his own words, realized he could not be a “team player.”  Worse, working with the president he “couldn’t be Judd Gregg.”  Political solipsism if ever there was.  Gregg being something like the T.O. to the Senate.

Regardless of the Republicans’ centrist deceptions, I would hope that Obama continues to rise above and reach out.  Hopefully there will be others such as Specter, Snowe and Collins who put the people’s work above myopic party ideology.  But if nothing else, as the economy improves, President Obama’s actions will serve to shame the lip servers of bipartisanship into taking up true residence.

For more perspective, visit www.thatminoritything.com

Obviously the academic research shows that having an accessible gun in the home saves lives, but I had a more basic question: I decided to check to see if a question about guns was likely to lead the questions on one’s fitness to serve as a foster parent or to adopt a child. American Adoptions is licensed by the state of New Jersey to provide home study services for people preparing for adoption. Their home study guide has a lot of questions on a person’s criminal record (arrests and convictions), whether they have ever been reported for child abuse/neglect (seems more important than gun ownership), and marital status and history – but no questions about gun ownership.

It is surely not impossible that such a question would be asked, but making it the first of only two questions seems extremely unlikely and misrepresents what the actual process would involve (even taking into account that forms had already been filled out by Cuddy).

I recently noted that the TV show Monk had a great episode where Monk was unable to use a gun defensively because it was locked in a gun safe, but the very next episode had Monk’s assistant Natalie accidentally shooting Monk in the leg (the odds of that happening are incredibly low). The segment wasn’t all bad since it also showed Natalie protecting herself from a criminal threatening to hit her with a rock.