Ellen Gray: House is the TV doctor you can trust

HOUSE. 8 tonight, Channel 29.

TRUST, I'VE lately come to realize, is the most important part of the doctor show-viewer relationship.

More important than bedside manner. More important even than the steady supply of diseases and conditions only the worst hypochondriacs - or most imaginative TV writers - can summon up.

Trust is why I still watch Fox's "House" with little or no groaning over its far-fetched plots - which nearly every week have highly trained doctors ransacking patients' homes - even as I continue to roll my eyes at the junior-high maneuvers on ABC's "Grey's Anatomy."

Let me be the first to say this isn't fair. They may have catfights in the Seattle Grace cafeteria and, yes, they spend more time in the on-call room having sex than they do sleeping, but when was the last time any of those "Grey's" surgeons actually committed a burglary?

They're mostly too busy locking lips to be picking locks.

And yet I don't trust them, or the people who write for them.

It's not as if their Fox counterparts are immune to the kissing disease: Two weeks ago, Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) planted a big one on his boss, Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), and if the Phillies and Barack Obama hadn't both had pretty big wins since, this might actually have qualified as news.

On another show, such an encounter could be a misstep, and this one may turn out to be one, too.

But I've come to trust the writers at "House" not to have people play kissy-face just because they're bored, though boredom, or the fear of it, appears to be at the heart of nearly every close encounter on "Grey's" and its even more libidinous spin-off, "Private Practice."

I've also come to trust the "House" writers to put the patient, if not first, then at least close enough to the center of the action to not be forgotten. And tonight's episode, in which "House" stretches the definition of "house call" to the breaking point to treat an agoraphobic, is no exception.

House and Cuddy may have some issues to work out, but if that's your loved one in the bed, he or she has nothing to worry about.

Or nothing more than anyone with a devastating and mysterious condition for which only Dr. House can find a cure does.

Patients do die from time to time on "House," but they have a gratifying way of staying dead, something I've come to appreciate after one too many return visits by "Grey's" resident specter, Denny Duquette (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who popped up only last week, as much a harbinger of sweeps as NBC's Ann Curry climbing Kilimanjaro for the "Today" show.

With all due respect to "Six Feet Under" and "The Ghost Whisperer," dead people don't belong on television.

And certainly not on "Grey's Anatomy," which last week had interns and residents fighting over unclaimed corpses in a manner that should have disturbed ABC execs a lot more than anything related to the show's aborted lesbian romance.

If we must see dead people, it's probably best handled the way "ER" does it this week (10 p.m. Thursday, Channel 10).

For all the fuss being made about a flashback appearance by Anthony Edwards as the late, lamented Mark Greene, the episode is more about the most recent of his many successors, Cate Banfield (Angela Bassett), and why she hardly ever smiles.

It's sad, and a little sweet, and if it adds little to our understanding of a beloved former character, it at least does nothing to tarnish his memory. *

Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.