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A dry erase board sits erect, backlit by a lightly shaded window overlooking the grounds of Princeton Plainsboro Hospital. On the white background of the board, haphazardly scribbled in blue marker, is a makeshift tally reading House vs. God.' This, of course, is a trick. House is God.

Going on four seasons now, Dr Gregory House has stuck his cane in the eye of people's expectations of what a medical drama should be. He isn't the nice guy doctor who puts his patient's feeling before his own or who worries over the morality of his deeds. No, House is an altogether different kind of doctor. He is rude, vulgar, blasphemous, and brilliant. His dark humor and unconventional approach give House something people aren't use to seeing on television, a character of real depth who exudes a host of heroic and anti-heroic ideals (wisdom, ingenuity, and unyielding defiance in the name of his principles) and still manages to offend virtually everyone around him. Even those who have known him the longest, his best friend Wilson, his boss Cuddy, and his team, are still continuously shocked by House's bizarre methods.

Part of what makes House so unique is how he draws upon a wealth of knowledge from all areas of life, not just the medical, in diagnosing his patients. In this way, House can be compared to a modern Sherlock Holmes, both unconventional in their time and sharing between them an obsessive need for uncovering the facts. House has shown an uncanny grasp of all subjects ranging from language to religion to a staggering knowledge of flora and fauna the world over, just like Holmes in his time who could tell where a person had been by the color of the dirt on his shoe. Even his reliance on Vicodine mirrors Holmes' own habit of recreationally shooting up with cocaine whenever he grew bored in between cases.

One of House's greatest appeals, and at the same time the source of much of his offensiveness, is his unrelenting atheism. In other shows, it is almost considered taboo for the protagonist to be an atheist. And even if they start out this way, it never lasts. Atheistic characters are always experiencing religious phenomena somewhere along the line which usually forces them into at least an ambiguous sense of religiosity. But not House. The subject of religion is anything but a forbidden subject to the in your face' personality of the cane-wielding doctor. He has gone toe to toe with Christian nuns, fanatical evangelicals, even orthodox Jews and met them on an equal

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