Good post over at The Culture Beat about the spiritual undertones of House, a popular TV medical drama. The show's protagonist is an atheist, who

doesn’t believe in the vaguely benign and ill-defined god of American civil religion and, therefore, sees no reason to engage in the ritual pieties associated with that belief: optimism for its own sake, platitudinous talk about death, etc. Like Thomas Hardy, House thinks that if there is a “higher power” it’s, at best, indifferent to our fate and, thus, ritual appeasement is a waste of time.

Because, not despite, of this, “House” is where you will find the most thoughtful discussions of faith and morals on the tube. Instead of sentimental tripe, we see honest and consistent disbelief confronting a fairly portrayed opposite. And, disbelief usually loses.

The post goes on to elaborate on that claim; go check it out.

I've watched the show a few times (my wife likes it, and besides, the character House is the same guy who played Bertie Wooster in Jeeves and Wooster--who could resist that?), but now I'll have to watch it more carefully with an eye towards this sort of thing. In my opinion, most of the spirituality bantered about on network TV is of the annoyingly shallow and generic variety, and so I've trained myself to more or less ignore it. But maybe House has something more to offer in that respect.