Lacking cable, satellite and antenna connections, I don’t watch TV. Does this make me morally superior? Probably.

While you’re watching “Dancing Idols” and “Desperate Mentalist,” I’m  potentially rereading the classics and taking violin lessons. Or perhaps merely renting great movies. None of that network rot for me.

That was the idea. Then “House M.D.” came along. I got hijacked.

This popular medical detective series is about to start its sixth season on Fox, but I hadn’t heard of it until a couple of months ago when a friend suggested I check it out.

“House” sounded like an obscure show on a bottom-tier cable network. Little did I know that last year it was the most-watched TV show on the planet.

 Our Summer of House started innocently enough with a single DVD rental from Netflix. I was blown away. Spewing withering sarcasm and jaw-dropping political incorrectness, Dr. Gregory House was the baddest dude I’d ever seen on TV.

With his amazing powers of inductive reasoning, Dr. House bore more than passing resemblance to Sherlock Holmes. I’ve always loved Holmes. Ergo, I loved House.

Shows follow a predictable pattern. A patient is admitted with dire symptoms. A cascade of medical calamities ensues. House and his team of abused subordinates race to keep up. Diagnoses fly like bullets, symptoms worsen, all appears lost ... until House plucks the true explanation from his encyclopedic mind.

The Hugh Laurie character is socially deranged. He combines the genius of an Einstein with the impulse control of a 3-year-old asked to share a sandbox for the first time.

One DVD led to another. Soon Cheryl and I were binge watching. As many as two, even three episodes a night. Dinner done, we’d jump on the couch and become “House” zombies.

Cheryl is the lead zombie, despite her professed aversion to House’s flamboyant pill-popping addiction to Vicodin and plots that have grown ever more outlandish.

She’s hooked on the medical mysteries, treating “House” like a game show. As each mind-twisting episode unfolds, she shouts out her best guesses at a diagnosis. Over 80 episodes, she’s beaten House to the punch twice.

It’s hard to have a high batting average when the reason behind a patient’s deadly condition turns out to be an exotic worm, a Brazil nut or a one-in-a-million genetic oddity.

Cheryl likes the show’s computer-generated imagery of exploding organs and toxins on the march. I tend to look away. This is way too much medical information.

I also avert my eyes when patients change color, leak blood from every conceivable orifice and convulse spectacularly.

No matter what is going on, House can be relied upon to shred patients and coworkers with comments about their ethnicities, derrieres, sex lives. His skewerings are brilliant, absolutely brilliant, in the way that a drill sergeant’s expletives can approach a rough form of literary greatness.

I cackle at House’s verbal audacity. Jonathan cackles with me. Though surrounded by cackling males, Cheryl is conspicuously quiet. Enough with the verbal muggings. She wants more symptoms.

We’ve blown the entire summer with “House.” Without realizing it, we’ve become TV people.

When Tuesday night’s Napa City Council meeting got out early, I raced home and asked Cheryl if we had time to squeeze in an episode. Faster than you can say “differential diagnosis,” we had the DVD queued up.

Per usual, the episode opened with a big production scene, in this case a Hassidic wedding. During the frenzied dancing, the bride collapsed. The medical mystery had begun.

At one point, Cheryl shouted out, “What about the thyroid?”

Nope. Not the thyroid.

As the show wound down and the patient was being wheeled into surgery, House had one of his nick-of-time insights. He lifted the woman off the gurney and squeezed her hard. Her symptoms stopped.

House’s diagnosis: The woman had been born with dangling kidneys. They had been shaken lose during the wedding dance. His hug returned them to their proper spot.

Cheryl groaned. She had been thinking kidney. “I should have shouted it out,” she said.

Kevin can be reached at 256-2217 or Napa Valley Register,  P.O. Box 150, Napa 94559 or kcourtney@napanews.com