One of the ways television has changed over the years is the way we watch it. When I was a child, we had three main networks, public television, and a handful of local stations on the UHF dial. Remember the UHF dial? Programs were on when broadcasters decided to air them: cartoons on Saturday morning and after school, news at 6 and 10 p.m., and situation comedies, dramas and even variety shows designed for mass appeal in the primetime hours in between. With the advent of watch-it- when-you-want-it television — starting with cable stations that broadcast, say, kids’ shows or sports or news all day long, and proceeding through iterations of various recording technologies — mass appeal went out the window. Now providers don’t have to find programming that will appeal to everyone; they just have to have programs that will appeal to someone. For lots of people, that means older shows that we once would have watched in syndication, if our schedule permitted. A Netflix subscription means that I can now work my way through the eight seasons of “House M.D.” that I never watched before, one at a time, while I run on the treadmill at the gym. I’m only in the first season, but each episode is just about the perfect length for a 45-minute run, and engaging enough to distract me the entire way. For those who don’t know, “House” stars Hugh Laurie as a doctor whose job it is to figure out what’s wrong with people when no one else can. He works with a team of three younger doctors as they cycle through possibility after possibility. Loosely based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (another favorite of mine), House is trying to solve the mystery of each patient’s illness rather than a crime. Like Holmes, he’s abrasive and an addict. The thing that strikes me about the show is how often House is wrong. In each episode, there are two or three wrong diagnoses that must be cast aside before the right diagnosis can be made. Sometimes he’ll even medicate a patient for the wrong disease, and let the patient’s poor reaction to the drugs lead him to the right answer. Let me put it this way: if it looks like House has come up with an answer before, say, the 35-minute mark, it’s wrong, or at least not the whole story. Sometimes, even if he finds the answer, the patient dies. That, I think, is the beauty of the show. The church is filled with saints who got it wrong before they got it right (hello, St. Paul), or who started right, went wrong and then came back to right (I’m looking at you, St. Peter). Unlike a television drama, we don’t have a set amount of time to figure it out. We just have to keep trying. And sometimes, even when you get it right, you don’t like the outcome. That’s when you remember there is a larger plan, and when you are one of the actors in the drama, you don’t always get it. You just keep trying.