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House is a fine, quite entertaining show, and we're glad that it's made it to a second-season order. Still, we can't say its success is an unqualified good, if it means its Lisa Edelstein will be kept so busy playing the elegant, unruffled Lisa Cuddy that she won't have time to work in a few portrayals of neurotic blind dates elsewhere.

Look, don't get us wrong. We're happy that House has ended Edelstein's streak of show-killing, having littered the landscape with the corpses of Almost Perfect, In The Loop, and Leap Of Faith. And Cuddy is a great part. She's the hospital Chief of Staff governing Hugh Laurie's titular Dr. Gregory House, who is that TV staple: a complete pain in the ass who has the good fortune of being so brilliant that everyone puts up with his shit, of which there is pa-lenty. And since she's the female boss of a male authority-flouter, it would be easy for the producers to write a Cuddy who is reduced, by House's insubordinate shenanigans, to helpless hysteria. Instead, Edelstein's Cuddy is consistently irritated by House, and yet never lets him get the better of her, thus earning his grudging respect. Plus she gets to wear some extremely cute outfits -- both beautifully tailored business suits and the occasional crisp tennis whites or preppy golf togs. Nothing could ever make us yearn for another job when we'd have to wear pantyhose on a regular basis, but Cuddy's smart wardrobe has caused us to consider assembling a Cuddy costume for Hallowe'en.

But, good as Edelstein is at embodying a perfectly turned-out consummate professional like Cuddy, we first became aware of her in her many performances as nightmare girlfriends and dates. Like Maura Tierney, Edelstein is just as assured working in comedy as she is in drama, and her comic roles -- on shows like Sports Night, Mad About You, Cybill, The Larry Sanders Show, Ned & Stacey, Conrad Bloom (speaking of show killers), Partners, Grapevine, Grosse Pointe, and Miss Match, and in movies like What Women Want and Daddy Day Care -- often require her to play women scorned, generally for being crazy-ass bitches. On Frasier, Edelstein played Caitlin, the free-spirited artist who ended one date with Frasier by coming out with her head shorn, planning to use the clippings to stuff a pillow. In Keeping The Faith, she was the hyper-exercised set-up for Ben Stiller's Rabbi Jake (the one who listed "jogging" as a skill on her résumé) who begged him to punch her in the stomach, and later had to be bodily shoved out of a cab in order for Jake not to be dragged upstairs to her apartment with her (and given that she worked out a lot and he...was four foot three, the notion that he might be overpowered by a woman wasn't so outlandish). On Seinfeld, she was Karen -- together enough to disparage George's oral technique (giving him "the tap"), and to kick him out of her bedroom without his glasses. Still, Karen only gets partial sanity credit. She did date George.

Not all the girlfriends Edelstein's played are crazy: her recurring role as Lauren on Felicity -- who got pregnant from a one-night stand with Scott Speedman's Ben -- made her a serious relationship stumbling-block for our adorable lead couple, but she wasn't nutty enough about the situation to cut off all her hair over it or anything. Edelstein had also played elegant professionals before Cuddy: Laurie on The West Wing, in fact, was so smooth that Rob Lowe's Sam didn't know that, in addition to being a law student, she happened to be a call girl (since she was classy enough to throw him a freebie).

Will Cuddy obliterate any chance Edelstein has of playing entertainingly cracked love interests? Maybe -- her sleek, savvy confidence seems so unshakeable that we won't be able to forget her new onscreen persona when she tries to play against that type. On the other hand, the offscreen Edelstein isn't so polished that she can't fall victim to the occasional nip slip. Which, frankly, is kind of a relief.