When the first episode of House aired, on this week in 2004, what we thought was good television was dramatically starting to shift. The West Wing was on its sixth season, The Wire was on its second. Mad Men was still three years away, Breaking Bad was four. Network TV was such a different beast to TV as we know it now: there were 24-odd episodes of House a season, meaning it would air once a week for about half a year. These days, it’s hard to think of a drama with more than eight episodes per season.
If you believe quantity lessens quality, it’s strange to watch House now and see how good it (mostly) remains – fast, sharp and often very funny, with a magnetic central performance by Hugh Laurie who, before House, was known for playing bumbling toffs in British comedies and the dad in Stuart Little. You can watch Laurie’s audition tape for House online (shot in a dark hotel bathroom in Namibia) and immediately see why he got the role; suddenly George from Blackadder was a caustic, unshaven doctor, spitting out medical jargon with a perfect American accent while maintaining a limp and a semi-permanent frown.
As Princeton-Plainsboro’s resident terror and head of diagnostics, Greg House specialises in solving the cases that stump other doctors (or “zebras”, medical slang for obscure diagnoses). He barely tolerates his young, ambitious team: Dr Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), Dr Eric Foreman (Omar Epps) and Dr Robert Chase (Jesse Spencer). He bullies and flirts with his boss, the dean of medicine, Dr Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), and fobs off work to hang out with his sardonic best friend, Dr James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard). House is damaged, both physically and emotionally: a past misdiagnosis has left him with a permanent limp, an opioid addiction and an endless appetite for self-destruction. With the occasional overdose, romance, dramatic death or new cast member, this is basically the plot for 177 episodes.
By 2008, House was the biggest television show in the world, watched by 81 million people. Laurie once said: “It’s such a densely verbal, idiomatic, very funny, intricate show – I cannot imagine what it’s like seeing it in Turkish.” Perhaps it worked because it occupied a strange new lacuna: it was a case-of-the-week ensemble procedural and a character study of a singularly complicated human being.
Greg House is miserable, wounded, obsessive, childish, churlish, self-loathing, confusingly sexy. His ability to spot a diagnosis dazzles and frustrates everyone around him; as one patient observes, “When you’re that big of a jerk, you’re either great or unemployed.” He’s a staunch atheist whose only dogma is rationality: he argues a rape survivor into getting an abortion, secretly offers a terminally ill child an early death if she wants it, and risks his medical licence to give his best friend chemotherapy at home. He hates his patients, but is drawn to the puzzles they present. He can be deeply cruel to those he loves and startlingly gentle with people he barely knows.
Sure, the medicine was often interesting – scurvy, bubonic plague, a condition called Alien hand syndrome which, frighteningly, actually exists – but if you’re watching House, you are watching for one guy only. “No one cares about the medicine,” House grouches in the final episode, which neatly sums up the whole thing.
Not all of the episodes work. Around a third are just OK – but the majority veer between solid and brilliant, which isn’t a bad hit rate for a network procedural with 177 episodes. The brilliant ones are concentrated in the first six seasons – the second is best, the fourth is an excellent reset, and the sixth was a brave attempt to do something new – but House noticeably ran out of steam by season seven, and smartly ended with season eight.
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Like most pop culture from the 2000s, House hasn’t aged perfectly. There are a lot more references to “hookers” than you’d believe, and asexual, intersex and fat patients are spoken about in ways some might find clumsy or distasteful now. The sheer number of gay jokes is frankly remarkable, but none of it is nasty – and what else are you going to write when two of your male actors have that much chemistry? (If House was remade now, I suspect the only thing that would change is House and Wilson would not have settled just for a proposal and would actually get married.)
But in some ways, House aged really well. It is the perfect rebuke to that most irritating catchphase – “You can’t say that any more” – in that House says pretty much everything about anyone, and we still love him. He’s having a second life among even the most puritanical viewers: gen Z, some of whom weren’t even alive when it first aired. Based on all the fan art and TikTok edits out there, the Zoomers seem to enjoy House’s awfulness as much as anyone else, though they call him things like “babygirl”, which is just a delightful development.
You can rather neatly measure House’s moment in awards. Take the Golden Globes, where Laurie was nominated for best actor six years in a row and won the first two, when he was competing with actors in Grey’s Anatomy, Lost and 24. By the last two seasons, he was no longer getting nominated, replaced by Steve Buscemi in Boardwalk Empire, Jon Hamm in Mad Men, Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad and Damian Lewis in Homeland. Complex antiheroes had well and truly arrived on US television, as had the Brits with good dialect coaches. Before it was even called House, when reading the pilot’s script, Laurie thought Wilson was the main character because House was simply too mean. Now try naming a drama that doesn’t have a smart arsehole or troubled genius at its heart. That’s the house that House built.
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House is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video globally, and also on Netflix and Binge in Australia and Hulu and Peacock in the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here.
