UMass Lowell Connector Logo

It’s not Lupus, House is on Netflix

Sarcasm, syringes, stitches and strippers. America’s favorite Sherlock Holmes expy returns to television in all of his 8 season glory with all of the wit and wisdom you can expect from Hugh Laurie and company.

House tells the story of a drug addicted doctor who works against time to figure out diseases in a procedural fashion with his team who bounce ideas off each other based on the progressions of the different diseases. Along the way, the show gained steady viewership numbers and critical acclaim over the course of it’s run for well written, intelligent story arcs and well written character development.

The arcs and characters deal with heavier emotional themes such as abuse, suicide, drug addiction and genetic diseases, but gave them to the audience in the form of human, relatable characters that educated viewers as well as entertained. At the same time, character-of-the-week stories tackled the human side of dealing with death from different perspectives, from those completely isolated by geography almost dying alone to small children struck with autism unable to comprehend the fate infront of them. One episode that sticks out in particular, starring Dave Matthews, even featured the consequences of a savant and facing whether his abilities gained from his disability were worth inhibiting his intelligence for his entire life.

The cast since the show has gone on to success on other shows as well, with Hugh Laurie and Olivia Wilde going on to movie careers, Lisa Edelstein starring in Castle, Jesse Spencer starring in Chicago Fire, Omar Epps has starred in Ressurection, and Jennifer Morrison has gone on to star in Once Upon a Time, and Kal Penn famously going on to work for the White House.

The show is most notable for Laurie’s performance, which was nominated for three Emmys and won two Screen Actors Guild awards in 2007 and 2009. The show also received a 2005 Peabody Award, and won the 2011 People’s Choice Award for Best Drama. Featuring 177 episodes, viewers can now pick and choose from the best or watch the entire series in a long binge watch.

A word of warning, as with anything with procedural elements, the show can become a bit grating on binge watches. Some episodes do subvert the formulaic structure of the show and some episodes do away with it altogether, but over the course of 177 episodes they are few and far between(the episodes, Three Stories, One Day One Room, Frozen, and Alone among these). Part of the show’s strength at the time was it’s ability to slowly unfold it’s larger arcs and stories in small revelations that were easy to keep track of, which was very conducive to the show’s episode of the week format, making some of the slower episodes of the seasons (especially in the fifth season) unfortunately weaker and dragging down the season in hindsight.

In all, check out the show. If you missed the show the first time, the show is definitely worth watching to see what the hype was about the entire time. Likewise, the show has gone on to be very influential in it’s storytelling style and ideas, with many shows around the world taking it’s ideas and carrying them forward in their own programming, to say nothing of the ensemble cast that it spawned.