Everyone agrees on Dr. House: he’s a jerk! He treats his colleagues with a coldness and contempt that borders on cruelty. He ignores his patients. But he’s a genius at diagnosing the most unlikely illnesses. He is now head of the diagnostic department at Princeton–Plainsboro Teaching Hospital (PPTH) in New Jersey. He is admired even by those who reject him. Yet, despite his unbearable behavior, he has a few friends who can see through the shell of mysanthropy.
House is addicted to painkillers since a pain in his leg was misdiagnosed, and thus not properly healed. He wears his wounds like medals, and uses them as a pretext to display his bottomless contempt for the human race. The only thing that thrills him is solving a medical enigma. For nothing in the world would he admit that he actually cares about his patients.
Obviously, the main character is also the main assets of this series. Everything revolves around him. That’s a good thing, because the caracter is atypical, highly complex and fascinating. Unfortunately, the secondary characters suffer from this focus, when they would have deserved to occupy more space in the plot. The proportion between personnal stories and medical cases is also a little bit unbalanced for me. Each episode shows a special case, so, if you are not intersted in medical issues at all, move on… But the remaining time for scenes with non-House characters not working on the case is to short, at least for me.
The approach, in the form of puzzles and medical education, and above all a unique and fascinating character, have made House a deserved success.
8 seasons, 177 episodes (50 mn), 2004-2012, on Fox, now on Netflix
Created by David Shore, with Hugh Laurie / Gregory House, Lisa Edelstein / Cuddy, Robert Sean Leonard / Wilson, Omar Epps / Foreman, Jesse Spencer / Chase, Jennifer Morrison / Cameron, Peter Jacobson / Taub…