TMC
09-15-2015, 12:26 PM
http://www.avclub.com/article/procedural-turned-personal-one-kind-house-episode-225131
By Noel Murray
Sep 15, 2015 •8:00 AM
A single television episode can exemplify the spirit of its time. A Very Special Episode presents The A.V. Club’s survey of TV at its most distinctive.
For one night in 2005, House was the best show on television. And I’ll go even further than that. For about three years, House was an example of network TV at its sharpest. A forward-thinking hybrid of the medical procedural and the “antihero” drama, the show delivered fiendishly difficult case-of-the-week mysteries, solved by a prickly, pill-popping diagnostician named Gregory House—a character modeled directly on Sherlock Holmes. (Get it? House? Holmes?) And then on May 17, 2005, toward the end of season one, Fox aired “Three Stories,” an episode written by creator David Shore and directed by Paris Barclay, which set such a high bar for what House could be that even though the show ran for seven more seasons—and was mostly excellent for two of those—it never again realized its full potential.
Prior to “Three Stories,” House’s first season followed a fairly rigid formula. While looking for ways to shirk work, Dr. House (played by Hugh Laurie) would be bullied or bribed by his boss Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) into putting in clinic hours at New Jersey’s Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, where he’d inevitably catch either a stupefying case or spot something seemingly routine that would turn out to be extraordinary. While leaving the grunt-work to his often baffled and annoyed team—Dr. Eric Foreman (Omar Epps), Dr. Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), and Dr. Robert Chase (Jesse Spencer)—House would make inappropriate comments and willfully violate the medical profession’s various codes of ethics, all while bouncing ideas off of his long-suffering friend/conscience Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard). Typically there’d also be a subplot of some kind—sometimes carried over from earlier episodes—related to hospital politics or the staff’s interpersonal drama.
By Noel Murray
Sep 15, 2015 •8:00 AM
A single television episode can exemplify the spirit of its time. A Very Special Episode presents The A.V. Club’s survey of TV at its most distinctive.
For one night in 2005, House was the best show on television. And I’ll go even further than that. For about three years, House was an example of network TV at its sharpest. A forward-thinking hybrid of the medical procedural and the “antihero” drama, the show delivered fiendishly difficult case-of-the-week mysteries, solved by a prickly, pill-popping diagnostician named Gregory House—a character modeled directly on Sherlock Holmes. (Get it? House? Holmes?) And then on May 17, 2005, toward the end of season one, Fox aired “Three Stories,” an episode written by creator David Shore and directed by Paris Barclay, which set such a high bar for what House could be that even though the show ran for seven more seasons—and was mostly excellent for two of those—it never again realized its full potential.
Prior to “Three Stories,” House’s first season followed a fairly rigid formula. While looking for ways to shirk work, Dr. House (played by Hugh Laurie) would be bullied or bribed by his boss Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) into putting in clinic hours at New Jersey’s Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, where he’d inevitably catch either a stupefying case or spot something seemingly routine that would turn out to be extraordinary. While leaving the grunt-work to his often baffled and annoyed team—Dr. Eric Foreman (Omar Epps), Dr. Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), and Dr. Robert Chase (Jesse Spencer)—House would make inappropriate comments and willfully violate the medical profession’s various codes of ethics, all while bouncing ideas off of his long-suffering friend/conscience Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard). Typically there’d also be a subplot of some kind—sometimes carried over from earlier episodes—related to hospital politics or the staff’s interpersonal drama.