Hugh Laurie’s ‘slightly drunk’ tweets were right. House is still great TV

Hugh Laurie briefly channelled his old character Dr Gregory House this week, delivering a sardonic retort to a British journalist on X who decried the hit 2000s medical drama for having the “same narrative every episode”. A mysterious illness. A series of misdiagnoses. Escalating stakes. Then a breakthrough.

“We actually tried a couple of episodes where House … gets it right first time, but they were only 6 minutes long. NBC weren’t happy,” he wrote.

While Laurie has since apologised for the intensity of his clap back (he also made a point of critiquing her grammar and sarcastically compared the show to the repetitive works of JS Bach, Frida Kahlo and Henry Moore) admitting he may have been “slightly drunk” at the time, I am not so quick to lay down arms.

In fact, as possibly Australia’s No.1 House defender, I consider it the defining example of a bingeworthy network procedural – incredible because of its formula, not in spite.

A stumbling block I often see with many people who struggle to appreciate this iconic medical mystery is that they are coming for the “medical” more than they are coming for the “mystery”.

Created by David Shore (who formerly worked on Law & Order and Family Law), House is explicitly a modern riff on Sherlock Holmes. The main characters share a genius deductive prowess and semi-functional opioid addiction, and there are countless smaller Easter eggs too. Like Holmes, House has a 221 street address, and the season two finale sees him in extreme peril at the hands of someone named Jack (rather than James) Moriarty.

Watching House through a detective fiction lens, these recurring misdiagnoses aren’t repetitive incompetence, but a well-trodden genre trope: a shift in lead suspect. This is a genre known for its red herrings and twists, where even false leads turn up clues that prove vital to deducing the final culprit. And by fusing this with the medical genre, House places the patient in a unique dual role of victim and perpetrator. While it is the patient’s life at stake, it is also their behaviours, ambitions and deceptions that block the investigation at every turn.

House’s oft-quoted mantra – “Everybody lies” – feels more aligned with cynic sleuths such as Philip Marlowe or Veronica Mars than with the hyper-empathic healers most medical dramas are preoccupied with. But if you’re able to suspend your expectations of what a medical drama should be (and how doctors should behave) you’ll have a much better time digesting this show.

Medical ethics are less a rigid guideline for Dr Gregory House, and more a jungle gym for him to