Hugh Laurie Will Not Stand for Your ‘House’ Slander, Thank You

Procedural television can be as comforting as a warm bath or a box of Extra Toasty Cheez-it Crackers. You settle in, hoping for a quick story with some familiar characters you’ve come to know and love. Maybe you’ll learn a little more about their personal lives, or that thing that was going on with them that season that you tuned in (the good thing from that season you like, not the bad thing from that season you don’t). There’s a reason that they still hold on via network television, get rediscovered on streaming services, and get defended by well-respected actors.

A journalist named Janet Murray recently took to Twitter to take shots at the Hugh Laurie-starring show House, about a cantankerous doctor who is a medical genius and doesn’t care about these humans but will do everything in his power to save them. The show did bananas numbers over its eight seasons on the air, and anything that ran that long is going to have its fans. Still, according to Murray, the formula of the show was too much for too long.

“Patient has mysterious illness. Hugh Laurie (House) gets diagnosis wrong. Patient nearly dies. Hugh Laurie has last minute leftfield idea. Gets diagnosis right. Doesn’t get fired,” she wrote. “Eight seasons of this?” Now, look, if that’s not your bag, I get it. But this is one of those situations where Murray should have known that such a declarative statement would receive some backlash. And, heck, maybe she did know that. Stuff like what she wrote is a good way to get engagement. But, in this case, she was engaged by Dr. House himself.

Laurie took to the site to respond to Murray’s criticism, and he hit the nail on the head: “Thanks for your critique, Janet. We actually tried a couple of episodes where House (Hugh Laurie) (please put the brackets in the right place) gets it right first time, but they were only 6 minutes long. NBC weren’t happy. Then we tried some where House never gets it right and the patient dies. The audience wasn’t happy. One could apply your trenchant analysis to other art forms: JS Bach wrote 30 Goldberg variations on the same chord structure; Frida Kahlo painted 50 portraits of herself; Henry Moore, what?? The point is, or was, variations on a theme; if all you see is hospital, medical blah blah, then it wasn’t meant for you. Nonetheless, I look forward to your first novel!”

The response is pretty perfect and defends not only Laurie’s long-running show, but the ideas of procedurals in general. People like being able to tune into something and know exactly what they are getting. It will vary slightly, but it’s going to give them what they came for. Rolling your eyes at a show because it executed that process seems… ill-informed. But Hugh Laurie did not stand idly by, and I’m sure House fans will sing its praises in the comments, as they did on Twitter, in response to someone firing shots at it for no dang good reason.

Now, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, here’s a clip from Family Guy where Laurie plays House, which is all I can usually think of when I hear about that show.