House Review

The structure is unashamedly mechanical. A patient presents, three wrong diagnoses fail in sequence, a stray remark in an unrelated conversation triggers the right one, and treatment starts with four minutes left. Shore built that clock deliberately, and its reliability is a large part of why the show ran so long and why so many of its hours are interchangeable. What makes it worth the time is Hugh Laurie, giving a performance of such precision that the accent stops being a fact after ten minutes and the cruelty reads as a discipline rather than a quirk.

He is playing Holmes, openly, with Robert Sean Leonard as an unusually sad Watson, and that friendship is the only relationship the writing treats with real care. Everything else erodes. The romantic subplots are a chore, the team turns over twice without improving, and the later seasons reach for shock formats once the formula stales. It looks like well funded network television and nothing more. A machine, and an actor who made the machine sing.