The answer: Complaining About Shows You Dont Watch. Hate to admit it, but in this case it was true. Now that I've begun at the beginning I'm very much enjoying myself. I've never really been big on medical drama before, but seeing this show, a unique Sherlock Holmes twist with heavy doses of Black Comedy, I am definitely counting House among my favorites now. Seriously, if your show manages to scare a mother into thinking she might have to buy a coffin only for House to unexpectedly say it's just a cold and nothing more, and you don't explode with laughter as a result, you're doing something wrong.

I wrote a review for this series, but it's gone now. I'll be more brief.

Like many melodramas, House got caught in the trap of trying to top itself. House hits rock bottom, his friends abandon him, he cleans himself up, is bounced off back to work — this has been fodder for four seasons already.

At the same time we're covering old ground, the most enjoyable parts of the show are stripped away. Most of the cast (Wilson, Foreman, Chase) are adrift, locked in old patterns; or else attending to mundane aspects of domestic life, like Taub and Foreman moving in together, or Taub cheating on women (despite looking like a garden gnome.) It's not very stimulating stuff. Another weird thing is how the patients (the cornerstone of the show's premise, or at least they used to be) aren't that prominent anymore. This in turn harms Dr. House as a character, since his gifts and bulldog perseverance are wasted, and we end up with a mean boss who glowers all the time, bullies his coworkers, and is an even worse friend than Tom Green.

With a show that peaks in its early seasons, I ordinarily start with the good and then stretch my opinion out from there. In this case, the show hasn't resembled Season One in a long while, so this is for all intents and purposes is the show: boring melodrama, rote shipping, entire seasons of filler that could be easily skipped, etc.

Gerkuman's review is on-target, to my chagrin, since that leaves me little to say (also, I'm not as succinct in my rants!). But what needs to be hammered home is how Hugh Laurie is the only worthwhile character. For some people, that's enough. Even by network drama standards, the cast of House is useless. The writers, trying valiantly to give them dimension, pair the men off with Thirteen (snore), or reveal some dark moment their past, later forgotten. Which is too bad, because they're all great actors.

ER sometimes stretched the limits to which we could sympathize with the hand-wringings of a Lexus-driving Dr. Clooney, but they usually overcame that. House has a character (Taub) who is defined by his libido. First, we already have a Taub: Wilson. Second, how does this balding short guy attract all this jailbait? Third, who cares? He's not even interesting to watch. One episode ended with Taub driving up to a billboard of himself, then flinging paint at it in disgust. Boo hoo. I guess that's supposed to endear him to us. The people sitting on sofas who aren't on billboards.

This is the real problem with House; the dreary, dull lives of his underlings. With the exception of Thirteen (once the most hated sidekick, now the only tolerable sidekick - go figure), these people are all whiny, self-flagellating, self-absorbed pricks. House barely interacts with patients anymore (they've been pushed back as an afterthought), so we lack evidence of his dazzling medical genius which supposedly overrules the fact he's a psycho.

With no characterization to latch onto, House ends up trying to top itself each year with House doing zanier and zanier things. He's Easily Forgiven the next season, and then it's onto the next thing.

It's funny that the episode with the most imaginative visuals and scenes is the one that made me realise that House just doesn't do anything for me anymore, but that's the way things often are. I guess my beef with the whole thing is the ending, in particular how it shows that the only thing that really matters to the writers is that the train keeps on rolling.

I was hoping that Huddy would go a bit longer, but the fact it ended wasn't the problem. It just felt as if the main reason they dropped it was because they didn't have any more to write about... how right I was. I watched the Vlog from the cto-producers and an interview with David Shore about the episode, and it showed that they never had any intention on House and Cuddy staying together. It was just a plot they picked out of the bucket, that they ran with as long as they could and then dumped in favour of the next one.

House used to be a medical show with the lives of the team in the background, that morphed into a show about these people, who solved the medical mystery in the background. That's perfectly fine, so long as the characters become the focus and the plots feed into character development. But that doesn't seem to be the case here. The show seems to be turning into a soap, a fate that Bones fell into not long ago. Both the medical plots and the personal plots are there just to keep the show going. House is back to how he was before, both sans Cuddy and plus Vicodin.

I expect the gravy train will keep on rolling, but I've made my stop here.