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.Hugh Laurie with the cast of House (from left) Omar Epps, Jennifer Morrison, Robert Sean Leonard, Jesse Spencer and Lisa Edelstein.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 parkour over in increasingly illegal ways. He breaks into patients’ homes to look for unlikely toxins, jumps the queue to use the operating room, treats one patient a week at most and violates HIPAA code about 80 times a minute. Yet, none of this behaviour makes him the archetypal “maverick” hero, violating procedure because he cares too much about his patients.His approach is better described in an early scene by bleeding-heart oncologist Dr James Wilson (the Watson to House’s Holmes): “You know, some doctors have the Messiah complex. They need to save the world. You’ve got the Rubik’s complex. You need to solve the puzzle.”Dr House (Hugh Laurie) attends to a patient in the medical series House.This point of view is what makes House consistently compelling. Each episode is a puzzle, a solvable one at that. Even without a medical degree to understand the specifics of disease pathology, you’re given just enough clues to deduce why someone is sick – as long as you’re paying attention!Despite this medical mystery formula, House was also a show extremely adept at breaking its own mould, finding inventive and meta ways to deconstruct the rule book of network TV at large.With House finally forced into fulfilling the obligations that come with working at a teaching hospital, season one’s penultimate episode, “Three Stories”, sees him give an impromptu lecture on three wildly different cases that all presented with the same initial symptom: leg pain. As this deeply meta episode weaves in and out of reality (at one point, House mentally recasts a patient as Carmen Electra so his thought experiment has a bit more sex appeal), we later discover one of these stories is his own: a revelation of how House’s disability and opioid addiction came to be.Other episodes break form by focusing entirely on secondary characters such as Wilson or hospital dean Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), with House bursting in on the peripheries of grounded scenes like Kramer blasting open Jerry’s door.Omar Epps and Hugh Laurie in House, which has multiple instances of humour veering into dicey territory.Season four (in my opinion, the series’ best) reinvented the show completely. After all, after three of his fellows leave the diagnostics department at the end of season three, House’s oppositional personality leads him to the most convoluted recruitment process he can think of: hiring 40 fellows to compete for the final three spots, using real (dying!) patients as game-show challenges, and offering Survivor-esque immunity to whoever is most willing to break the law at his bequest.I am not here to claim House is a perfect show. Elements of it have aged poorly, from the truly bizarre colour-grading of season one to multiple instances of House’s edgelord humour veering into dicey territory (for example, his frequent use of race-related monikers to refer to his black fellow, Dr Eric Foreman).That said, much of House feels light years ahead of its time. Though the role was not authentically cast, the writing of House remains one of the most nuanced portrayals of disability and chronic pain I’ve seen on screen. As a sarcastic jerk with a limp myself, it was deeply formative to grow up watching a character like House lead eight seasons of primetime TV.But don’t just take my word for it. Between the show’s enduring fan base and a growing popularity with younger Gen Z viewers discovering it on streaming, it’s evident that even 22 years on, House still has a lot to offer.House is available to stream on Netflix, Disney+ and 7Plus.Alistair Baldwin is a writer, director and comedian. His credits include Erotic Stories, Latecomers, Get Krack!n and Hard Quiz.Want more TV? We’ve got you.Newsletter: Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.Best TV of the year (so far): From The Pitt to Widow’s Bay, and ABC comedy Dog Park, these are the shows that have caught our critics’ attention.Adults only: Sex work is all over TV right now. 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