House creator David Shore, the show’s executive producer Katie Jacobs, and star Hugh Laurie announced late yesterday that House would be ending after running for eight seasons on Fox. And they set a high bar for what they think the show achieved:
After much deliberation, the producers of House M.D. have decided that this season of the show, the 8th, should be the last. By April this year they will have completed 177 episodes, which is about 175 more than anyone expected back in 2004.
The decision to end the show now, or ever, is a painful one, as it risks putting asunder hundreds of close friendships that have developed over the last eight years – but also because the show itself has been a source of great pride to everyone involved.
Since it began, House has aspired to offer a coherent and satisfying world in which everlasting human questions of ethics and emotion, logic and truth, could be examined, played out, and occasionally answered. This sounds like fancy talk, but it really isn’t. House has, in its time, intrigued audiences around the world in vast numbers, and has shown that there is a strong appetite for television drama that relies on more than prettiness or gun play.
Do folks actually think they fulfilled that mission? I enjoyed House, but it’s not as if the show was above theatrics that fall squarely in the category of theatrics and gunplay. If breaking up a marriage over one partner’s medicalized murder of an African dictator isn’t soapy, I’m not sure what is. And who now will give us our mistaken lupus diagnoses?
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