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?

Emily Nussbaum points to an interview with Homeland showrunner Alex Gansa that contains this interesting tidbit about a network that banned any suggestion that police could ever disagree:

Well, I recently did a police procedural for a major broadcast network. And the note came down from the network time and time again that there could be no conflict among the police officers and detectives who were trying to solve the crime. In other words, they didn’t want any dissention in the ranks among the good guys. Because if you showed dissention among the ranks, then people would begin to question if they were actually doing their jobs properly. And, of course, that robbed every single scene in the precinct of any drama whatsoever. They had to get along. They became just mouthpieces of exposition instead of real people.
And it was infuriating on a weekly basis to get that note. They couldn’t disagree. They couldn’t be wrong. They had to always be on the straight and narrow. And it was impossible to construct stories under those kinds of conditions.

There’s no conflict? I mean, that’s the first thing I ever learned as a writer in television. You know, you have to have conflict for any kind of drama. And this particular network just believed that there was enough drama in the good guys catching the bad guys, so that you didn’t have to muddy the good guys in any way, shape, or form. They just had to be right all of the time, and they had to be in sync all of the time. I mean, it was absurd.

And Kate Arthur from The Daily Beast notes that “There’s at least one another network that has the rule that doctors can never be wrong.”

This doesn’t just make for bad storytelling: it’s an actively dangerous endorsement of the idea that we should never question people in positions of power. It would be ridiculous to present a vision of a police department where no one ever commits an act of wrongdoing or negligence during an investigation. And it would be worse to present a department where, say, mistreatment of suspects, lying about what you’d witnessed, or God forbid, using pepper spray or live ammunition on the public went unquestioned.

Similarly, having television deliver the collective message “trust me, I’m a doctor” carries considerable risk with it. We live in a country where medical professionals have sterilized black women, lied about providing treatment to people with sexually transmitted diseases, and massively overdosed infants on blood-thinning drugs. Not to mention the fact that perhaps the most prominent doctor on television routinely abuses and harasses his patients. We need stories that encourage patients to be informed about their health, and to be their own advocates in the doctor’s office.

Obviously, living in a society is grand, and I appreciate the police keeping my neighborhood safe. I find the rise of vaccine deniers who refuse to accept the consensus of the medical establishment and are making the rest of us less safe really disturbing. But there has to be space between giving doctors and the police absolute authority and no authority, for narrative, and for our own safety.

No sooner do I ask whether narrative horror’s viable on television than NBC greenlights an updated Frankenstein show by Russel Friend and Garrett Lerner, the producers behind House.

I always get anxious when I hear about this kind of project because I worry that “modern-day take” on Frankenstein means grave-robbing in Los Angeles rather than London, and in a sleek lab rather than a dank basement, rather than any actual engagement with our contemporary anxieties about science. It’s pretty easy to forget that the dude with the scalpel is the monster, not his creation. I feel the same way about the news that Bradley Cooper of all people is starring in a Paradise Lost movie (incidentally one of the works Frankenstein’s monster finds most compelling), though whether it’ll be completely cosmic and fantastical or set in some version of the real world. Whether you think Paradise Lost is a statement of repentance for rebellion against the Crown or the work of a former censor who knew how to get the official approval he needed to publish the first edition of the work, it’s a monumentally compelling examination of what it feels like to find yourself on the wrong side of what appears to be God’s will that has no particular modern analogue. I actually think Torchwood: Miracle Day has the closest thing to a contemporary Satan I’ve seen in Lauren Ambrose’s impeccably-dressed-in-red PR hack, Jilly, who has absolutely no values except buzz and worships at the altar of the news cycle.

I do think there’s a chance that Fried and Lerner will do a good job with their Frankenstein, though. House, when the show was good as opposed to completely insane, was very good at exploring how someone like Sherlock Holmes would fare in an age where scientific knowledge was vastly more widespread and extreme anti-sociality was considered less charming and more diagnosable. House may usually be right about what’s ailing his patients, but the show is a useful modern rebuke to the idea that we’d be better off in a world where the rest of us are scientifically blind and a one-eyed man is king, or that there’s anything charming about misanthropes who use their genius to bludgeon other people. I only hope they come up with as useful a framework for their Frankenstein project. I’m glad to think about the interaction between scientific expertise and compassion, and about scientific ethics, but I do worry that it’s hard for pop culture to critique specific scientific practices without casting a skeptical eye on scientific endeavor as a whole.

-Nikki Finke is the new Christopher Hitchens.

-Yes, my lifestyle is going to kill me.

-If we’re going to keep turning products into narratives, I’m okay with Emily the Strange being on the list.

-Haven’t had enough of the awesome debates over the phone hacking scandal? Play Prime Minister’s Questions.

-More reasons not to watch the next season of House.

Deadline’s Tim Adler sat down with a bunch of international television executives at the Monte Carlo Television Awards to find out why international audiences like American police and medical procedural shows so much. The answers weren’t as revealing as I might have liked — with the exception of the beautifully stereotypical explanation that “what appeals to the French about House and The Mentalist is that lead characters Dr. Gregory House and Patrick Jane are irreverent.”

Most of the executives mentioned higher production values in American shows than in a variety of domestic competitors. Thomas Bellut, the head of programming for ZDF, the non-profit German public television broadcaster, apparently thinks that German audiences don’t like watching shows that don’t resolve problems within a single programming hour on television, and that the’re more likely to watch something like Lost or Damages when they can consume a lot of episodes in a row, via DVD or another method (as a side note, I’d love to know how more complex, non-procedural shows do in countries like Chile, where something like the telenovela wars require audiences to tune in every night for months). But other than talking about the comfort-food, one-off factor, none of the executives said anything about cultural or values factors.

There’s no denying that shows that you don’t have to make a major commitment to are very effective at gaining casual viewers, be it Ace of Cakes or Law & Order. But police and medical procedurals also are a very effective way to get American audiences to reconcile their conflicting feelings about authority. Procedurals don’t just demonstrate police or medical effectiveness within the hour; they also let audiences acknowledge that police brutality and bullying patients are bad things while making the argument that it’s worth accepting those behaviors as long as they contribute to someone ending up behind bars or not dying of an incredibly baroque disease. In that respect, procedurals are a conservative genre: they undermine arguments for reform, suggesting that reforms might upset the efficacy of the status quo. But I have no idea how those arguments play abroad, whether they’re part of the appeal of American procedurals, or a limiting factor, and what they mean for how other countries think about justice in America.