WIRED Summer Binge-Watching Guide: House

Before launch, this long-running Fox series looked like a disaster waiting to happen: a weekly drama that recasts Sherlock Holmes as a doctor, except he's a modern-day American as played by that guy who used to hang out with Stephen Fry all the time? Surprisingly, House was fun, and stuck around a lot longer than anyone anticipated. Here's our prescription for the perfect House binge regimen.
House
Fox

Before launch, this long-running Fox series looked like a disaster waiting to happen: a weekly drama that recasts Sherlock Holmes as a doctor, except he's a modern-day American played by that guy who used to hang out with Stephen Fry all the time?

Read More Summer Binge-Watching GuidesBreaking Bad
Buffy the Vampire SlayerThe-Wire
The WireIt's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
30 RockHouse proved to be far more successful than many people expected, largely thanks to the show being funnier, smarter, and just outright meaner than most people could've seen coming. Its illness-of-the-week-diagnosed-by-maverick-doctor formula and strong supporting cast of fellow doctors kept it compelling for many seasons, and the fact that Hugh Laurie (the show's eponymous M.D.) could do a pretty good American accent didn't hurt, either.

If you've ever felt that humanity was, at heart, a pretty lousy collection of reprobates doomed to failure due to the imminent collapse of their body, then House is your show. If you've always suspected as much and just needed a guide to how to start watching, the doctor is ready to see you now.

House

Number of Seasons: 8 (177 episodes)

Time Requirements: Three months. Yes, that may seem like a long time to binge-watch something, but there are almost 200 episodes, and the procedural aspect of the show doesn't reward watching more than two episodes in a row. Watch two every weeknight, and three each day on weekends. It'll take you around 12 weeks to get through the whole thing.

Where to Get Your Fix: Netflix

Best Character to Follow: The clue is in the title. While there are other characters worth paying attention to throughout the eight-year run of the show (of the background characters, I find Peter Jacobson's Taub particularly charming when he shows up in the fourth season—he's an oddly lovable schlub), Gregory House is undoubtedly the star of the show. He's contrary, funny, and as misanthropic as he can be while maintaining enough promise of a hidden heart of gold to keep the network suits happy, with Laurie giving the kind of performance that keeps you paying attention even when the scripts get sloppy.

Seasons/Episodes You Can Skip:

Are you a hypochondriac? If the answer to that question is "yes," then let's get this out the way right now: You should skip the entire series. Seriously, you'll just end up convinced that you have some amazingly obscure disease purely because your head is slightly itchy and maybe you had a nosebleed once a couple years ago.

For everyone else, you can fairly easily skip the sixth and seventh seasons. After five seasons of pretty good TV, the soap operatics started to overwhelm the rest of the show without really doing anything other than melodramatically going over old ground again and again. And, don't say it too loudly, but a lot of the first season is pretty weak as well—you could pretty much do the pilot and then skip the next 19 episodes to "Three Stories"—but we'll get to that in a moment.

Seasons/Episodes You Can't Skip:

You'll notice no less than four season finales/season openers in the episodes listed below, and that's with good reason: If there's a rule of thumb, House is at its best with season finales and season openers; it gets to break out of the procedural format in those episodes and try and do something different with the characters for a change.

__Season 1: Episode 21, "Three Stories" __One of the first times that House didn't play fair with its audience—a trick the show would lean into a lot in later years— "Three Stories" took House out of the hospital and into the classroom for an episode in which he uses three recent cases to make a point to a room full of medical students. Writer David Shore, who won an Emmy for this episode, took full advantage of the break from the norm in this one to tell us something more about House himself. Spoiler: that cane's not decorative.

__Season 3: Episode 24, "Human Error" and Season 4: Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, "Alone," "The Right Stuff," "97 Seconds," "Guardian Angels," "Mirror Mirror," "Whatever It Takes," "Ugly, "You Don't Want to Know," and "Games" __ The fourth season of House is by far the strongest, but what makes that true has its roots in the final episode of the third when House's team of crack assistants falls apart (in large part due to his manipulative treatment of them). Instead of simply finding replacements and moving on, however, the show's writers decided to have some fun with the storyline and transformed more than half of the subsequent season into a parody of TV reality shows by making House declare a contest in which prospective candidates got eliminated at the end of each case for reasons based as much on House's whims as anything else. Fun, smart, and more than a little mean, it's the closest the show came to matching the temperament of its lead character.

Season 4: Episodes 14 and 15, "House's Head" and "Wilson's Heart" Another (great) example of a bait and switch, the MacGuffin of "House's Head"—in which he escapes from a bus crash with minor amnesia, remembering that someone was with him but not who—unfolds into the season finale, "Wilson's Heart," where it turns out that his companion in the crash was someone very close to his medical team. As if that slow realization and what follows isn't painful enough, the latter episode also reveals that one of House's team has the neurodegenerative disorder Huntington's Disease, because there's no point in closing out a season if you're not going to make everything seem especially dark.

__Season 5: Episode 24, "Both Sides Now" and Season 6: Episodes 1 and 2, "Broken" (Parts 1 and 2) __ Speaking of dark season finales, let's also talk about the end of the fifth season in which what appeared to be a wacky comedy about House getting his life together turns out to be an episode about the lead character in the show genuinely losing his grip on reality and not realizing it. The sixth season opens with the character in a mental hospital, but manages to swerve away from the darkness inherent in the concept by redoing One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (and very openly, gleefully referencing the original on many occasions) and trying to build a better, smarter House in the process.

Season 7: Episode 23, "Moving On" and Season 8: Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, "Twenty Vicodin," "Transplant," "Charity Case," "Risky Business," and "The Confession" It can't be denied that, as the show headed towards its final days, it began to lose its luster. Even this surprisingly strong final season has a certain familiarity about it, with House's complete inability to accept change and its consequences mirroring both the mental institution incarceration of "Broken" and the "rebuilding the team" arc of the fourth season. That said, seeing House in prison in "Twenty Vicodin"—I said there were consequences, right?—feels oddly prescient post-Orange Is the New Black, and the short arc of his attempts to rebuild his team once again is both fun and manages to reinvigorate the character dynamics after two fairly flat years. If only we could've found Charlyne Yi's Dr. Park years earlier.

Season 8: Episode 11, "Nobody's Fault" Arguably this is the show's last great episode before things start getting a little too cozy with everyone all too aware that things are coming to an end. "Nobody's Fault" manages to demonstrate the costs of believing in House too much. It also shows the ways in which he has been humanized by his team for the last eight years in a storyline that's both understated and messy enough to feel as if it belongs in the series.

Why You Should Binge:

In many ways, House is a show that defies binge-viewing. It's not just a procedural, but one where the majority of episodes fit a very specific plot, which can make for problematic (and, as blunt as it sounds, dull) viewing if you plan to watch episode after episode after episode.

And yet, despite its formulaic nature, House works as both medical melodrama and soap opera, mixing both genres with a good dose of dark humor and a cynicism that dilutes the moments of pure saccharine that occasionally surface, especially when kids are involved. "Everybody lies," as House repeatedly tells anyone listening, and the show does its best to prove him right, gleefully uncovering everyone in its path as selfish, scared, and deeply flawed (including House himself, although he pretends declaring that openly means that such criticisms don't really apply to him).

Binge-viewing the series gives you a better perspective to see the wounded heart at the center of the show before the latter seasons make that subtext all too textual. (The final season opens really strongly, but by the second half begins to fall into a sentimental sinkhole leading to a final episode that is, in many ways, a betrayal of the feel-bad ethos of what's come before.) You realize, potentially even before the writers did, that House was a love story all along, even if not necessarily the one that appears obvious in the first episode.

And if that isn't reason enough to binge, consider this: After 10 or so episodes, you can make a pretty good drinking game out of the number of wrong diagnoses made in the first half hour of each episode.

Best Scene—The Climax of "House's Head"

No video for reasons of spoilers, but the climactic scene in "House's Head" where he finally remembers the identity of the injured mystery bus passenger is really quite something.

The Takeaway:

The American healthcare system sucks, but there are two upsides. First, even if it worked, doctors probably wouldn't be able to work out what's wrong with you because three out of every four diagnoses on this show are wrong. Second, at least there are some asshole doctors willing to buck the system and make you feel better. Well, physically, at least.

If You Liked House You'll Love:

If the mix of medical drama and soap opera of House is what you're here for, then you should really check out ER, if it's somehow passed you by. On the other hand, perhaps you came for the "capable, unpleasant-yet-charming hero" motif, in which case you should look into the short-lived crime drama, Life (also available on Netflix).