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A recipe for House

So you think House is formulaic? Check out HOW formulaic with this cool checklist.

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There are some who say, that after five seasons House is too formulaic. Its audience figures have dropped markedly this season on TEN (and doubtless, there are a number of reasons for that).

One who might agree with them is cracked.com which has published an amusing “How To” guide for writing an episode of the series.

Checked out some of these stepping stones, mandatory for a good script:

– A character we’ve never seen before spontaneously contracts a disease whose symptoms would be considered witchcraft in most civilisations.

– Symptoms should be gross: oozes, enlarged, infected, lazy / blood, kidneys, brain, genitals, foetus

– House makes everyone guess something he knows the answer to

– The insightful words of a child cut House down to size

– The patient sweats blood / vomits blood / has their balls explode right before the first commercial break

– The patient’s getting worse and Cuddy wants answers

– House does something shockingly offensive to everyone

– The patient was lying / mistaken / dreaming

– The case appears to be solved.

– The patient poops a lung!

– The patient could die at any moment and House grudgingly decides to stop taking digs at Cuddy / Foreman / Wilson long enough to cure the disease

– House downs some pain pills

– A word / image / song makes House stare into space for a few seconds, signalling that the case has been solved

– House risks the patient’s life with a treatment that will kill them if he’s wrong. A few days later they’re fully cured. House is smug.

– The patient is alive.  House has learned a valuable lesson but rides off on his motorbike / hires a prostitute / gets shot, revealing that he’s still as intense and complex as ever.

FADE TO AWESOME.

You can read more observations on the show at Cracked.com

15 Responses

  1. The whole show is so paper-thin. My ten-year-old nephew said towards the end of a recent episode. “It’s the last ad break. House will figure out what it is after this.” I was surprised someone so young could pick up on how predictable this show has become. He also asked “Why do they always talk so fast when they’re discussing the diseases?” Well, so they can sound important I guess…

  2. @RoyB

    Yeah the show has changed dramatically since Cameron and Chase were reduced to minors, so in some way you can only enjoy the show if you like Kutner, Taub and Thirteen. But I don’t agree about the “lost any sense of having a story arc”. The show didn’t revolve around Cam and Chase. After they left the team, we had the storyline about House picking out his new team, Thirteen’s Huntington’s, Wilson dating Amber, the bus crash and Amber’s death, Wilson leaving PPTH and House coping without him, and now this season we had House having Wilson spied on by Lucas, Cuddy’s adoption failure and the whole House/Cuddy thing. So yeah, total lack of story arcs 😛

  3. My local GP describes House MD as “Garbage” (from a medical perspective), but it does make for entertaining TV, which is the Producers’ intent no doubt. 🙂

    It has become formulaic & lost any sense of having a story arc ie: it’s largely treading water since the 3 interns were reduced to minor characters. It’s all a bit direction less.

    You can make a drinking game based on who will be the next character to appear in the office doorway, to the “surprise” of the current occupant… (any old soap opera rules can be adapted. 🙂

    I still watch House MD, but really it’s just out of habit.

  4. I agree its very formulaic but i still watch it 😛 Hugh Laurie is just fantastic to watch 😛

    Matt, i don’t agree about CSI, i still think it’s the best Crime show out there. And sometimes they don’t solve the case or get the right guy; which I can’t remember happening in House…

  5. Would be good if only some cases got solved…would like say 25% of them to result in the paient dying still despite House’s / teams best efforts.

    Also, what about some eps where the team solves the case without House helping…

  6. house is good but it needs to have more patients, having only 1 the whole ep is boring! if they really wanted to bring us in they should have made house and cuddy a couple in the last ep instead of him saying no. we would see a different side then, it should all be focused in the emergency room, get rid of forman he is boring as hell!! atleast next season it will start with a clean slate because there was no big ending like the last and then we wont have to see half the season about the previous, like house and wilson

  7. Funny read, but I still think House is as good as it’s even been. I think if you have watched this show just for the cases, you would be sorely disappointed by the end of season 1. While the cases themselves can be interesting, it’s just a background to the main part of the show, the interaction between the main characters, it’s still as interesting as ever.

    Look at some crappy crime shows, CSI etc. It’s got all the same forumlatic crap but is backed up with bad and cheesy writing/acting.

  8. My favourite bit is; “Fade to Awesome”. I guessed that the audience would get tired of it after six seasons. Maybe everyone’s not as stupid as I think they are (but they probably are).

  9. House is awful. Its Grey’s Anatomy with a cranky douche for a protagonist. Nothing ever happens, and no I don’t count the new team as character development. See one episode, seen them all. Its the most formulaic show on TV

  10. All shows are formulaic it’s what they do with the formula. Why single out House?? It’s still one of the best written/well acted shows on tele and low ratings do not equate to lack of quality,in fact it’s often the opposite. And if we take demos into account (which we should) it still does very well in the under 49s. In fact in the states extremely well while still getting quite good numbers in TP.

  12. They left out – “House rattles off a whole heap of medical jargon really really quickly so as to convince the audience that what he is saying has some grounding in medical reality, only we’re too stupid to understand it.”

  13. For once id like to see them solve the disease in less than 55mins (that usually how you know when its solved and the only thing i that irritates me, they go through lots of tests and then with 5mins to go pull the solution out of thin air.)

    Perhaps they should do an episode where House just Googles the symptoms instead of doing the differential.

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