Hugh Laurie has torn into a critic whose viral post heaped scorn on his show, House.
Freelance journalist Janet Murray set the internet alight with a post skewering the show’s classic formula. By her reckoning, a patient arrives with a mysterious illness, Laurie’s Gregory House gets the diagnosis wrong, the patient nearly dies, House gets it wrong again, faces firing, the patient nearly dies again—then, at the last moment, House has a flash of inspiration, nails the diagnosis, and keeps his job.
“Eight seasons of this?” Murray concluded. The post racked up more than a million views.
British actor Laurie, never one to let a slight pass, materialized in her replies with the sardonic energy of House himself. “Thanks for your critique, Janet,” he wrote. “We actually tried a couple of episodes where House (Hugh Laurie) (please put the brackets in the right place) gets it right first time, but they were only 6 minutes long. NBC weren’t happy.”
He wasn’t done. “Then we tried some where House never gets it right and the patient dies. The audience wasn’t happy,” Laurie continued. “One could apply your trenchant analysis to other art forms: JS Bach wrote 30 Goldberg variations on the same chord structure; Frida Kahlo painted 50 portraits of herself; Henry Moore, what?? The point is, or was, variations on a theme; if all you see is hospital, medical blah blah, then it wasn’t meant for you.”
He signed off with a parting shot: “Nonetheless, I look forward to your first novel!”
House ran for eight seasons on Fox from 2004 to 2012 and earned four Emmy nominations for outstanding drama series. Laurie himself was nominated six times for the lead role—though, as Murray might appreciate, he never won.
In a response to someone else, Murray said she “found his response funny.”
“Well this was unexpected. And not the slightest bit patronizing,” she said, sharing Laurie’s response.
