April 6th, 2009
There’s really no point in discussing this without spoilers, so read on below for some quick analysis of what is perhaps the most blatantly “shocking” episode of House in a long time – there’s also spoilers in the tags, so don’t read those either.
Filed under House
February 24th, 2009
But BARELY.
I don’t particularly know if I can put my finger on why I care so little about House’s fifth season, considering that I was actually quite a big fan of the fourth one. Although oft criticized for eschewing the show’s regular sidekicks for a new batch, the fourth season felt like things were being shaken up: that the producers realized that the show was in danger of becoming too formulaic, and that some changes were necessary. I like that level of self-awareness in my showrunners, personally, and it was healthy to see it here.
Unfortunately, House has fallen off the wagon for me this season, and I’ll admit right now to having very little desire to even watch last night’s episode, which is waiting for me on the DVR as soon as I get around to it. [I watched it – check for my thoughts in parenthesis throughout the post added after I sat down to watch the episode]. There just isn’t anything about the show that I find engaging, which is because of two fundamental problems: one is the show focus on what is ultimately an uninteresting and worthless character, and the other is that the show’s other drama must derive entirely from relationships, all of which are misguided and doomed to failure if only for the sake of the show’s normal points of tension.
It all adds up to a show that I honestly don’t care about anymore – and there will come a point where I might stop watching altogether in the very near future.
November 18th, 2008
A week after throwing the show’s structure for a loop by reintroducing Chase and Cameron to the central narrative, House is at the kind of place where the show never really was last season. It’s a sort of unstable normalcy, where everything on the surface is the same but underneath there is clearly unrest amongst the team. There’s drama building everywhere, and it’s the kind of drama that will eventually explode in some fashion.
It’s a lot of moving parts, so I wonder how long they can make it last. “Emancipation” largely only works because of Omar Epps giving Foreman a very real sense of tarnished pride, a character who tried making it on his own last season only to find that he’s too much like House for his own good but now finds himself unable to get himself out from his shadow. While the fragmented nature of the episode was problematic in a few ways, the dual cases gave Foreman his biggest showcase of the season to date, more Chase and Cameron than we’ve received on average, some Wilson and House interaction, and even some new ripples appearing in the world of the three newer cast members.
No individual part of the episode really got to stand out beyond Foreman, but it all felt like positive momentum at this stage in the game.
Filed under House
Subscribe to Cultural Learnings' RSS Feed.
Cultural Learnings 