House M.D.

So I've been enjoying House M.D. rather a lot for the last few series. It's not a show without it's problems but up until recently the biggest one was that it was essentially the same show every week.

I quite liked that, though. Watching something where you know exactly what you're going to get is rather comforting. It was solid television. It wasn't Battlestar or Supernatural, it was Chuck. It was 30 Rock. It was solid amusing fair for people who want to wind down at the end of a day.

Things began to change in series 4 when they bought in a host of new characters. Usually this is the kiss of death for any show but, in this instance, it injected new life into proceedings. Especially thanks to the inclusion of Kal Pen (Kumar from Harold & Kumar).

Late last year, series 5 started and things weren't quite right from the get go. Now the new actors were settled into their roles, the show seemed more formulaic than ever. House has always been a show that'd fed from the angst of its characters but turning Wilson emo just to have him revert to his previous character four episodes later is somewhat bizarre. Arbitrary tragedies started attaching themselves to characters only to be completely discarded the next episode. Taub's feud with his ex-wife has evaporated completely, 13's Huntington’s is a constant source of tearful glances over slow guitar music and a promising sub plot involving Kutner's back story was resolved after one episode and never mentioned again.

It also doesn't help that the new characters started to merge with the old ones. There's an episode where 13 trusts everyone implicitly. This isn't just out of character, it's in someone else’s- Cameron. Taub is quickly becoming a crap version of Chase as well, leaving the only actually original character being Kutner.

These are minor irritations and wouldn't ruin the show were it not for two problems.

Firstly, the reliance on crap psychology is getting really annoying. House has always relied on the Sherlock Holmes logic of "I have noticed this one thing about you- that means THIS, THIS and THIS are true" and he's never wrong. This has never quite rung true but recently, the justifications for such idiocy just haven't been there. It doesn't help that the other characters seem to be participating in these idiotic logical fallacies as well. The king of these bizarre leaps of logic came in the last episode I saw before I gave up on the show in disgust- Series 5 Episode 13 - Big Baby.

In it, Foreman and 13 have hooked up (I'll get to that in a minute) and House immediately notices this. How? Because they disagreed in a differential diagnosis. Please note that previously he has known that Cameron and Chase have hooked up because they agreed during a differential. The logical extension of all of this is that everyone during every differential diagnosis everywhere is bumping pelvises like there's no tomorrow.

Problem number two is the aforementioned up hooking of 13 and Foreman. It's a match that doesn't make any damn sense. Combine this with Cuddy's recent acquisition of a baby and what do we have? New characters taking on traits of old characters, increasingly unlikely sets of characters forming relationships and unnecessary pregnancies. These are the marks of a show that's running out of ideas and is desperately trying to cling onto popularity.

Ladies and gentlemen, House M.D. has finally jumped the shark.

At least we got four decent series out of it, which is more than TV shows usually manage.