House only agreed to hire him when he found out he had a juvenile record. A sealed juvenile record that should never have been public knowledge.

Hell, the issue with Foreman was worse. The guy wasn't even working for House when House poked into his background. House only agreed to hire him when he found out he had a juvenile record. Writing-wise, that was to show that House had a unique style of deciding who to hire. Like looking at Stacy's or Cameron's medical records or even the marine's in Top Secret, it was to answer a specific question about the person. There was a point to it. Looking at everyone's financial records digging for information shows that he's a jerk which is no surprise to anyone watching the show. It also shows that he's worse than Tritter, who also looked into the ducklings personal histories but with a purpose while House is doing it to have something to hold over them later. “House” may be mainstream TV’s boldest-ever psychological farce. It didn't start out as a farce, it started out as a humorous and interesting exploration of an interesting man and the group of characters around him. Sometimes the plot devices were extreme but never as unrealistic as they are now (e.g. hiring an emotionally unstable drug user back on Lucky Thirteen and letting her loose on patients). Maybe he means that it's a "psychological farce" in that the psychology is farcical? Sometimes it feels like this show has joined Boston Legal, Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy in the "this is totally unrealistic but you'll be entertained by it" category. I like GA (sometimes) but I need to remember to park any expectation of reality at the door when I watch. I think the writers may have pushed House's assishness and the extremes of the show all the way into another category. People got used to House being a jerk and so in order to keep shocking the audience, it got more and more extreme and unrealistic. Do you object when people say HD? Because it's H. Chorea, not H. Disease.

Thanks Poeia. I had wondered about the difference since reading about Woody Guthrie and his son Arlo's decision not to get -*test*-('")ed and still have kids. What a terrible dilemma. ETA: Families support page for those with Huntington's Disease: some amazing stories of individuals going through the trauma of getting -*test*-('")ed, making that difficult choice and supporting each other. Mention is made of the Alice's Restaurant church now being the HDAC center and Arlo's participation. Very interesting reading.

I definitely don't agree. I love the show. I've loved it since I saw the pilot, before it even aired. I love it now that we're getting different angles on the characters. I love it when House is a bastard and I love it when he shows his human side. .... I'd say it has every bit of the "sold writing and plotting, period" that it always has had, but it's looking at different angles now. ..... I'm tired of the implication that if I continue to like the show now that I'm an idiot for failing to understand had bad it's gotten. Is it realistic? No. It never has been. Is the medicine exactly what you'd see in hospitals today? No. Never has been. It's a different take that even allows me to buy into Darian Serafian's crazy directorial style -- that he's intentionally giving us an atypical view of the world, because this is not the world as it is, but rather the world that House occupies. And this atypical Housian view isn't something new this season or last season or the third season -- whichever season people want to pick that they've been shouting about jumping the shark. So yeah, I don't expect House and House's world to conform to my world. I never have. What I want is to be entertained, to be intrigued by this character who is consistently confounding every expectation I have of him. To have people who bounce off of him and are forced to reconsider their world -- from Cuddy to Chase to Cameron to Foreman to the newbies. That hasn't changed. Namaste, Thanks so much for articulating so well what I've wanted to say for months. Especially "I'm tired of the implication that if I continue to like the show now that I'm an idiot for failing to understand had bad it's gotten." I was beginning to wonder if I was alone in continuing to be ever more entertained by and enthralled with the show and the always evolving and constantly surprising character that is House.

For God's sake, it's Huntington's, not Huntingdon's. For something that's as big a plot point as the disease is, people should learn how to spell it right, and I'm tired of seeing it consistently misspelled. If it's that important a plot point of the show, why is no one on the show monitoring for the preclinical cognitive dysfunctions that come with the disease? Deficits in attention, concentration and visuospatial abilities that could very much affect her ability to her job both with regards to patient treatment and to check -*test*-('")s. There's no guarantee it won't come on earlier than her mother's did since there is also a juvenile form. It looks like she's already showing the emotional processing problems that are the early stages of the disease. Yes, it's a spelling mistake with a relatively obscure name. But I'm not letting a possibly impaired person free to work among the patients as House is. You forgive the show for not being realistic about the medicine or the psychological reactions of the characters but you won't forgive a spelling mistake in the name of a disease. We used to have debates about whether House was justified in lying to the transplant committee about Carly's fitness to be on the donor list or whether Stacy did the right thing wrt the debridement. Now it's about a spelling mistake. Is this really a bigger problem than all the medical impossibilities that have happened on this show these past two seasons? Or does this say something about what the show is in season 5? I wonder how much of this is really discontent with the fact that House is snooping around in his new team's lives, or whether it's discontent with the story lines that were generated from these new bits of information. On my part, it's discontent that the show is retreading old story lines in a less logical and less relevant way. When House looked into Cameron's medical file, it was because she, his fellow and someone he needed to rely on to handling patients optimally, had frozen at telling the parents their baby had died in Maternity and he wanted to know why. Mrs. Taub's bank records have nothing to do with the practice of medicine of his team, nor does how often Thirteen goes to the gym she joined. What he and Cuddy really should be worried about is how emotionally unstable she is right now and how to know when the disease starts affecting her work, not whether she could have got a better interest rate on her car loan. HL once said the show was so sucessful because it was part procedural and part-character driven drama. If in order to make the show work season 5 you have to perceive it as a farce, that's pretty far away from HL's statement.

All Namaste and Boffle were pointing out was that it was a spelling mistake, and on a word that's brought up constantly in our discussions. It had nothing to do with how it's brought up on the show. It's just annoying as hell.

If in order to make the show work season 5 you have to perceive it as a farce, that's pretty far away from HL's statement. Actually, no, no we don't. Not at all. Procedural elements still there. Check. Character development still there. Check. Farce? Not in my opinion. Farces are comedies. Though it has comic elements, House is a drama, just not a run-of-the-mill drama, it is complicated by the difficult proposition that is Greg House. Often House's diagnosis comes from seemingly insignificant details, so he pursues them when no one thinks it makes sense. In Top Secret, the cluecame from Chase complaining that he had researched everything including his grandfather's nosebleeds, which ended up being the key to the case. House's process is to gather as much data as possible until the relevant pattern comes clear to him. It's a concatenation of seemingly irrelevant things that, when put together, click into place and make sense: House is a lateral thinker who is obsessive about solving problems and his strength and his weakness both is his ability to think and act outside the box. He questions assumptions and teaches his fellows to do so. He uses humor, sarcasm and jokes both to have fun for himself and to make his points more memorable for his students. And he cast his net as wide as possible so that he won't miss the telling detail (like the dog that didn't bark in the night).

the Taub storyline was OK but House's interference bothered me much more. One, he doesn't even have the justification that the records belong to an employee, for whatever that's worth. Two, the "case" against Mrs. Taub was sketchy and there were equally likely innocent explanations, so it fails on the level of storytelling. But most importantly, it is utterly beyond the pale and beneath contempt to break into someone's house and go through their private papers out of idle curiosity. Given that House has, since the pilot, been willing to dig into sealed records to satisfy his curiosity, I don't see how anything he did to the new team was beneath contempt, but what he did with his old team was admirable somehow. He didn't have any motive in digging up things on Foreman than wondering what he'd bring up. He was intrigued on what he dug up, so he hired him. There was nothing specific there other than the same motivation he had on digging up things on his new team. And House knew he had made an assumption on Mrs. Taub--that's why he paid such careful attention to how Taub answered--he knew he was correct from Taub's reaction, not just the presence of the secret bank account. To me, it looked like a typical House move. I'm also not sure why House digging into Cameron's medical files because he wants to know more about her past is admirable, but House digging into Taub's present because he wants to know more about him is jumping the shark. The one resulted in Cameron confiding some personal details to House that fit into her overall arc; the other resulted in Taub taking House on in a way that fits into his developing arc. I wasn't thrilled with the storytelling involving Cam's crush, and I'm willing to see how the storytelling surrounding Taub's commitment issues goes. I haven't seen a House who respects boundaries about people's privacy since season one. I know it's a mileage varying issue, so we've probably covered the topic now, so I'll just say that the moment for me that made me stop and take stock of what I thought I knew about this character was when he broke into Stacy's private therapy file for manipulative purposes and shared what he found with Wilson, with not a blink of remorse at any point. Even when he talked to Stacy, he was very clear that the only thing he was sorry for was that the timing of being found out coincided with the timing of Stacy realising she liked spending time with him. That was all. I was able to accept that aspect of House in season two, and to me, the PI stuff doesn't even come close to that level of guiltless intrusion.

Sometimes the plot devices were extreme but never as unrealistic as they are now Every TV show is unrealistic. Every show operates under its own particular rules. Getting DNA results within hours? Try weeks or months in the real world. A lab of one goth girl who can do everything? Laughable. Crime scene techs who run interviews with suspects? Please. Denny Crane? Wouldn't be allowed near a courtroom. So accepting a House view of the universe in which doctors run lab -*test*-('")s, surgeons perform every type of operation, the timeline is hard to pin down (though from the first season we were informed that time isn't a constant, so that shouldn't be any surprise) and illnesses follow atypical paths is not a problem for me. It's consistent within the universe that fits House's world. Every show creates its own operating rules. It's called "dramatic license." Some of it is more extreme -- the stylized world of "Pushing Daisies" or the rules for vampires in Joss Whedon's universe -- but the same is true for the worlds of "CSI" or "NCIS" or "Numbers" or "House." So the question is not "is it realisitic" for me, but rather, can I live with the dramatic license that they're presenting. Some shows simply don't work for me because my personal suspension of disbelief doesn't work in this instance. This doesn't mean that the show's no good nor that people who do buy into it are idiots. I've never seen a David E. Kelley show that works for me, but I don't go around to those boards and preach to people who find that it does work for them. In terms of the fifth season of House -- since that's the topic of this thread -- I still buy into it because the realities presented since the very first episode are still in force in the fifth season. House gets medical cases which don't follow normal rules. House pries into people's private lives for no good reason other than his own curiosity. House is an ass. House doesn't trust labs and has his people run their own -*test*-('")s. Cuddy has, at best, a tenuous hold over House and his actions. And, most important to me, House is still a fascinating character who hides himself behind words and actions, who rarely lets anyone see what's behind his layers and is difficult to predict. The House that we see in the pilot who briefly shows himself as he talks about death to the patient, is the same guy that I still see in glimpses in the fifth season who can't even congratulate a friend or who replies in all honesty that he doesn't know why he does what he does. To me, the medical mysteries have only been plot devices from the very first that are designed to get us into House's mind, so I don't mind that they're still plot devices today because they always were.