Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/1738
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Yes, and Ralph Gallagher's answer identifies the pattern pretty well.

Why does it make for a popular show? I think it's because it gives audiences something familiar, something they can expect to see every week, while still allowing a lot of room for variety within that structure. Most stories adhere to some kind of structure, whether it's as rigid as the one on "House" or something more general. You may have encountered the "roller coaster" model for basic story structure back in grade school: the setup, rising action, climax, falling action, and conclusion. It's a very simple model, but one a lot of stories use, whether consciously or not and often with some variations. Most hald hour TV shows work on a three act structure. Movies are generally between three and five acts, with some exceptions.

The structural nature of procedural dramas also plays in to the audience knowledge of how TV shows work. The viewers know that House and his team aren't going to solve the medical mystery in the first fifteen minutes, or that whoever the detectives on any version of "Law & Order" won't be the right suspect because there' still more than half the show to go. So it becomes a given that House's team won't guess right on the first try or the cops will initially collar the wrong suspect. There's still room to surprise the audience, though. House's initial diagnosis may turn out to be right, but other factors may lead him and his team to incorrectly conclude that it isn't. Or the detective may have the right suspect, but not the right evidence.

A lot of heavily structured TV shows will occasionally do a show that breaks the structure. Last night's episode of "House," for example, barely had anything to do with the medical case.

And every once in a very great while, it actually **is** lupus.

Addendum: Another reason that "House" is able to work while still being so formulaic is that the human drama is more important than the medical mystery. "House" has a lot of trappings of the mystery genre (in part because it's partly based on Sherlock Holmes), but it isn't the kind of mystery where the viewer gets all the necessary clues and tries to guess the solution. Unless you're incredibly knowledgeable about rare medical conditions, you'll never guess what's wrong with the patient of the week. Indeed, the event that cause's House's epiphany is usually completely unrelated to the actual case. It doesn't matter if the patient has endocarditis or heavy metal poisoning. What matters is that the patient believes that his faith is keeping him alive or feel guilty about the death of her son or that one of the team is having a crisis of confidence.

Original score: 4