There are two kinds of people in the English-speaking world. Those who haven’t watched House MD and those who know it’s never lupus. Those who think that The Pitt is a good show and those who know that if you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people. Those who think House is a medical drama and those who know you can’t always get what you want, but if you try hard enough you might get what you need.Those of us who worship at the altar of Hugh Laurie’s greatest creation can never get over the show that’s perhaps the greatest Sherlock adaptation ever created, including the BBC one.For the uninitiated, House is a synonym of Holmes, and Arthur Conan Doyle based his definitive detective’s portrayal on Joseph Bell, a Scottish surgeon and diagnostician who came up with The Method. As Arthur Conan Doyle, who served as his outpatient clerk, noted: “Dr Bell would diagnose people as they came in, before they even opened their mouths. He would tell them their symptoms and even give them details of their past life, and hardly ever would he make a mistake.”A doctor who knows everything about a patient before he even opens his mouth? Sound familiar? Even the show made no bones about this connection, with Wilson, the Watson counterpart, gifting House Joseph Bell’s Manual of the Operations of Surgery.But why are we revisiting one of television’s greatest shows 14 years after it aired?Because a new watcher suddenly discovered that every House MD episode has a recurring theme, as was wont in shows that came out in the early noughties: similar narrative, House getting the diagnosis wrong, which continues a few times before Hugh Laurie gets a leftfield idea and gets his diagnosis right. And then she wondered: “Eight seasons of this?”To be fair, that can be said about almost every television show, including Mad Men: Don Draper is stumped with work. He has a drink. He abuses Pete or Peggy. He goes to sleep. He wanders off in the middle of the day to sleep with someone’s wife. And then he has a eureka moment just when the clients are about to walk out. The backlash was immediate from a host of House fans who have sadly imbibed his misanthropic zeitgeist, leading the poster to even write about her online fight with Hugh Laurie.While this might have earned retribution, as is wont from House fans, Hugh Laurie decided to step up to the plate and wrote: “Thanks for your critique, Janet. 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. Then we tried some where House never gets it right and the patient dies. The audience wasn’t happy. 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. Nonetheless, I look forward to your first novel!” It was, in every essence, a classic House burn that every fan is familiar with, like the time he told Foreman: If her DNA was off by 1%, she would be a dolphin. Or that he was going to perform an autopsy on a live person. Or observing that sometimes the best gift is the gift of never seeing someone again.Now, one is not defending rabid fans online. The anonymity of the internet has truly allowed all people to bare their fangs and show their worst versions, but there’s something to House that goes beyond being a simple medical drama. The eponymous protagonist is a symbol of everything we have come to detest about modern life: a bureaucratic system that rewards mediocrity over merit, a world where we are shoehorned into behaving in a particular manner, and a society that constantly judges us based on how we peacock rather than perform.That is why the critique of House as merely a repetitive medical drama misses the entire point. The diagnosis was the plot, not the point. The formula was the frame, not the painting. Every episode may have begun with a patient collapsing spectacularly, but the real illness was usually somewhere else: in the family, in the lie, in the shame, in the thing nobody wanted to admit. The body was simply the one character incapable of maintaining polite fiction.House worked because it turned medicine into moral philosophy without making it sound like a college seminar. The question each week was rarely just “What disease is this?” It was: what truth are these people hiding from themselves? What happens when kindness obstructs competence? Is it better to be comforted by a lie or saved by a bastard? Can someone who has no interest in being good still do good? And does being right excuse the carnage you leave behind?This is why “Everybody lies” became more than a catchphrase. It was the show’s entire worldview. Patients lied because they were ashamed. Families lied because they were afraid. Doctors lied because they were human. Society lied because civilisation itself is often a system of acceptable evasions. House, for all his cruelty, refused to participate in that theatre. He was not polite. He was not therapeutic. He was not well-adjusted. But he was useful. In a world increasingly built around looking correct rather than being competent, that made him both monstrous and irresistible.Of course, the genius of the show comes down to Hugh Laurie’s own magnificence as an actor. For example, folks who didn’t know Laurie in his previous avatar couldn’t even believe that he is actually a British actor based on his American accent. In his younger days, he was a champion rower and dated Emma Thompson at Cambridge, where he met his future comedy partner Stephen Fry. The university dramatic club they were part of also produced the British surreal comedy group Monty Python. Laurie, like House, is also a trained musician. He and Fry, who would play Sherlock’s older brother Mycroft in A Game of Shadows, have a series of remarkable skits where they unravel different aspects of British neuroses in different settings, from the pub to the football ground. He is equally resplendent as PG Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster to Fry’s Jeeves. And while the script was tight, it all came down to Laurie’s portrayal of the Vicodin-addicted genius. Now, if one was perfectly honest, the show drifted a tad too much, going overboard with the addiction and love angle in the last couple of seasons, but before that, like Mad Men, which too drifted into a sadder era as Don Draper unravelled, it was TV entelechy.That is perhaps why Laurie’s response felt so perfect. It was not just a celebrity defending his old show. It had the rhythm of House himself: irritation, intelligence, insult, analogy, dismissal. The critic had seen repetition. Laurie saw a failure to understand variation. A Sherlock story does not become pointless because Sherlock solves the case. A raga does not become shallow because it returns to the same scale. A ghazal does not become redundant because the rhyme keeps coming back. The question is what the repetition reveals. And House MD revealed quite a lot. It revealed that people want truth only when it flatters them. It revealed that society admires competence, but mostly when competence behaves itself. It revealed that honesty without warmth can become cruelty, and warmth without honesty can become anaesthesia. It revealed that House was both the cure and the symptom: the man who could diagnose everyone except himself.And then, in the most deliciously un-House twist of all, Hugh Laurie apologised.After his burn went viral, Laurie said he was sorry if people had been having a go at the critic because of his tweet. He said that was not the plan, that he had been “very slightly drunk” and already upset about something else, and that he was really sticking up for the writers he adored. Which is where the illusion finally broke.House would never have apologised. House would have doubled down, stolen Wilson’s lunch, insulted Cuddy, and somehow concluded that the critic’s take was caused by a rare neurological disorder. Laurie, however, stepped back. He recognised the imbalance. He admitted the mistake. The man who had sounded exactly like House for one glorious online moment then did the most un-House thing imaginable: he behaved decently.That is why it was never lupus.It was never even medicine.It was House.Until, of course, Hugh Laurie apologised. Which proved the final diagnosis: Hugh Laurie may have briefly become House online, but unlike House, he still knew when to stop being him.