I moved my post to the Thirteen’s thread. It’s much more fitting with the discussion happening there. :)

When Alan Sepinwall asked him about all the screen time Thirteen is getting, David Shore replied: "Honestly, I don't think I realized how much screen time she's getting," insisted "House" creator David Shore when I brought the matter up during the session. "I like Thirteen. I think it's a really cool, interesting character, and the disease and how people react to that disease is really cool Either Shore is lying and he does know how much more Thirteen is getting and he doesn't want to admit it or he doesn't know that much about his own TV show, who is on screen getting story time and who isn't. I don't know which is worse. A really good actor can make a compelling character out of very little screen time. Take RSL, for example. From the start, he was a very important part of the show and yet I think he's got less screen time over the 4 1/2 seasons of the show than OW has got this season alone. We haven't really got much of the reality of Thirteen's disease (I explained more fully in the Thirteen thread) nor have we really got anyone's reactions other than using the disease as a butt for humor. We haven't seen Foreman talk with her about his own mother's progressive degeneration, Chase bonding about losing a parent at an early age, Cameron talking to either her or anyone else about how it feels to be the one who is watching the other person die, as she indicated in Maternity. There's been nothing about Thirteen's fitness to continue to practice medicine or what the reality of her life is like. Instead, what they are doing is throwing everything at the character, secretive, acting out, illegal drugs, sex, hostage taking, legal drugs, wanting kids, brain tumor, to make this exciting! scary! breathtaking! I wonder if Shore doesn't trust OW's acting to carry the role if it were realistic and subtle. I wouldn't blame him for it because I think she's the weakest of the nine regulars. Jesse Spencer made Chase realistic and sympathetic out of nothing. Olivia Wilde can't make me care about Thirteen with all the angst of the Titanic. I am emotionally uninvolved with Taub's marital problems but I don't see why Shore should expect me to care about him. We don't know why he cheated on his wife other than the opportunity was there, we don't know why he was so determined to keep the marriage (I thought at first it was for the children but they don't have children), we don't know why he wanted to have sex with Amber (Mirror Mirror) when he gave up his job for his wife, we don't know how Rachel reacted to his confession of infidelity or why she doesn't want to have children. Very little of this story has really been told. In short, there is nothing that the show is giving me to make me care about Taub's marriage. I think we're getting Taub's story so that Shore can point to it and say "see, we needed new characters to tell new stories". The cynic in me thinks it's a cover because what he really wanted to do is highlight OW/Thirteen and Taub's marriage is the beard. A cliché becomes a cliché because it works, my teenager told me when I asked her why she had stopped watching House. The unspoken part of the statement is that if you're going to throw away the clichés, you need to replace them with something better and while Shore has happily discarded the expected, he has replaced it with something that works less well. (He also alienated a large part of the audience when he dropped Chase and Cameron and as far as I can figure out, focusing on Thirteen and Huddy hasn't replaced them.) Ensemble shows work because most viewers can find someone in the ensemble that they care about and they will watch for that character to see what happens to him or her. From the pilot through to the end of the Tritter arc, when Shore was insisting that the show was only about House, in every episode, I could always find a storyline for one of the characters that I liked. Now in season 5, when Shore is saying the show deserves awards for best ensemble cast, there are precisely three story lines dominating the season, two major (Huddy and Thirteen/Foreman) and one minor (Taub). I have no interest in any of them and the small plots for the other four characters are almost entirely gone (Kutner had precisely one this season in the on-line medical advice, Cameron had two brief moments in The Itch and Big Baby, other than his conversation about Amber in TGG Wilson has done nothing but push Huddy since Birthmarks, and Chase has yet to do anything other than wear a surgical mask or ask for a drawer). It also seems to me that House (the character) has failed to make the connections with the new team that he made with the old one. We knew even in DNR that he cared about each member of his team. Now he uses Kutner and Taub as the butt of jokes but I haven't seen him care about either. I don't think he even cares about Thirteen for all that he keeps her around when he should be firing her. What this does is make House more impoverished as a character than he was in previous seasons rather than open up the canvas for more stories. (I think it was a mistake to nominate OE as a star rather than as a supporting actor. He might have won in the supporting category. He's nowhere near as important to the show as Chandra Wilson is to GA.)

I think it might take awhile for the new team dynamic to kind of set in (for lack of a better term). I think at the beginning of the show's narrative, it took everyone a bit of time to kind of get to know all of the characters and figure out how the characters interacted with one another. Presumably, all this stuff is mapped out in advance and all of the characters are written and everything is plotted quite awhile before we see it on our TV screen. We really don't know what got cut and what worked and what didn't work while they were filming the show. I wish I did but that is kind of impossible, if I had a job getting HL's lunch I'd be the happiest person in the world. I guess that is why I don't think it worth anyone's time to argue about who is getting 'pushed to the front' etc. I don't know if they still do that thing where they get random people to come in and watch episodes and then they grade stuff and talk about what they like and don't like. If they do that, then maybe they got a great deal of positive reactions about 13 and that is why she gets an arc and stuff like that. I just think it might take awhile for them to work out what they want to do and how they plan on using the new characters and their experiences to add to the narrative within a medical mystery show. In Season 1, for instance, we got a Foreman episode (Histories) and we got a Chase episode (Cursed) but we really didn't get a Cameron episode in the sense that her stuff was kind of integrated throughout the season. We really got to know who Wilson and Cuddy were. In season 5, we've seen a 13 episode but we haven't really seen a Taub or Kutner episode. I think it would be easier if it was just House, Wilson, Cuddy, 13, Kutner, Taub. If we only had to pay attention to 6 characters, it would make things a great deal easier. They have to justify paying JM, JS, and OE. They have to give them stuff to do. I think the whole idea of turning the hiring of new fellows into a kind of reality game show type thing was interesting and true to House's character but I would have rather seen House kind of organically grow his team, the way it happened the first time. He could have hired one person, they could work on some cases and then he could hire another person. He might fire someone or force someone to quit and then hire someone else. I think that would have worked better because then Season 4 would have still been different but we wouldn't still be in the 'getting to know you' phase with TTK in Season 5. They could have done all of the same stuff, they could have still had Amber, etc. We never really got to see the first few weeks of one of his fellow's time with him. I think that would have been way more valuable than what they ended up doing. Of course, they kind of dropped the ball in Season 3 by ending the way they did. It was kind of weak. If they wanted his team to implode, they should have come up with something more dramatic and that would have paved the way for a PPTH without CCF. I think the show will continue to suffer because of the way the end Season 3 and Season 4 went down.

One of the things I find so impressive about the first episodes was that it wasn't only the highlighted character that got something, it was every character on the show that we learned something about. It's less so in Histories and Cursed than in episodes like Socratic Method, Occam's Razor, DIYD, Detox or Sports Medicine but even in those two we found out about Wilson's brother in Histories and Cursed had Cuddy balancing her responsibility to the hospital's donors with being House's boss, Wilson as Rowan's doctor and Foreman and Cameron trying to find out about Chase's past. Autopsy was on tonight. As well as Chase dealing with Andie's kiss and House mocking him for it, there was Cuddy having to make the decision to go with the autopsy, Wilson bringing Andie to House to give her some more time with her mother, Foreman making the call about where the tumor was, and the bit of business HL and JM came up with in the black walnut tea. Something for everyone. I think it might take awhile for the new team dynamic to kind of set in (for lack of a better term). I think at the beginning of the show's narrative, it took everyone a bit of time to kind of get to know all of the characters and figure out how the characters interacted with one another. I think Shore did that in the pilot, set out who everyone was and how they interacted. The House/Wilson, House/Cuddy and House/Foreman dynamics (Foreman trying to prove he's better than House) were clearly laid out from the start. We've have 29 episodes with the new characters. Episode 29 of the show was Hunting. By that point, we'd learned about all the characters and how they interacted with each other, gone through Vogler and Cameron's crush and were mid-way through the Stacy arc. Even if you only count from post-Games when the new team was in place, that's 21 episodes, the Three Stories mark in the first season. By then, who all six characters were had long been established. It's easier now since there are only three new characters to learn about, not six. I think it would be easier if it was just House, Wilson, Cuddy, 13, Kutner, Taub. If we only had to pay attention to 6 characters, it would make things a great deal easier. I think Shore won't get rid of Foreman for the same reason he won't get rid of Thirteen (unless forced to), because he likes the character so much. (IMO, like Thirteen, Foreman is a House mini-me.) There was no need to bring Foreman back to the team because they functioned fine without an attending in the first seasons, and even less reason to make it Foreman who is still a worse diagnostician than Chase or Cameron. (He even has to go to C&C in Emancipation to help him solve the case.) Maybe it would be hard writing for 9 characters if Chase and Cameron actually had had a storyline. But I don't think either of them have. Chase has really had nothing at all other than surgery scenes that used to be done by various doctors in previous seasons and a footnote in Cameron's story in The Itch. Cameron had something in The Itch but it was the medical story and even that plus her personal stuff took less time than House dealing with having kissed Cuddy. She had a bit more in Big Baby but that lasted only one episode and there was still Huddy and Foreteen advancement in that. I think neither Cameron nor Chase are taking away the time they might have spent exploring Kutner or doing a serious exploration of where House and Wilson are in their relationship right now, something that was promo'ed like crazy over the summer and very quickly wrapped up and dropped.

I agree that a good writer could certainly integrate all of the characters into a coherent narrative but I just don't think that the writing is there right now and I don't know what the problem is. It kind of reminds me of Buffy, in a way, because Seasons 6 and 7 of Buffy had the same group of people involved for the most part but the quality wasn't really up to the standards of the earlier seasons. I think many of the problems they had were do to not plotting the Season after something major happened within the narrative in a way that spoke to major shake up but also kept forward momentum and laid the groundwork for the remaining characters to effectively continue on. This is tricky to do and many of the issues can be traced back to the end of Season 3. If it was me, I would have locked the doors and had the writers outline the arc and go into great detail about how they were going to handle the situation. To me, it just doesn't seem like they did that. Buffy being dead and House's team leaving are the two kind of defining moments, neither writing staff really dealt with the transition well in order to keep things moving forward. However, I think the panacea for each show would have been different. In House's case, I really think they needed to start fresh and get new people. As much as I liked CCF, I think it cheapened the narrative to keep them around. I just hope House doesn't end, two seasons after its big event because I still think the show has good parts to it and it is still entertaining. Although, I watched Buffy till the bitter end as well. It also didn't really surprise me that I was unhappy in the beginning. I was pretty unhappy with Meaning back at the beginning of Season 3, which was the other kind of 'major change' episode.

I had a thought about Season 5 so I read back a few pages to catch up on the general drift of the comments before posting. This thread is so dense with wonderfully valid ideas from all points of the compass I hesitate to begin! Cuddy's character has been readjusted quickly and without precision or apparent transitioning this season. Lisa E. must have been asking herself, "Who am I this time?" Overall, I respect the storyteller but I reserve the right to relate to the story with my own inner compass in tact. Nor am I required to catch every ball the show runners throw at me. That is for Hugh, Lisa, and Robert to do as actors. I might consider some balls out of bounds. Chipmunk_love's notion of 'Cuddy hyperbole' and Lully's of Cuddy "jumping all over the place" this season struck a chord with me. But my thought involves both House and Cuddy. In the Season 5 episodes between Cuddy losing Joy and the priest in "Unfaithful", House and Cuddy seem to be exchanging roles more and more. It reminds me of the idea of a walk in someone else's shoes. Cuddy is becoming the childish gamester and House the stabilizing mature one. It's a bit of a literary device employed to foster deeper understanding between characters. Could this be one reason for the impatient character stretching? But who knows what the results will be on House MD. (-:

Glad my post about the 13 arc made sense to you, peggy06 and cutie_honey. I have the sense that in David Shore's House-world only the character of House needs to be strictly and faithfully maintained, developed, and serviced. With all other characters Shore reserves the dramatic luxury of skewing, tweaking, stretching, or distorting if it serves the story swirling around House. The only problem I have with that is my loyalty to Cuddy. My solution is to not take the "office squatting" or "bitter practical jokes" as a manifestation of her inner character but a writer's caricature, a flight of fancy, or artistic license that is only temporarily valid. Then its back to reset within more realistic, believable, and organic boundaries. Cuddy's character has been readjusted quickly and without precision or apparent transitioning this season. Lisa E. must have been asking herself, "Who am I this time?" Overall, I respect the storyteller but I reserve the right to relate to the story with my own inner compass in tact. Nor am I required to catch every ball the show runners throw at me. That is for Hugh, Lisa, and Robert to do as actors. I might consider some balls out of bounds. I too like Cuddy and I enjoy House/Cuddy tremendously. I thought the writing for House/Cuddy was absolutely brilliant right up to The Itch but have very mixed feelings about it after that. HL’s and LE’s stellar acting and incredible chemistry help tremendously, of course, but I too use the solution you very nicely described in order to continue enjoying the arc. But there’s no denying that it's been one hell of a bumpy ride. One big problem with doing a romantic arc with House is that since they can only have him change very slowly, they can’t show him discussing or expressing his emotions openly. The other big problem is that the romance is with Cuddy, his boss, and she can’t just exit the show once it is over, at least not permanently. So not only do they have to find ways to slow down the romance and complicate it, but they have to do so in a way that these two characters can return to some semblance of their original dynamic when it’s over. While I can well imagine that it must be a challenge to write under all these constraints, it still doesn’t justify the extent to which the storylines and characters (especially Cuddy’s) have gotten stretched in this arc. I am guessing that they didn’t really have a plan for how to develop the Cuddy character after The Itch. Different authors wrote pretty much whatever they liked for her from episode to episode and so the result is that the writing feels both OOC and all over the map. I can still try and piece together some sense of her behavior within episodes but it has been impossible for me to pick up the thread across episodes and I am starting to suspect there isn’t one. In Emancipation we saw a cold, hard look on Cuddy’s face when she told Foreman that you didn’t wait for House to give you things, you took them from him. But then in Last Resort we saw her throwing these loving and concerned looks at him. Then in LTEC she suddenly took over his office in war mode and attire but then didn’t really have an answer for why when he called her out on it. And despite how badly things ended between them, in the next episode she brought a case to House for no apparent reason (it wasn’t a donor or a famous person) which made his insulting remarks about her wanting to hang around him seem true. In Painless, she was almost begging Cam, an employee, to help her out with baby- sitting House. They wrote her well in Big Baby but then of course in the very next episode she was physically hurting House. I also don't get how getting Cuddy's college desk is a romantic gesture. She's no longer an undergraduate or medical student, she's a professional who demands respect from those who work for her and those who she's is trying to influence to donate money to the hospital. IMO, the last thing she needs in her office is an old beat-up desk from her college days. Maybe I've been reading too much Robert Langs but House getting Cuddy the desk seemed to me to say "No matter how high you rise, no matter what you achieve, to me you'll still always be the kid who was trying to pass her exams." I guess I don’t see why House would go to the trouble of sending her a rather complicated and cruel message through a desk when he tells her exactly what he thinks of her to her face all the time. We also saw him stroking the desk rather contemplatively a couple of episodes later. And Cuddy did very well in med school, so the desk must hold positive memories for her. Having said that, I am not sure it was a romantic gesture either. That would depend on when he ordered it and what his state of mind was. But it certainly was a tender and caring gesture because he seemed to know that it would make her happy, which raises questions about the kind of relationship they shared in Michigan. I hope we get to learn more about both the desk and their past as the season progresses.

maya, I want to quote your entire post but I'll settle for..."it's been one hell of a bumpy ride."

From The Softer Side thread: I'm glad that to21be gave such a detailed explanation because to say "entertainment" is dismissive of viewers who don't find the show entertaining. I feel that this is probably going off-topic for this particular thread, but why would a viewer watch a television drama week after week which they don't find entertaining?

e_c, I think you've summarized one problem I have when watching House S4/S5. I do tend to hold the show to a different standard than I do most TV. It's unfair, I know, but true. There are many shows I can watch, be entertained and feel I didn't waste the time I spent watching. But House at it's finest is one of the best programs I've ever seen. As a result, if another show I watched produced a One Day, One Room I'd say it was okay -- the clinic patients were fun and the lead actor looked particularly great. But when House comes out with an episode like that I say "What were they thinking? That was awful." For me there have been too many "What were they thinking?" episodes in S4 and S5. I've been entertained by a lot of it (except the life and times of Thirteen) but I haven't been wowed. I was with Unfaithful and The Softer Side. And I'm hoping it's a sign that the show is back on track. ETA: And, of course, I'd turn in every week to watch HL breathe (or not breathe in The Softer Side.) I'm besotted enough to find that entertaining.

Personally, I'm continually entertained because I'm interested in what happens next. To dwell on how they handled a medical or personal or personnel issue in the past is akin to the nostalgia of the "good old days." It glosses over problems that were always there. Every season has had its hits and misses. For every "Three Stories," there was "Poison." (To me, still the worst episode ever. </comic book guy>) For every character exploration ala "The Mistake" there was, to me, the unforgivable and always unforgivable Cindy Lou Who actions in "Acceptance." (Thirteen, to me, has never come near the intense dislike I have for Cameron between the crush and "Acceptance." I accept her presence when it's there -- for that matter, I'm not a person who dwells on things I don't like -- but I certainly don't miss her when she's gone.) And, while I may like Chase, I much prefer the combo of Kutner and Taub and what they bring to the table that's new, rather than rehashing old issues. Mind you, I still enjoy the old episodes, but I'm far more entertained by the prospect of what happens next, than rewatching the same thing again and again and again.

From Softer Side thread: I'm glad that to21be gave such a detailed explanation because to say "entertainment" is dismissive of viewers who don't find the show entertaining. By that logic, isn't saying the show now sucks (however nicely phrased) being dismissive of viewers, who are still entertained and like the show? That's not my opinion, by the way, I'm just respectfully questioning your reasoning in the above statement. Of course the show has changed. Pretty much every show does. But whether or not the change has been negative, positive, or simply different is the decision of every single viewer. Just as you probably don't like being told that the show is still as strong as ever and that you should love it, there are viewers (me included), who do enjoy the show and don't want to be told that they are so wrong in still loving it, because it's lost so much. It makes me feel like I'm being called stupid for not noticing. I'm not saying you did that. It's just a reason why I post and read less and less. The truth lies in the eye of the beholder, or something. Maybe we can agree on that. And as long as discussion remains discussion and not an attempt at conversion, everything is fine. :D I'm confident that if my displeasure ever outweighs my pleasure when watching the show, I'll simply stop watching and look for something else. Maybe I'm to blame for dismissing the opinion of viewers who, by their own admission, haven't watched a whole episode, because they switched channels or turned off their TV for whatever reason. It's because I don't understand how one can have an opinion on something one hasn't actually seen. I'll try to be more open. :wink: I'd love to discuss the points you made about why you are not entertained anymore. I don't know if I can keep up with your speed and quantity though. :wink: ETA: I'm on the verge of deleting this again. I don't want it to be misunderstood. This was just flow of thoughts, not whining about opposed opinions. With the bitterness and satisfaction threads we can all find a home to vent positively or negatively, which is awesome. Just take this as the ramblings of an unordered mind. :wink: