House

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Hugh Laurie gets a pay rise

14 July 2006 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Hugh Laurie in HouseYou have to love it when a Brit does well in Hollywood. House MD‘s Hugh Laurie – everyone’s favourite grumpy, Sherlock Holmes-inspired doctor – has just had his pay per episode tripled to between $275,000 and $300,000. Hoorah!

Turns out that Fox has realised that the only reason anyone watches the show is because of Laurie. So understandably, given it’s a ratings smash in the US, they’d like to make sure he doesn’t quit so he can come back to the UK and appear in a drama about life under Thatcher in the 80s or something.

Can’t see him getting that kind of cash from the Beeb, can you, and it should make up for not getting an Emmy nomination this time around, as well.

Next season on House

22 June 2006 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

The finale of House hasn’t aired on Five yet, although you can read my potted, spoiler-free review if you’d like. But bookmark this blog entry for the day it does. If you’re confused after you’ve seen it, writer and House creator David Shore has given an explanation for the events at the New Jersey Star Ledger and discusses some of the plans for the start of the next season. They sound promising.

Incidentally, did you know that pretending to use a cane while filming 22 episodes of a TV show each year can be quite painful? Hugh Laurie’s shoulder is more than a little bit sore now and they fixed Kerry Weaver’s hip on ER because it was hurting Laura Innes so much.

Five’s plans for new channels are going badly wrong

8 June 2006 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Well, they may have invented a channel just for me, Five US, but no good deed goes unpunished. It looks like there won’t actually be any programmes on it, according to Broadcast.

Five’s new US acquisitions channel is facing an autumn launch without a number of its biggest hit shows, including House, Grey’s Anatomy and Law and Order.

Living TV owns the exclusive rights to Grey’s Anatomy, which it licenses to Five but does not want to share with Five US. Hallmark, meanwhile, is not prepared to give up multichannel rights to popular Five series House, Law and Order, Special Victims Unit and Criminal Intent.

Five is also locked in a bidding war with Living over the multichannel rights to its highest rated series CSI with US producer Alliance Atlantis. Living is believed to hold the rights to the most recent series of the show but older episodes coming out of licence are up for grabs.

So what can we expect to see instead?

Five US is expected to launch its limited hours primetime line-up with recently purchased series it owns exclusively, male-skewing Hollywood movies, music shows, US documentaries and US sport.

Aargh! That’s not a TV channel just for me! That’s a TV channel expressly designed to ensure I never watch so much as a second of it! I have visions of Five US turning into ESPN 8, aka “the Ocho”, from Dodgeball: “And now, live from Arizona, midget-tossing!”

Oh well. Maybe something better will come along.

US TV

Season finales: Scrubs and House

1 June 2006 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

In the penultimate of my series of finale guides this week, I’m having a look at two medical dramas: House and Scrubs (no, I won’t be covering Grey’s Anatomy: it’s pants).

House's finale

House

With no real story arcs to clear up, House could have just ended with business as usual. Instead, the season has a cracking and indeed shocking conclusion. There’s enough misdirection in it to make it hard for all but the most jaded to spot what’s going on. There’s also no pat resolution, making it a tense summer for the House fan. Although we can guess that the regular character in jeopardy will survive through to the next season, there’s a possibility that things won’t return to the status quo: indeed, the episode went through most of the possible changes that could occur, so you’ll be able to spend the wait working out which is the most likely.

Tension factor: 8/10

Scrubsfinale

Scrubs

This season’s been a bit rubbish, so it’s no surprise that the finale should be rubbish. Resorting to one pregnancy: that’s a bit tired, but reasonably acceptable. Resorting to two pregnancies: that’s starting to suggest desperation. But three pregnancies? Just how few ideas do you have to have left to try that? No real tension here, given that we’ve had no build up to these bolts from the blue, so don’t fret too much.

Tension factor: 2/10

Buckley’s Crime Show Hypothesis needs a new name

4 May 2006 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

On Saturday, I suggested that the producers of US crime shows don’t watch any of the other shows. I’ve now decided to expand the hypothesis to include other genres, thus necessity a name change for the hypothesis, which will now be called “Buckley’s ‘All producers live in Islington’ hypothesis” (so-called because only people in Islington say things like “Of course, we don’t actually watch television. In fact, we don’t even own a television set. Ha, ha, ha!”).

I’m prompted to do this hypothesis-expansion because of Monday’s episode of Prison Break. During the last five minutes of the show, there was an extended montage overlaid with an instrumental version of Massive Attack’s Teardrop. “So what?” you ask yourselves. Well, the thing is Prison Break airs on the Fox network in the US, as does House MD, everyone’s favourite tale of grumpy doctors. And as I’ve droned on about ad nauseum, the theme tune to House in the US isn’t the same as it is in the UK (the UK’s theme is apparently called “Buddha Grass Soul(kpm 548)” and was composed for the show especially, because of licensing issues). The US theme to House is in fact Massive Attack’s Teardrop. Two Fox shows in more or less the same time slot, both using the same piece of music.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have mentioned this to avoid being too anal about it. But Variety picked up on it, too. When quizzed though, Fox replied, “The music supervisor for Prison Break didn’t know it was the theme song for House.” But as Variety’s Josef Adalian points out, surely one of the producers of Prison Break will have watched House at some point.

Except if my hypothesis is right, of course… Still, I feel I need more evidence before I can bump my hypothesis up to the status of theory. And ‘Law’ is going to be a long time coming, I suspect.