Hugh Laurie says he was a little tipsy when he tore into a TV critic over her take on House. The actor posted Monday on X that he was “very slightly drunk and already upset about something” unrelated when he responded to British journalist Janet Murray, who had complained that the long-running medical drama followed the “same narrative every episode,” NBC News reports.
- “Patient has mysterious illness. Hugh Laurie (House) gets diagnosis wrong,” Murray wrote on X. “Patient nearly dies. Hugh Laurie gets diagnosis wrong again. Gets threatened with being fired. Patient nearly dies again. Hugh Laurie has last minute leftfield idea. Gets diagnosis right. Doesn’t get fired. Eight seasons of this?”
Laurie fired back with a response that Murray called “sharp, witty, and unmistakably patronizing” in a story she wrote for Unherd about the clash. He joked that episodes where his character, Dr. House, nailed the diagnosis immediately were “6 minutes long” and NBC wasn’t happy. “Then we tried some where House never gets it right and the patient dies,” he wrote. “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??” Laurie wrote. “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!”
- After Murray, noting that she has 38,000 followers on X while Laurie has 1.2 million, wrote that she had suffered “some fairly horrific trolling” from House fans. Laurie apologized. “I’m a thin-skinned t—, apparently, even though it wasn’t my skin,” he wrote. “I was sticking up for the writers who I adored.”
