10 TV Shows That Should Have Quit While They Were Ahead

7. House

House follows the rules of the formulaic network television procedural, telling twenty-something stories a season about a team of dedicated, brilliant diagnosticians faced with an impossible medical condition every week, finding the clues to solve the puzzle before it's too late.

Now, with your typical procedural (NCIS, CSI - any of the acronyms, really), any character-based plotwork is normally relegated to the background. If there's a narrative arc, it's a sketchy one: perhaps a recurring character or plot device, but nothing the show hangs its hat on. The characters enter the show fully formed, in the shape that they'll retain throughout their run: because the characters are hooks to hang the plot on, not the other way around.

The problem with House is that it wants to have its cake and eat it. It wants to be a simple procedural, but it also wants to be a character study about Dr. Gregory House, the damaged, obnoxious medical genius - and this is a character that wouldn't last a week at any professionally run hospital, never mind eight years.

To cover this angle, creator David Shore and his writing staff continually came up with obstacles for House to circumvent: authority figures who would mess with House the same way he messed with everyone else (rather than simply firing, suing or imprisoning him immediately, as would happen in real life). We get multiple episodes based around dreams or hallucinations, and a constantly rotating cast of doctors to surround himself with, who will put up with his bullsh*t.

But at its core, House is a procedural, which relies on the character beats remaining largely the same in order to pursue the formula. That means that the purported character study was a fake. House wasn€™'t ever going to change. There was no character arc here, just the illusion of one, the show messing with the audience just as House messed with his co-workers.

Static and - ironically - dishonest, House should have died a death around the fourth season. After all, the show literally jumped the shark in season five, House being shown playing with a toy shark to episode eighteen.