Actor Hugh Laurie regretted and publicly apologized to the journalist who criticized the scripts for the series ‘Dr. House’. The 66-year-old English star attributed his hostility to the fact that he was “slightly very drunk” when he read her criticism and decided to hit back at it.
Laurie made his apology on X, formerly Twitter, after the author of the review he attacked said she was being subjected to hostility from trolls and fans of ‘Dr. House’.
In this case, the conflict led by Laurie began when journalist Janet Murray made a post drawing attention to certain formulaic and repetitive aspects of ‘Dr. House’.
In Murray’s assessment, the episodes of ‘Dr. House’ followed more or less this pattern: “A patient presents with a mysterious illness. Hugh Laurie makes the wrong diagnosis. The patient almost dies. Hugh Laurie gets the diagnosis wrong again. He is threatened with dismissal. The patient almost dies again. Hugh Laurie has an unexpected idea in the last few minutes. He gets the diagnosis right. He doesn’t get fired. Eight seasons of this?”
The English actor then responded: “Thanks for your review, Janet. We actually tried to do a few episodes where House got the diagnosis right the first time, but they were only six minutes long. NBC wasn’t satisfied. Then we tried a few where House never got the diagnosis right and the patient died. The public wasn’t happy.”
Then Laurie stated: “We could apply his blunt analysis to other forms of art: J. S. Bach composed 30 Goldberg Variations on the same harmonic structure; Frida Kahlo painted around 50 self-portraits; Henry Moore, then, that’s not even mentioned… The question was — or is — exploring variations on the same theme. If all you see is ‘hospital, medicine, blah-blah-blah’, then maybe the work simply wasn’t done for you.”
Laurie then returned to X to apologize when she saw a post from Murray lamenting the attacks she was experiencing following his post.
The artist stated in the new post: “I apologize if people picked on you because of my tweet. That was not the intention at all. I was slightly too drunk and already upset about something that had nothing to do with you. If it’s any consolation, I also got yelled at for that. Apparently I’m a very sensitive idiot, although it wasn’t even my skin that was at stake.”
Hugh Laurie concluded by saying, “I was defending the writers I loved. Obviously, I shouldn’t have cited Bach, Kahlo, and Moore—I was practically asking for trouble—and I would have been better off using as an example the 10,000 blues songs written around the same 12-bar structure. I’ve heard most of them and will keep listening. Because we love what we love.”
Hugh Laurie starred in ‘Dr. House’ between 2004 and 2012. For his production work, he won two Golden Globes and received seven Emmy nominations.