Kiss Off, Part Six

Dear House, M.D.,

Please don’t look at me like that; you had to sense this was coming. I know, things were great in the beginning–you were funny, yet poignant, and Hugh Laurie is fantastic in anything. My husband and I sat down every week to watch you together as our only shared show. We laughed and cheered and sometimes wept with you. There are so many episodes from seasons one and two that I almost know by heart.

Sigh.

Then it got harder to watch every week and your episodes starting piling up in our DVR. We figured we’d watch them in time and never deleted them, even when the number of unwatched episodes grew to ridiculous double digits. We wanted to stay.

But here’s the thing that made me realize it was over between us: we got a new DVR last year when we switched cable companies. That was in April. In December a friend asked me if I’d been watching House. It was then that I realized we had forgotten to program you into the new DVR. We hadn’t missed you at all.

I know how hard that is to hear; it’s even harder to say. All along we’ve bought the DVDs and rewatched favorite episodes, but it seems for the last couple of seasons, we’ve forgotten to do that too. I promise we will someday. I feel we owe that at least.

I wish I could say it wasn’t you, it’s us, but that would be a lie. Instead I will say this: we still love Hugh Laurie, we just don’t love House. Something tells me from the little bit I caught the other day, Hugh Laurie isn’t crazy about House anymore either. (Robert Sean Leonard looks pretty tragic, too, but then he always looks that way to me–it’s a Dead Poet’s residual effect I suppose.)

Thank you, House for making me disclose everything to my doctors and providing wonderful examples of the anti-hero in my classroom. I also have been known to rock your blazer with graphic tee combo to great success. However, the plots are too predictable most of the time and ridiculous the rest of the time.

My hope is that someday we’ll meet again, like the end of The Way We Were. The music will swell and we’ll put your DVDs in our cart and I’ll get to say, “Your run was lovely, House.” And mean it.

XO

A