The 15 Best House M.D. Episodes Ranked

Nowadays, Fox’s “House M.D.” almost feels like a relic of a different time in television history, in which a network show with over 20 episodes a year could still be essentially a prestige concoction, carried by smart, profound writing, heady themes, and ambitious character work, while still conforming enough to a cozy weekly formula to become a ratings hit — one massive enough to cost Hugh Laurie his role in “Superman Returns,” no less.

While some of the show’s 177 episodes are so similar as to start blurring into each other in retrospect, many “House” episodes have stood the test of time as first-rate hours of television by any reasonable criteria — installments in which Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie, who did an American accent all throughout any given shooting day, but later used a single word to switch between British and American accents on “Avenue 5”) was not just one of the greatest detectives in TV history, but a catalyst for searching and creative storytelling that used medicine to reflect on the mysteries of the human soul. 

Here, we’ve compiled a ranking of the 15 best ever. Beware of spoilers for each episode’s basic setup, though we won’t ruin their twists or conclusions.

On “Locked In,” the 19th episode of season 5, House is involved in a motorcycle accident while riding through Middletown, NY, and wakes up in an emergency room next to a patient (Yasiin Bey, then known as Mos Def) who is at first thought to be brain-dead. Soon, however, House notices that he’s following people with his eyes, meaning that he’s conscious but unable to move. The patient is transferred to Princeton-Plainsboro and House’s team sets out to diagnose him, while Wilson tries to figure out what House was doing in Middletown.

The episode’s unusual point of view, unfolding largely from the patient’s impotent perspective with narration of his thoughts peppered throughout, makes “Locked In” a particularly gripping hour, one that makes the most of its dramatic concept and doles out information about the case about as inventively and unexpectedly as any episode of “House” ever has. It’s a textbook case of the show freshening itself up by imagining the way an outsider would respond to the reiterative ensemble dynamic of House’s team; to boot, the mystery is one of the best-constructed in the show’s history.

About as close as we’ve come to a “House” bottle episode, the 18th episode of season 3, “Airborne,” has two parallel plotlines. The first, focused on House and Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), is set entirely on an airplane back from a symposium in Singapore, and we follow House and Cuddy’s efforts to figure out what’s going on when a massive outbreak of what may be a dangerous disease begins to spread through the plane’s passengers. The second, more straightforward one is set at Princeton-Plainsboro as Wilson, Eric Foreman (Omar Epps), Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), and Robert Chase (Jesse Spencer) try to diagnose a woman with seizures.

“House” was a show that shone when it departed from formula, and “Airborne” offers an opportunity to delight not just in a remixed cast dynamic — with House and Cuddy working together on a case for once — but in the resourcefulness spurred by a taut closed-quarters scenario with close to zero medical infrastructure. House’s skills have never been more impressive than during his attempt to improvise a facsimile of his hospital work environment out of random passengers and medication pulled from carry-on bags.

The season finale of Season 2, “No Reason,” features a ton of highly dramatic and momentous incident — beginning with a threat to House’s own life. At first, it looks like any other week, with House and the team treating a patient with a swollen tongue. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a man (Elias Koteas, who played Casey Jones in the influential 1990 “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” movie) walks into the hospital and shoots House in the stomach. Soon, House and the shooter himself, shot by hospital security, are sharing the same ICU room, and House must continue to work on the week’s case from his bed while struggling through hallucinations.

Naturally, there’s plenty of tension and emotion to be found in House’s life-or-death predicament, and placing him as his own shooter’s roommate allows the episode to put a very interesting spin on his usual superiority-asserting banter with guest stars. Even more crucially, however, “No Reason” makes for a fascinating early glimpse into the depths of House’s tortured psyche, with each new shocking development leading us further down the rabbit hole of the moral war raging inside him.

“Nobody’s Fault” is built as a series of flashbacks unfolding from a disciplinary hearing in which Dr. Walter Colfield (Jeffrey Wright) — who used to mentor Foreman as a Johns Hopkins professor — interviews House, Foreman, Christopher Taub (Peter Jacobson), Chi Park (Charlyne Yi), and Jessica Adams (Odette Anable) about an incident in which a series of unfortunate decisions led to a patient having a psychotic breakdown while unrestrained and stabbing Chase with a scalpel.

Season 8 of “House” struggled with building out a compelling new cast in the wake of the numerous season 7 departures, but the new team of Taub, Park, Adams, and Chase feels truly vivid and full of texture here, as the episode uses its framing device to cross-examine the four of them, plus House and Foreman, in thoughtful, incisive ways. It’s a great opportunity for the show to reflect on how far House, Foreman, and Chase have come and how deep their relationships have grown. At the same time, House’s bitter scuffle with Dr. Colfield is masterfully written and acted, with Wright easily going down as one of Hugh Laurie’s best-ever verbal sparring partners.

On the seventh episode of season 3, “Son of Coma Guy,” a lot of the typical machinations of a “House” episode are pared down to the interplay between just three men — none of whom are the patient of the week. After a man (Zeb Newman) collapses into seizures while visiting his comatose father (John Larroquette), House believes that he may be suffering from a genetic condition and finds a way to awaken the father for 24 hours so that he can be interviewed. Meanwhile, Michael Tritter (David Morse) continues his vendetta against House by putting pressure on his team.

The gist of the episode is the refusal of Gabriel Wozniak, the awakened man, to behave in the ways that would be expected of a coma patient given 24 hours to live. The road trip that he, House, and Wilson take to Atlantic City finds writer Doris Egan coming up with creative ways to riff on the usual “diagnostics through personal life investigation” format while asking surprisingly deep questions about the value of human attachments and what it means to live a life.

One of the earliest episodes to tackle House’s Vicodin addiction more directly, season 1’s “Detox” is also arguably the first “House” episode to complicate the master diagnostician into a more fallible figure, by having him exhibit significant potential lapses in judgment and method. The week’s case finds House treating a young man (Nicholas D’Agosto) experiencing abnormal bleeding after a car crash, but the gist of the episode is the context in which the investigation occurs: House has agreed to Cuddy’s offer of a month off clinic duty in exchange for a week off Vicodin, and he’s trying to crack the case while battling increasingly severe withdrawal symptoms.

With House’s withdrawal pain hardening him into an even more cruel and objective version of himself, “Detox” becomes an exercise in vicious directness — a case approached as a mathematical problem, with no time for management of the feelings of the patient or his family. It’s a perfect showcase for the way that “House,” at its best, managed to use mystery-solving and its attending processes as a window into House’s existential pain.

The 20th episode of season 5, “Simple Explanation,” follows a classically knotty case of the week, in which an elderly woman (Colleen Camp) comes down with respiratory failure while visiting her husband (Meat Loaf) on what’s believed to be his deathbed — only for the husband to start improving while the wife’s condition worsens. But really, the case is just a narrative through line — and, at points, an outright distraction — to offset the episode’s big story: House’s team learns that Lawrence Kutner (Kal Penn, who left the show suddenly due to a job opportunity at the White House at the time), without warning and despite zero overt signs of deep psychological anguish, has committed suicide in his apartment.

The whole episode is engulfed in a dark, almost surreal gaze, with everybody mostly failing and/or refusing to process the crushing reality of what has happened. Meanwhile, the week’s case forces the cast into a deeply uncomfortable reckoning with the nature of life and death that serves as a proxy for how they’re feeling about Kutner’s death. It’s tough stuff to watch, as brutal as “House” has ever gotten, and maybe the best example of how the show understood its characters intimately enough to turn them into bundles of raw nerves in times of deep distress.

There were several episodes throughout the run of “House” that favored a narrower focus on one specific member of the ensemble cast, but season 6 episode, titled “5 to 9” may have been the most interesting and successful. Eschewing case-of-the-week antics in favor of a frantic barrage of dilemmas, the episode follows a day in Cuddy’s life as she deals with the constant, relentless trials of her job as Princeton-Plainsboro’s Dean of Medicine, juggling grueling day-to-day operations, major decisions, executive pressures, and conflicting staff demands.

Not only is the episode a perfect self-contained short film of relentlessly-building anxiety that manages to reframe and deepen almost every character on the show, but it’s also an opportunity for Lisa Edelstein to give her best performance in the show’s entire run. Cuddy was always an integral part of why “House” worked as well as it did, and “5 to 9” takes advantage of six years of audience acquaintance to push her characterization into new, stunning places.

Of all the instances in “House” of regular cast members becoming patients for a week, none were more gripping or affecting than “Euphoria,” the season 2 two-parter in which Foreman contracts the same illness as the team’s patient: a police officer who starts laughing uncontrollably and then develops a series of strange, severe symptoms. The episode becomes a painful, tension-filled helping of flipped-perspective action as the normally calm and composed Foreman finds himself quarantined, isolated from his team, and facing down the possibility of not making it out alive.

For starters, the episode proves momentous in “House” history for the unique way it yanks Foreman out of his comfort zone, forcing the show’s most stoic character into an inescapable crisis that brings out his deepest-seated layers. On top of that, it’s just an unimaginably gripping watch for numerous reasons: the oddity of the case, the twisty and bizarre way it unfolds, the enormous stakes it takes on, the way it threatens the very structure and unity of the diagnostics team. It’s “House” at its most discomfiting.

Deeper into “House'”s run, things got to a point where a given episode could just follow the characters’ personal lives without any medical mysteries or hospital events coming into play, and that was the case of the two-part Season 6 premiere, “Broken.” Following on from the Season 5 finale reveal that House’s Vicodin addiction is causing severe hallucinations, “Broken” charts House’s stint as a rehab patient at the Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital while attempting to purge himself of Vicodin.

There may be no diagnostics on the docket across these two hours, but “Broken” proves a fantastic character piece. The relationships House develops with his treating physician Dr. Darryl Nolan (Andre Braugher, in one of his most notable dramatic roles before “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” reinvented him for a whole generation), his roommate Alvie (Lin-Manuel Miranda), and Lydia (Franka Potente), a frequent visitor at the clinic, are all complex and fascinating, and allow Hugh Laurie to flesh out a rarely-seen vulnerable side of House. For the depth it affords its Sisyphean protagonist, “Broken” may have been single-handedly responsible for keeping “House” a viable show for three more seasons.

Another example of a top-notch “House” season finale is “Help Me,” which amplifies the usual final-chapter drama by setting its story against the backdrop of a huge emergency. After a crane collapses into a building in Trenton, House and Cuddy join the efforts to rescue and treat survivors, and while remotely overseeing his team’s efforts to diagnose the crane operator (Doug Kruse), House winds up discovering a woman (China Shavers) who is trapped in the parking garage, with her leg pinned under rubble.

In addition to being a fascinating and highly effective formal exercise, shot entirely with Canon DSLR cameras to allow for more leeway in the claustrophobic rubble scenes, “Help Me” is one of the darkest, saddest, most emotionally involving episodes that “House” has ever pulled off. While cooperating with rescue workers to try to save the woman’s life without having to amputate her leg, House finds himself personally attached to the case in a way that hasn’t quite been seen at any other point on the show — not because she’s an acquaintance or because the puzzle compels him, but because he develops a genuine connection with the patient as a human being.

The immediate sequel to “House’s Head” and the final part of the most incredible denouement of any “House” season, “Wilson’s Heart” follows the fallout of the discovery that Amber Volakis (Anne Dudek) was in the bus crash that House spent “House’s Head” trying to remember. Gravely injured and afflicted with inexplicable tachycardia, Amber is rushed to Princeton-Plainsboro, while a desperate Wilson tries to get House to recover more memories of the day of the bus crash so that his girlfriend stands a better chance of being saved.

This episode is an enduring favorite of “House” fans — and, really, of anyone who was following what was happening in television in 2008 with any attention — for a reason. If “House’s Head” is the daring, inventive, kaleidoscopic setup of the bus crash storyline, “Wilson’s Heart” is its raw, unembellished, gut-wrenching resolution: Just a forlorn race against the clock to save a character the audience has come to know and love, pushing every character in the ensemble to emotional extremes and ultimately arriving at the most devastating 15 minutes in “House” history.

A late-period “House” highlight, “After Hours” is a hectic, off-book hour that finds the show’s cast facing various personal calamities over a single late night. Remy “Thirteen” Hadley (Olivia Wilde, who changed her name for Hollywood) is visited in her apartment by a prison friend (Amy Landecker) who needs urgent treatment after being stabbed and risks being arrested if she checks into a hospital, which ultimately forces Thirteen to call Chase for help. Taub also learns that his affair with nurse Ruby (Zena Gray) has resulted in a pregnancy and visits a strip club with Foreman while pondering what to do. And House develops tumors as a result of a clandestine experimental treatment for his leg, and in a self-destructive spur, decides to extract the tumors himself in his own bathtub.

A proper dark night of the soul for “House” as a whole, “After Hours” may be the most dour, downbeat, relentlessly bleak installment in the show’s history — but that’s also where its greatness lies. No other episode has placed the cast in such dire circumstances or extracted as much truth from them; from the first scene to the last, all bets are off, no one seems safe, and the numbing weariness that had crept into “House” by late season 7 suddenly feels like an asset rather than a liability.

While “House” often saved the best for last, on at least two major instances, the season’s emotional climax was actually the second-to-last episode. This was true of season 7’s “After Hours” and also of “Three Stories,” the season 1 chapter that still stands as arguably the boldest structural gambit in “House” history. House is forced by Cuddy to fill in for a medical school diagnostics professor and presents students with three different scenarios involving leg pain — the third of which turns out to be more personal than House initially lets on.

It’s hard to overstate what an event “Three Stories” was when it first arrived in 2005, ripping straight through the blueprint established by the preceding 20 episodes and showing what a dramatic powerhouse (no pun intended) the show could be when released from the constraints of formula. For the remainder of show’s run, it never stopped being the benchmark for tight, emotionally fraught, expectation-twisting writing against which every other “formula-breaking” episode was measured.

“House” was truly a show that excelled at second-to-last episodes, and sure enough, the greatest episode in “House” history was also the one leading up to a season finale: “House’s Head,” the 15h installment of season 4. The episode opens with House in a daze, sitting in a strip club with no memory of how he got there. He leaves the club to find that he was just involved in a bus crash that left him concussed and must subsequently stumble his way through hallucinations and fragmented memories in order to save the life of a fellow bus passenger, whose identity remains ambiguous until the episode’s final minutes.

In addition to being the most successful example of virtually everything “House” was great at, “House’s Head” was simply one of the most phenomenal examples of cinematic form put to expressionistic use in the history of television. Few other hours of any show have matched it for sheer impact, intelligence, bravado, and intensity, or delivered twists that knocked the wind out of viewers’ sails so successfully.