This is a region-free import of the complete series of House M.D. on blu-ray. As most fans of the show are aware (at least those who are also fans of physical media), in the United States, the first five seasons of House were released on DVD and the final three seasons were released on blu-ray. But, the older seasons of the show were never released on blu-ray and there was never a complete US series release on blu-ray. To my knowledge, this is the easiest and most cost-effective way to get the entire series on blu-ray. While it is an import from Japan, the discs do play in region 1 (US region) blu-ray players and it does have captions in English on the episodes, but not on the special features.
House was a hit medical drama that aired from 2004 through 2012 starring Hugh Laurie as Gregory House, a brilliant, acerbic diagnostician at a fictional hospital in New Jersey who was addicted to Vicodin, hated seeing patients, insulted them (and his team of doctors) mercilessly when he had to interact with them, and thought everyone is a lying idiot. His team (in the early seasons) included doctors Cameron (played by Jennifer Morrison), Chase (played by Jesse Spencer), and Foreman (played by Omar Epps). In Later seasons Olivia Wilde, Peter Jacobson, Kal Penn, Odette Annabele, and Charline Yi would also play members of House's diagnostics team. House's only friend is an oncologist named James Wilson (played by Robert Sean Leonard), and the hospital administrator, Lisa Cuddy, who is always butting heads with House is played by Lisa Edelstein.
The show was mostly a case-of-the-week procedural drama in which the team was presented with a patient with some weird medical issue that no one else could diagnose. Intertwined within the weekly cases were serial arcs that sometimes involved House pissing off the wrong person, the lives of one or more of the team members, or the like. The first seven seasons of the show were great. Season 8 is not as good because a pot point from season seven never truly gets resolved in a satisfying way. That said, the series has a nearly perfect ending.
The blu ray set has 39 discs, all of which are in huge keep cases. They are, unfortunately, the kinds of cases that require two discs to be stacked on top of each other, and the discs can on some tabs come loose and fall off and on others be damn near impossible to get off. The blu-ray set does have all of the same special features, including interviews, commentary tracks, gag reels, deleted scenes, etc., that were released on the US DVD and blu-ray releases. The A/V transfer of the early seasons is okay, but not great. The final three seasons which got original blu-ray releases have a much better A/V quality. The blu-ray menus are very bare bones and are hard to navigate at first, and the titles of the episodes are not listed on the menus. The only change to the episodes themselves is that the theme that plays over the opening credits is different than the one that played in the US (it is the European version).
Overall, the show is great. It is probably the best medical drama after ER (which is the medical drama by which I compare all others) that I have seen. It was well-written and very well-acted. It could be suspenseful, sad, and funny, all within the same episode. The show also got a lot of great guest and recurring stars throughout its run, some of whom were very well-known (e.g., James Earl Jones, Candice Bergen, and Sela Ward), and some for whom the show was one of their big breaks (e.g., Wentworth Miller, Dominic Purcell, Amanda Seyfried, Michael B. Jordan, Elle Fanning, Jeremy Renner, etc.). If you are a fan of the show, this is definitely worth the pickup.
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