everyone agrees that house MD falls off around seasons 7 and 8 and they typically point toward nonsensical character retcons, flanderization, the way that medicine takes a backseat to character melodrama, but rarely does anyone point out how the cinematography of the show takes a massive nosedive compared to the earlier seasons (and especially season 1). just look at the difference in saturation, contrast, lighting, and color correction in a simple diner scene from season 1 vs. a clinic scene from season 8 [first screenshot is from @3scythes]
look at how rich and layered the first image from season 1 is. it has a deep, warm, red hue to it because the characters are in a dimly lit diner booth. it fits the intimacy of the space. the shadows are a pure, crisp black, the light is rarely a perfect white but it's very stark, especially against skin. the red diner seats, the brown of chase's blazer, and the shade of foreman's skin all contribute to the warm, primary color palette in the scene. the first two seasons of house were phenomenal at picking colors to center a scene around. just think back to cameron and house's date, what do you remember about it? it's the bright, blue lights that were behind cameron during that scene, wasn't it? most importantly, you can see the textures in the image: you can see the grains in the wooden both wall, you can tell the seats are made of a leathered material, there's a soft film grain to house's profile and chase and cameron's faces that tells you that this is human skin. this is just one frame and there's so much dimension to it that you could focus on any part of the screen and get something of value out of it.
meanwhile, season 8 has very soft, flat, uninteresting lighting. the areas where the light should be very stark and bright are barely lighter than the base color of the material they're hitting. the only pure blacks in the image are the wrinkles of the female patient's dark coat, the black border between the wall and the floor, and the male patient's shirt. in the first image from season 1, pitch black is used to block off the rest of the restaurant behind chase and cameron so that the camera is focused on their faces and the contents of the table. what can you say, meaningfully, about the second image compared to what you got from the first? nothing. unlike the first image, which is naturalistic and diegetic, what you see in the second image is what you get.
the lack of deep shadow and points of brightness in the photo means that there's little to no contrast in the image. it also makes it much more difficult to distinguish between different textures because the image does not capture how different materials form shadows and capture light differently - for all you know, the clinic seat and house's blazer may as well be the same material.
this also has the terrible side effect of making skin look like rubber or wax. it's the early 2010s, we're still suffering from the recession, you don't get to have good things like interesting lighting or your eye being naturally guided toward points of interest. it's the era of realismslop. your super-serious tv show about vicodin addict sherlock holmes looks like an unreal engine 5 video game demo cutscene with nanite, lumen, and lambert shading.
this lack of dimension and a clear, visual pyramid also 'standardizes' the image, so not only does it look like they're just filming a set with actors rather than immersing you in the location with the characters, it also makes every scene look and feel the exact same. any sense of tone or location is completely gone. wilson and house going to a rundown, podunk diner feels the exact same as being back in the sterile, incandescent hospital with chase and foreman. this actually erases one of my favorite aspects of the earlier seasons, where princeton-plainsboro, even in an area that was well-lit, was always kind of dim and dark, sometimes oppressively so. it grounded a lot of the character drama and fantastical medicine and it reminded you that while there's a lot of intrigue and fun and mystery to the show, at the end of the day they're still in a hospital. these characters (especially house) are all troubled in their own way and it feels like PPTH is an extension of that. it's almost silent hill-esque in that regard. it makes any scenes with natural sunlight or where the characters are outside feel a lot more refreshing because you're no longer in that dimly-lit locale. the later seasons just kind of throw this away and make PPTH always brightly lit and even, the only meaningful difference between PPTH and the outside world is that the outside world has actual colors like green and blue.
defenders of this stylistic choice (which it's not, it's a byproduct of thinking that just because you "upgrade" from film to a digital camera that you don't need to properly light and block your show) will say that the show becomes desaturated and grey because it's supposed to represent house's character degradation and the show becoming darker and more serious. i guess andrey zvyagintsev, jean-pierre melville, andrei tarkovsky, and andrzej zuławski missed that memo because they were able to make dark, depressing films with desaturated color palettes that still had contrast and looked visually appealing.
in order: leviathan (2014), stalker (1979), le samourai (1967), the devil (1972)
this also wasn't a problem in detox (an episode from season 1 which dealt with house's addiction) or house's head (which, for a later-season episode, i found an absolute visual treat with all of the cool camera work and interesting lighting that they do), which didn't look like seasons 7 and 8.
say what you will about the pilot episode and its characteristic black-and-orange traffic cone resident evil 5 piss filter, but it is at least a visual identity.
[edits: changed some descriptors and added extra points that i came up with when thinking back on this topic]
