I’ve just enjoyed watching the second series of The Night Manager, which [spoiler alert] features in its cast, Hugh Laurie.

And that made me want to go back and watch House, Laurie’s hit US hospital drama that shares a sprinkling of DNA with Sherlock Holmes. The series aired originally on Channel 5 in the UK, I think disappearing off to Sky at the end of its run. This was in a period when Sky went about snatching up imports from terrestrial television, like 24, to make them exclusive on its pay service.

At the time, I also found more “unorthodox” methods to get episodes, which in the US came with Teardrop by Massive Attack as the theme tune, but in the UK came with a Massive Attack-alike theme tune.

Anyway, fast forward to 2026, and let’s catch up. Which streaming service has House?

I thought I’d spotted House on Amazon Prime, so I looked there, and yes, it’s free for Prime subscribers. Note that I pay the extra £2.99 a month to avoid ads on Prime. The pilot episode did look a bit yellow to me, but it looks like it’s an HD version of the show, and aside from some video-artifacts in the lighting, it looked good. In my memory, it looked better later on into its run, and the internet tells me that it was mostly shot on 35mm film, so there’s no real excuse for it still not looking good (There was one episode famously shot on prosumer Canon EOS 5D Mark II cameras as an experiment/stunt).

Now, when a long running series is on a streaming platform, it’s not always a given that every episode will be there. So I thought I’d check Prime’s offering to us in the UK.

Oh.

There are eight seasons of House. Here’s how Prime seems to make them available:

So, for no obvious reason, I can’t watch Season 4 unless I pay for it, but we’re all fine for 5 and 6. Then we have to pay again.

But that’s not true.

It’s worse than that!

I thought I’d check on the number of episodes there were in the first season. Sometimes, before a show is a hit, it has fewer episodes. But House regularly hit 22-24 episodes a season with the exception of one season hit by a writers strike when they “only” made 16.

But scrolling through Prime’s offering revealed that even though I have access to Season 1, I don’t have access to every episode!

Season 1 episode 1 – 11 are fine, yet episodes 12-14 inclusive have to be bought or rented. But episodes 15-22 are all available. What makes 12-14 so valuable I have to pay?

Go to Season 2, and I can watch episode 1, but have to buy episode 2. Episodes 3-22 are all there, but episode 23 is a paid one, while episode 24 is free again? What madness is this?

Every episode of Season 3 is there, except episode 23 which is a paid episode.

Season 4, we’ve established, is all paid. Except, it isn’t!

Episode 1 has to be bought or rented, but it remains a mixture throughout the season.

And it remains a mixture all the way through the rest of the seasons. Amazon decides to present the yellow shopping basket icon next to a season if episode 1 has to be bought. There are more available free episodes for every season than paid, but you can’t watch the entirety of any season of House without buying or renting at least one episode. I genuinely don’t understand the licencing decision around this. The entirety of the series is surely owned by a single rights holder, so why are random episodes not made available. Is it something to do with music licencing within certain episodes? That’s the only possible explanation I can come up with.

To be clear, House is also available in the UK on Channel 4’s on demand service. But that comes with ads in the free tier that I have. As far as I can tell, every episode is there however. And I could upgrade to Channel 4+ for £3.99 a month and get most shows ad-free. However, an asterisk says that for contractual reasons, some shows come with ads and trails. And I can’t tell if House would be one of those shows.

I was beginning to explore paid options at this point, but the cheapest digital offering was Apple TV’s £60 for the entire eight seasons, compared with £100 for a blu-ray boxset on Amazon, which has definitely been cheaper in the past. But an idle Google search surfaced a UK Netflix fan page which suggested House came to Netflix in April last year. Hopefully the Netflix licencing deal would be for a minimum of one-year deal and probably more. Because I can’t get through 177 episodes in the next two months.

I checked Netflix. All eight seasons are there, ad-free if you have a without-ads package, and no random episodes missing.

So at time of writing, House is available in full on Netflix. It’s also available in full on Channel 4. But it’s mostly, but not entirely available on Prime Video. And I have no idea why.

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I don’t know if this is in any way related, but when looking a little deeper into the issues surrounding the House theme music, I learned that there are at least three variants. Teardrop by Massive Attack was only ever licenced for the US, and for whatever reason, the producers decided against paying more to licence the track globally. They made a “European” version which was a bit of a soundalike version, although the credits are not edited in time to the music as the US version is. Then, for reasons that are unclear, there is the “Singaporean” version which is different again.

Because people who manage catalogues perhaps don’t care, the actual assets – or files – are often mixed up, and streaming services can have a mix of all three types of theme music. A streamer might licence House, but think it’s fine to use the file they already have. Or someone at the distributor doesn’t notice that S01E15_original and S01E15_copy have different themes. They’re the right length, so out the door they go.

Hilariously, this is what comes on to describe the theme music if you have subtitles turned on during the opening credits on Prime or Netflix, both of which use the “European” theme on every episode I checked. I assume it’s coded into the official subtitle track: