Lisa Cuddy - Reception

Reception

In 2005, Edelstein won the Satellite Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television for her role as Cuddy. Following the show's pilot episode, Tom Shales noted in The Washington Post that: "The skirmishes between House and Cuddy could get awfully tired, but by the second episode there are already some provocative wrinkles in what had seemed a simple situation." TV Guide's Nina Hämmerling Smith has deemed the banter between Cuddy and House "one of the best things about the show", while Salon's Lily Burana has declared herself to be on "Team Cuddy" in terms of House's romantic interests. Following the season three episode "Merry Little Christmas", Mary McNamara for the LA Times wrote: "The Avid Viewer was also happy to see the seeds of a romantic relationship between House and Cuddy being sown — that had to be part of the show's original bible because really, who else could survive a romantic relationship with House now that Sela Ward's gone?" McNamara has opined that a romantic relationship between the two "makes perfect sense", as "she is the only one who seems able to accept House as he is, to give almost as good as she gets and to let most of his barbs fall where they may. How Edelstein can play this in a believable way is the point where acting moves from skill to art." When the show underwent a change of format at the beginning of the fourth series, McNamara commented positively on the changing dynamic in Cuddy's relationship with House, noting: "gone is the increasingly dull and unbelievable tension between him and Cuddy. (As subordinate/boss, that is. The sexual tension, one hopes, is still in there somewhere.) Cuddy is done trying to squelch him; now she is just shooting for managed chaos. Which is so much more fun because it revolves more around the medicine and less around all the personal pathos of the staff."

However, as USA Today's Robert Bianco noted, when Cuddy and House finally began a physical relationship, in what later transpired to be a hallucination sequence, "It started a firestorm among fans who hated the change in the relationship". Following the pair's first screen kiss, IGN reviewer James Chamberlin opined that the event was "kind of awkward" and "just didn't feel right to me". With regards to Cuddy's season five storylines as a whole, Chamberlin commented: "Cuddy's interest in becoming a mother was something I enjoyed. This plot contained some heart-wrenching moments, particularly when Cuddy had to a take on the case as both a doctor and a potential mother in "Joy." The New York Times's Lisa Belkin has also praised Cuddy's motherhood storyline, citing her as one of few examples of good parenting on television.

Discussing the numerous YouTube fan videos dedicated to the "Huddy" relationship, The New York Times's Ginia Bellafante has assessed: "It is not merely the unrelenting push-pull of the show’s writing, but the “His Girl Friday” chemistry between the actors Hugh Laurie (House) and Lisa Edelstein (Cuddy) that inspires otherwise reasonable women to bizarre, time-consuming digressions of fantasy." Bellafante considers herself amongst these women, writing: "Shamefully, I would have been overjoyed if the season finale had ended with House and Cuddy electing to spend the summer together in Corsica. This would have betrayed the show’s primary covenant — to keep House miserable — and entirely erased its integrity. And yet I would mostly have wondered if House and Cuddy were going to make time for a stop in Sardinia." Following the fifth season finale's revelation that the consummation of their relationship was a hallucination, Bellafante wrote: "I feel used and manipulated. I feel like a one-night stand who is never going to get calla lilies or a follow-up phone call. I feel hate for the show and I feel begrudging respect." Despite this, it is Bellafante's opinion that: "basically the show went in the obvious right direction, gratifying our base collective urge to finally see House and Cuddy together, not talking about lumbar punctures, in a fake-sex way that didn’t ultimately impinge on the show’s credibility." She considered: "What would we really have done if House and Cuddy had woken up together, if he’d made her waffles, if she had eaten them wearing one of his shirts, if they spent the next day exchanging coy, knowing glances at Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital? Then we would have been watching Grey’s Anatomy and we would have experienced not a jump-the-shark moment, but a bungee-jumping-the-Arctic moment." Her conclusion is that:

"House refuses to buy into the myth that a good woman can save an ornery jerk, and the finale made it clear what a dope you were to even think the show would try. It doesn’t want to appease the woman who wants to appease her Harlequin Romance self. It wants to appease anyone who gets ticked off when a romantic comedy shows an accomplished woman in a skirt suit giving it all up for a jobless, slovenly idiot. The House-Cuddy attraction isn’t an attraction of opposites. It’s an attraction between two highly intelligent workaholics, two people too interesting for anyone else but ultimately unfit for each other — no matter how pathetically we’d like it to be otherwise."

Mike Hale for The New York Times has praised Edelstein's performance as Cuddy in comedic situations, writing: "Lisa Edelstein may not be the funniest performer around, but she is without a doubt the best sport in American television: every week the writers of House find new ways to embarrass her and her character, Dr. Cuddy, who is engaged in an excruciating mating dance with Hugh Laurie's Dr. House. Ms. Edelstein somehow manages to maintain her dignity while playing a 40-something dean of medicine who acts like a teenage girl". The fourth season scene in which Cuddy did a pole dance was very positively received by critics, Mary McNamara stated that these scenes "in three minutes earned back the price of Tivo". James Chamberlin stated that he never expected Edelstein to do a strip tease, although he had hoped it.

Lisa Cuddy was elected TV's Most Crushworthy Female Doctor over Remy "Thirteen" Hadley in a poll held by Zap2it.