CBS' Good Sam is best described as "House with a Daughter"

The Hollywood Reporter

"Every day that passes without a reboot/revival of House perplexes me," says Daniel Fienberg. "You have a beloved brand with an easily reproducible formula that has only built an audience in syndication/streaming. Obviously, Hugh Laurie wouldn’t do 22 episodes in a season ever again, but if David Shore came to him with a six-episode limited series? Sure! After all, you couldn’t have House without Hugh Laurie. I mean, if you needed to do House without Hugh Laurie and you decided to recast the main role, you literally couldn’t do better than Jason Isaacs, from the near-villainous intensity to the regionally nonspecific American accent that breaks British in moments of high emotion. Of course, Isaacs would never sign on simply to remake House, but if you go to the Awake and Harry Potter veteran with a pilot that’s basically House, but with a daughter? Apparently, he’s game! Calling Good Sam, CBS’s new procedural from creator Katie Wech, 'House with a Daughter' is a good recipe for some measure of audience disappointment. But it’s a description that will get viewers in the door for an otherwise tonally inconsistent series whose appeal generally hinges entirely around appealing leads Isaacs and Sophia Bush."

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• The antagonistic relationship between father and daughter fuels Good Sam, and is the its most interesting and most frustrating aspect overall: "It’s genuinely intriguing that Good Sam refuses to let father and daughter come to some happily ever after detente by the early episodes’ endings, especially as Bush and Isaacs prove well-matched for the task of portraying this particularly thorny, complex relationship," says Caroline Framke. "But the constant scenes of Sam and Griff bickering over each other’s territory and methodologies already start to get old by the end of episode 2, making it more difficult to see how Good Sam might evolve beyond it. In order to prove its longevity, the show will have to find more material to mine outside this central tension without scrapping it entirely."
• Sophia Bush wanted to use her negative experiences on One Tree Hill and Chicago P.D. to benefit Good Sam: “Sam is a person who really balances a pursuit of excellence with readily available emotions for others," says Bush, who also serves as an executive producer. "I think in playing her, she reminds me that I have the capability to do that as well,” Bush shares. “We’ve all experienced environments where our emotions might be treated not as a superpower, and personally, (they) are. It’s a wonderful experience to play this character and lean into her strengths and be reminded that I’m allowed to lean into my own as well.”
• Good Sam is thrilling for Bush after dreaming of becoming a surgeon when she was a child: "Sam speaks very fast, so when I have to spit out seven symptoms and one of them is 'superficial venous thrombosis' and I have to say that fast in a line with other terms, it can be a little insane but I love it. I really, really love it," Bush says of tackling the complicated medical jargon. "I feel like all the stars have aligned in the wildest way and I've learned a lot about myself. I'm not a fan of needles but I can literally watch a surgeon cut someone's chest open with a bone saw and go, 'How do you know how much pressure to apply there?,' and it doesn't bother me at all, so I'm clearly doing the job I'm supposed to do."