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House, also known as House, M.D., is an American medical drama television series created by David Shore and executive produced by film director Bryan Singer. It is an Emmy- and Peabody-award-winning medical drama that debuted on November 16, 2004, on the FOX Network. House stars British actor and comedian Hugh Laurie as the titular character, a role for which he received a 2006 Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama. The third season of House premiered on September 5, 2006, in the United States and Canada. Laurie plays Dr. Gregory House, a maverick medical genius who heads a team of young diagnosticians at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey. Each episode typically starts with a cold open somewhere outside the hospital, showing the events leading to the onset of illness for that week's patient, then features the team going to extraordinary lengths to diagnose and treat unusual ailments. Characters
Recurring characters Plot Dr. House's begrudging fulfillment of his mandatory clinic duty is a recurring subplot on the show. During clinic duty, House confounds patients with his eccentric bedside manner and often unorthodox treatments, but impresses them with rapid and accurate diagnoses after seemingly not paying attention. In one ode, House diagnoses an entire waiting room full of patients on his way out of the clinic. Often, some of the simpler problems House faces in the clinic help him solve the main case of the episode. Many of the illnesses and conditions encountered during the series could have been solved earlier if the patient/patients' families had not lied or hidden other symptoms (lying about having an affair that led to the mystery disease, lying about an underlying disorder, lying about jobs that lead to the mystery disease, and so on), thus every episode lends more and more backing to House's beloved stock phrase, "Everybody lies". The opening sequence of each episode introduces the patient who will be the focus of the story, but this sequence is often deliberately misleading, causing the viewer to assume that another (often secondary or background) character will be the one to fall victim to illness. Several episodes feature the unusual practice of entering a patient's house with or without their permission in order to search for clues that might suggest a certain pathology. The creator, David Shore, originally intended for the show to be a CSI-type show where "germs were the suspects", but has since shifted some of the focus to the characters rather than focusing solely on the plot. Character traits House is victim to an infarction in his right leg, which was misdiagnosed by his doctors and resulted in muscle death prior to the events of the series. Despite a corrective operation conducted against his will, House is in near-constant pain and walks with a severe limp, carrying a trademark cane. He bears a terrible scar on his thigh where the dead muscle was excised. He develops an addiction to Vicodin through the course of the series. His colleagues frequently suggest that his physical pain affects his medical judgment and exacerbates his irritable personality, although his ex-girlfriend Stacy later says House had the same personality before he was in constant pain. In Season 3, Episode 4 it is suggested that he might have Asperger syndrome. In the season 2 finale, House is shot by a former patient, and receives an experimental ketamine treatment that results in a complete recovery of function in his leg, the absence of pain. The entire episode is later revealed to have been hallucinated in the minutes between the actual shooting and being wheeled into the emergency room, including the miraculous recovery of his right leg. The early episodes of season 3 concern House's struggles with his recurring leg pain and ongoing Vicodin addiction. One of House's distinctive traits is his low tolerance for boredom, which results in his unusual role in the series' hospital. When unoccupied or thinking, he has been seen juggling, listening to music, watching soap operas, constructing elaborate contraptions from objects in his office and, most frequently, twirling his cane with one hand. In many episodes, House can be seen playing a handheld video game console (typically Metroid Zero Mission on the Game Boy Advance SP at the beginning of Season 1 and Metroid Prime Hunters on the Nintendo DS towards the end of the series). As of Season 2, Episode 5 (Daddy's Boy), House has a Sony PSP. In spite of this apparent frivolity and impatience (with a "nine to three" job), House is nevertheless dedicated once a problem takes his attention and cannot resist a challenge. Many of the critical diagnoses in the show come at the end of a long night's study, and at one point he enacts an elaborate plot and learns Hindi in order to avenge a slight from decades previous. House also shares a number of personality quirks with the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. The show's creator, David Shore, has said in an interview that the character of Dr. House is indeed partly inspired by Holmes. This comes full circle as Arthur Conan Doyle modeled Holmes on the medical diagnostician Dr. Joseph Bell. Among the characteristics the two characters share are Incidental parallels include: Episodes Response Before it premiered on November 16, 2004, House received early critical acclaim - so much so, that FOX used a quote from the Washington Post in its ads for House stating that the show is "the best medical drama since the debut of E.R.." The show's procedural structure, bizarre scenarios, and headlong dives into controversy via the hazardous and sometimes blatantly illegal conduct of the characters has gained the show some detractors. However, professional critics have focused their attention on the complex inner life that British actor Hugh Laurie brings to the title role, and much of the media's attention has been focused on him. The characterization of House himself, as a brilliant, irascible, grating and oddly sympathetic personality, as played by Laurie, is what has been credited with the show's success: Numerous publications have named it one of the best shows of the year. U.S. television ratings Seasonal rankings (based on average total viewers per episode) of House on FOX. Note: Each U.S. network television season starts in late September and ends in late May, which coincides with the completion of May sweeps. House premiered on November 16, 2004. It attracted just a little over 7 million viewers for its series premiere (the 62nd most-watched show for the week of November 15-21, 2004), although it improved the audience numbers for FOX from its lead-in that night, the scarcely-watched, short-lived Richard Branson reality program, The Rebel Billionaire (attracting 5.45 million viewers; the 78th most-watched show for the same aforementioned week). It wasn't until January 25, 2005 when House increased its audience significantly, courtesy of a more popular lead-in: the fourth season of the mega-hit American Idol. House became FOX's most successful occupant in the post-American Idol timeslot - even more successful than its prior timeslot occupant, the hit drama 24. An example of this success was shown by the audience numbers in the spring of 2005 of the reruns of some of the episodes that originally aired in 2004, which were comparable to the audience numbers of original episodes also airing during that particular spring. Production information House is aired by the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a co-production of Heel and Toe Films (Paul Attanasio and Katie Jacobs), Shore Z Productions (David Shore), and Bad Hat Harry Productions (Bryan Singer) in association with the NBC Universal Television Studio for Fox. All three companies are responsible for production and all four people are executive producers of the show. David Shore's ideas for House, M.D. are inspired by the writings of Berton Roueche. As of season 2, episode - "TB or Not TB", a German production company, MORATIM, is credited in the copyright notice instead of Universal Network Television. (MORATIM Produktions GmbH & Co. KG - of Pullach im Isartal, Germany). Moratim produced five episodes. Airing House currently airs Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. (Eastern/Pacific) on Fox, and is simulcast on Global in Canada. The second season premiered on September 13, 2005 and ended on May 23, 2006. During the summer of 2006, Fox showed reruns of the show in its current timeslot. The show was then renewed for a third season and premiered on September 5, 2006, moving up to the 8 p.m. slot for its four episodes in September. For four weeks in October, House moved to Wednesdays at 9 p.m. and was replaced by Major League Baseball in the Tuesday time slot; however, the episodes aired were not new, but rather reruns from earlier in the season. New House episodes returned to Tuesdays on October 31, 2006, but back at its older 9 p.m. time slot (switching places with the FOX show Standoff). Before the fall 2005 television season, FOX planned to move House from Tuesdays 9 p.m. to Mondays 8 p.m. for January 2006. However, the surprising success of the serial drama Prison Break (which later occupied the Monday 8 p.m. timeslot) nixed the plan. House remained airing Tuesdays 9 p.m., gaining an even bigger audience and cracking into the top 10 of most-watched primetime shows. In a rare move for the network, FOX continued to air the series in reruns over the summer of 2006, rather than preempting it for summer series. The cable station USA (an NBC Universal sister network) began airing Season 1 in syndication on January 6, 2006 at 11/10c. The USA Network began airing repeats of Season 3 episodes on September 15, 2006 (One week post their first run on Fox). House in Australia was broadcast on Channel Ten on Wednesdays at 8:30pm. House Season 2 finished on October 18, 2006, with no current advice on when it will return for Season 3. Channel Ten in Australia aired House in a manner which frustrated many fans, airing alternating new and repeated episodes (often in a random fashion, where it may be two weeks of repeats from Season 1 before a new episode was aired), one which garnered criticism on Ten, claiming it was attempting to milk the series for all it could. Casting In the pilot, Dr. Lisa Cuddy reprimands House for not performing the duties the hospital administration expects of him, but House counters that she cannot fire him. This scene was used as the casting session for the role of House. The producers were reportedly dissatisfied with early auditions for the role of House. When Hugh Laurie cast on the audition tape, he apologized for his appearance as he was filming Flight of the Phoenix at the time of the casting session. Laurie's audition tape compelled director Bryan Singer to get up out of his chair to get as close to the television screen as he could. Laurie's American accent was reportedly so flawless that Bryan Singer singled him out as an example of a real American actor, being unaware of Laurie's background. Laurie later stated that his original impression was that the show was about Dr. James Wilson, as the script referred to him as a doctor with "boyish" looks, assumed this to be the star and that Dr. House was the "sidekick". It wasn't until he received the full teleplay of the pilot did he realize that House was the protagonist. Laurie, whose father was a doctor himself, said he felt guilty for "being paid more to become a fake version of my own father" after being cast as House. 1 Opening theme The opening theme is "Teardrop" by Massive Attack. "Teardrop" itself does have lyrics, sung by guest vocalist Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins; however, the version used in the opening credits uses only the beginning and ending sections, which are solely instrumental. Due to rights and licensing issues this music is not used for the show in the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland (German version), Belgium, Australia, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Hungary, Latin America, Greece, Hong Kong, and Turkey. In those countries, a piece of music named "House," composed by Scott Donaldson and Richard Nolan, is used, which was written specifically for the show. With the second season, this was replaced with a similar, but modified, track. The parodic British television show Dead Ringers, which sometimes spoofs House, uses "Teardrop" for the spoof's opening theme. Filming Exterior shots of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital actually are of Princeton University's Frist Campus Center, which is the University's student center (a disproportionate number of these shots show a UPS truck sitting in the hospital driveway, implying that several of the overhead shots of the hospital were taken at the same time). Filming does not, however, take place there. Filming takes place on the Fox lot in Century City. Exterior shots of the university campus are filmed at UCLA. DVD releases Awards International broadcasters Outside the US, House is aired under the title Dr. House, Dr House, House, M.D. or (in Italy) Dr. House - Medical Division and has been broadcast by the following stations: Notes | |||||||||
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