Show Info
House stars British actor Hugh Laurie as the American title character, a role for which he received the 2006 and 2007 Golden Globe Awards and 2007 Screen Actors Guild award for Best Actor in a Drama. The third season of House premiered on September 5, 2006 in the United States, Canada and Mexico. In February 2007, House was renewed for a fourth season, which will premiere on September 25, 2007 in the United States and Canada.
Plot
Dr. Gregory House is a maverick medical genius, who heads a team of young diagnosticians at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital (based directly on the Yale-New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, the teaching hospital affiliated with Yale University) in New Jersey. Most episodes start with a cold open somewhere outside the hospital, showing the events leading to the onset of symptoms for that week's main patient. The episode follows the team in their attempts to diagnose the illness.
The team arrives at diagnoses using the Socratic method and differential diagnosis, with House guiding the deliberations. House often discounts the information and opinions from his underlings, pointing out that their contributions have missed various relevant factors. The patient is usually misdiagnosed two or three times over the course of each episode, often with sarcoidosis, lupus, cancer or an infection and treated with medications appropriate to those diagnoses that cause further complications. Often the ailment cannot be easily deduced because the patient has lied about symptoms and circumstances. House frequently mutters, "Everybody lies" or proclaims during the team's deliberations: "The patient is lying" or "The symptoms never lie". Even when not stated explicitly, this assumption guides House's decisions and diagnoses.
House's begrudging fulfillment of his mandatory walk-in clinic duty is a recurring subplot on the show. During clinic duty, House confounds patients with an eccentric bedside manner and unorthodox treatments, but impresses them with rapid and accurate diagnoses after seemingly not paying attention. He often plays video games on either his PSP or his GBA SP while patients or one of his colleagues talk to hi, and, in one episode, House diagnoses five patients in the waiting room in under a minute on his way out of the clinic. Realizations made during some of the simple problems House faces in the clinic often help him solve the main case of the episode — ironic, because he claims to hate working in the clinic.
Episodes frequently feature the unusual practice of entering a patient's house with or without the owner's 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 the "germs were the suspects", but has since shifted much of the focus to the characters rather than concentrating solely on the environment.
A running joke in the series is that Lupus is suggested as a cause of the patient's symptoms in many episodes, although invariably this is quickly dismissed. In one episode, House produces some of his secret Vicodin stash from inside a hollowed out Lupus textbook; by way of explanation, he says, "It's never lupus". Lupus is one of the medical conditions known as The Great Imitator, because it can present with a wide variety of symptoms.
Another large portion of the plot centers around House's abuse of Vicodin and other drugs to manage pain stemming from an infarction in his quadriceps muscle some years prior which causes him to walk with a cane. The pain and drug abuse act to increase many of his more objectionable character traits while not impairing his medical acumen, which leads him to often self-medicate. Overall, House is thus presented as a classic flawed hero.
House is in many respects a medical Sherlock Holmes. This resemblance is evident in various large elements of the series's plot. House, like Holmes, often relies (particularly in his clinic cases) on apparent minutiae to make accurate snap judgments about his subject's lives. He also displays a keen interest in individual psychology as a piece of his larger analytic method. House is addicted to Vicodin, but he can get along without it when the case is interesting; similarly, Holmes used cocaine out of boredom when he did not have a good case. These thematic parallels are confirmed and hammered home by various otherwise trivial plot details. For example, Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street and House's street address, as shown in "Hunting", is also 221B. Moreover, the name "House" itself can be read as a pun on "Holmes" ("homes").
U.S. Television Ratings
Seasonal rankings (based on average total viewers per episode) of House on FOX. Each U.S. network television season starts in late September and ends in late May, which coincides with the completion of May sweeps.
Season 1
Timeslot: Tuesday at 9:00 PM
Premiere: November 16, 2004
Finale: May 24, 2005
TV Season: 2004-2005
Ranking: #24
Viewers: 13.3 Million
Season 2
Timeslot: Tuesday at 9:00 PM
Premiere: September 13, 2005
Finale: May 23, 2006
TV Season: 2005-2006
Ranking: #10
Viewers: 17.3 Million
Season 3
Timeslot: Tuesday at 8:00 PM (2006) and Tuesday at 9:00 PM (2006-2007)
Premiere: September 5, 2006
Finale: May 29, 2007
TV Season: 2006-2007
Ranking: #7
Viewers: 19.4 Million
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 it's ads for House stating that the show is "the best medical drama since the debut of E.R." It attracted just a little over 7 million viewers for it's 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 it's 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 it's 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.
Before the Fall 2005 television season, FOX planned to move House from Tuesdays 9 PM to Mondays 8 PM for January 2006. However, the surprising success of the serial drama Prison Break (which later occupied the Monday 8 PM timeslot) nixed the plan. House remained airing Tuesdays at 9 PM, gaining an bigger audience and cracking into the top 10 of most watched primetime shows.
Production
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 (formed after General Electric, the owners of NBC, bought Universal Studios from Vivendi Universal) 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.
Casting
The producers were reportedly dissatisfied with early auditions for the role of House. When Hugh Laurie auditioned, he apologized for his appearance as he was filming "Flight of the Phoenix" at the time. 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" (the show was not yet titled House at that point). It was not until he received the full teleplay of the pilot that he realized 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.
Theme Music
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 only used for the show in North America with some exceptions. In other countries, a piece of music named "House End Credits" is used, which was composed specifically for the show by Jon Ehrlich, Jason Derlatka and Leigh Roberts. With the second season, this was replaced with a similar track by only Ehrlich and Roberts. This theme tune, however, is only used in the televised broadcast. In the DVD release (Season 2), the original (American) theme is used. In Italy, opening themes for Season 1–2 and Season 3 are switched, so that the original "Teardrop" is used for Season 3, while both Season 1 and 2 use the edited version. The parodic British television show "Dead Ringers", which sometimes spoofs House, uses "Teardrop" for the spoof's opening theme. "Teardrop" is used in the Season 2, region 2 and region 4 release, replacing the House theme at the beginning of the episode. "Teardrop" is also used as a background music for a promotion of the same show in Qtv in the Philippines.
Filming
Exterior shots of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital are actually of Princeton University's Frist Campus Center, which is the University's student center. Filming does not, however, take place there. Instead, it takes place on the FOX lot in Century City.
DVD Releases
Season 1
Region 1: August 20, 2005
Region 2: February 27, 2006
Region 3: PAL version, Singapore
Region 4: November 28, 2005
Season 2
Region 1: August 22, 2006
Region 2: October 23, 2006
Region 3: N/A
Region 4: October 23, 2006
Season 3
Region 1: August 21, 2007
Region 2: October 23, 2006
Region 3: N/A
Region 4: September 17, 2007
Despite the series being filmed for widescreen (16:9) television, the first season DVD set is in 4:3 format, although the region 1 release has letterboxes, thereby still presenting images in their entirety, whereas the other regions have a cropped fullscreen format, thereby losing the later portions of the image. The second season DVD set, on the other hand, presents the show in it's original widescreen format in all regions.
Facts and Trivia
- Some ads for House featured the song "Rebel Rebel" by David Bowie.
- Many of the wings in the hospital (e.g., Cuyler Wing and Witherspoon Wing) are named after influential people in Princeton University's history
This article primarily consists of material from the Wikipedia article "House (TV series)" which is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
