Information about House (tv Series)

House
House title screen
Created by	David Shore
Starring	Hugh Laurie Lisa Edelstein Omar Epps Robert Sean Leonard Jennifer Morrison Jesse Spencer
Opening theme	"Teardrop" by Massive Attack (varies from country to country)
Country of origin	United States
Language(s)	English
No. of seasons	4
No. of episodes	73 (List of episodes)
Production
Running time	approx. 43 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	FOX
Picture format	480i (SDTV), 720p (HDTV)
Original run	November 16, 2004 – present
External links
Official website
IMDb profile
TV.com summary

House, also known as House, M.D., is a critically-acclaimed American medical drama television series created by David Shore and executive produced by Shore and film director Bryan Singer. The Emmy and Peabody Award-winning medical drama debuted on the FOX Network on 16 November 2004. The series is currently the most watched program on FOX.

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 . In February 2007, House was renewed for a fourth season, which premiered on September 25, 2007 in the United States and Canada.^[1][2]

Characters

Main article: List of House characters

Cast

Character	Actor	Position	Field
Gregory House	Hugh Laurie	Head of the Department of Diagnostic Medicine	Infectious disease; Nephrology
Lisa Cuddy	Lisa Edelstein	Chief Administrator; Dean of Medicine; member of the board of the hospital	Endocrinology
James Wilson	Robert Sean Leonard	Head of the Department of Oncology; member of the board of the hospital	Oncology
Eric Foreman	Omar Epps	Department of Diagnostic Medicine (former); Head of Neurology at Mercy Hospital (former); Unemployed	Neurology
Allison Cameron	Jennifer Morrison	Department of Diagnostic Medicine (former); Emergency Room	Immunology
Robert Chase	Jesse Spencer	Department of Diagnostic Medicine (former); Surgery	Intensive care; Cardiology

Plot

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Gregory House is a maverick medical genius, who heads a team of young diagnosticians at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital 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 and treat 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, GBA SP, or DS while patients or one of his colleagues talk to him, 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.

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 -type show where the "germs were the suspects,"^[3] 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 medical textbook on lupus; 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 on 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.

House is in many respects a medical Sherlock Holmes^[4][5]. This resemblance is evident in various elements of the series' 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. Both play a musical instrument: House plays the piano and the guitar, Holmes plays the violin. 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" Season 2 Episode 7, is also 221B. Moreover, the name "House" itself can be read as a pun on "Holmes" ("homes") and the name of House's friend James Wilson is a direct reference to Holmes' side-kick John Watson. Another confirmation is in House's encounter with a crazed gunman credited as "Moriarty"—the same name as Sherlock's nemesis.

Reception

USA TV 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	Timeslot	Season Premiere	Season Finale	TV Season	Rank	Viewers (in millions)
	Tuesday 9:00P.M.	November 16, 2004	May 24, 2005	2004-2005	#24	13.3[6]
	Tuesday 9:00P.M.	September 13, 2005	May 23, 2006	2005–2006	#10	17.3[7]
	Tuesday 8:00P.M. (2006) Tuesday 9:00P.M. (2006-2007)	September 5, 2006	May 29, 2007	2006–2007	#7	19.4[8]
	Tuesday 9:00P.M.	September 25, 2007	TBD	2007–2008	TBD	TBD

Awards

Main article: List of House awards

House received a Peabody Award in 2006, for what the Peabody board called an "unorthodox lead character – a misanthropic diagnostician" and for "cases fit for a medical Sherlock Holmes," both of which helped make House "the most distinctive new doctor drama in a decade."^[9] At the 2005 American Film Institute Awards, House was an official selection as TV Program of the Year.

Creator David Shore won a writing Emmy in 2005 for the first season episode "Three Stories."^[10] The Writer's Guild of America honored Lawrence Kaplow for his episode "Autopsy."

In 2005 and 2007, lead actor Hugh Laurie was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. He was awarded the Golden Globe for in 2006 and again in 2007, when he also won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Male Actor in a Drama Series.

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.^[11]

The 59th Primetime Emmy Awards and Creative Arts Emmy awarded the Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup for a Series, Miniseries, Movie or a Special Award to Dalia Dokter, Department Head Prosthetic Makeup Artist,Jamie Kelman, Prosthetic Makeup Artist, and Ed French, Prosthetic Makeup Artist for the House, M.D. episode entitled "Que Sera Sera". for FOX, produced by Heel and Toe Productions, Shore Z Productions and Bad Hat Harry Productions in association with Universal Television Studios.

The 58th Primetime Emmy Awards and Creative Arts Emmy nominations recognized Derek R. Hill, Production Designer and Danielle Berman, S.D.S.A., Set Decorator for their "Outstanding Art Direction For A Single-Camera Series" 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.^[12] 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.^[13] Laurie later stated that his original impression was that the show was about James Wilson, as the script referred to him as a doctor with "boyish" looks, assumed this to be the star and that 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.^[14] 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.^[15]

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 also used in the season 2 region 2 and region 4 release, replacing the "House" theme at the beginning of the episode.

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.^[16] Instead, it takes place on the FOX lot in Century City and on location in Vancouver, BC.^[17]

DVD releases

Title	Region 1	Region 2	Region 3	Region 4
Season One	August 30 2005	February 27 2006	PAL version, Singapore	November 28 2005
Season Two	August 22 2006	October 23 2006	NA	October 23, 2006
Season Three	August 21 2007	November 4 2007	NA	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. ^[18] The Second Season DVD set, on the other hand, presents the show in its original widescreen format in all regions.

Original broadcast

First run episodes of House are broadcast on FOX in the United States and on Global in Canada. Reruns are also frequently broadcast on FOX and the USA Network.

Notes

See also

• ER (TV series)‎
• Grey's Anatomy

External links

• Official website
• House at Yahoo! TV
• House Medical Reviews A physician reviews House on medical accuracy
• House episode reviews on TV Squad

•  • [ e] House
Episodes Awards Soundtrack
Characters:	Gregory House Lisa Cuddy Eric Foreman James Wilson Allison Cameron Robert Chase
Cast and crew:	David Shore Hugh Laurie Lisa Edelstein Omar Epps Robert Sean Leonard Jennifer Morrison Jesse Spencer

Preceded by Criminal Minds 2007

Super Bowl lead-out program 2008

Succeeded by TBD 2009