House, also known as House, M.D., is an American medical drama series which premiered on Fox on November 16, 2004. House was created by David Shore. The show follows Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), an irascible, maverick medical genius who heads a team of diagnosticians at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital (PPTH) in New Jersey. In a typical episode, the team is presented with an unusual case; the storyline follows the diagnosis of the patient's illness, a process often complicated by the internal competition and personal foibles of the diagnostic team.[1] The team leader, House, frequently clashes with his boss Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) [2] in seasons 1 through 7, and Dr. Eric Foreman in season 8, and his only friend, Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard).[1]
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In seasons 1 through 3, House's diagnostic team includes Dr. Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), Dr. Robert Chase (Jesse Spencer) and Dr. Eric Foreman (Omar Epps).[3] This team leaves the show in the third season finale "Human Error".[4] The show achieved its highest ranking with the episode "Human Error"; this episode placed the series in first position for the week it aired. Each season introduces a recurring guest star, who appears in a multi-episode story arc.[5] The fourth season was the only exception to this pattern. It introduced seven new characters who compete for the coveted positions on House's team, replacing Cameron, Chase and Foreman.[4] House eventually selects Dr. Chris Taub (Peter Jacobson), Dr. Lawrence Kutner (Kal Penn) and Dr. Remy "Thirteen" Hadley (Olivia Wilde) as his new team; Foreman rejoins soon after. Following Kutner's death in season five, through a series of plot twists, House reacquires Chase, one of the original team members.[6]When House resigns early in season six, Foreman takes his place, but he soon fires Thirteen, and Taub quits because he was there only to work with House. After this, Foreman hires both Cameron and Chase, but, soon, House comes back, spurring the return of Thirteen and Taub, too. When the dictator ("The Tyrant") dies because of Chase's intentional misunderstanding, Cameron and even Chase decide to leave the PPTH. But, Chase's desire to be part of House's team makes Cameron quit (though she later returns for the episode "Lockdown"). At the beginning of season seven, Thirteen ostensibly goes away to Rome (it's later revealed that this was actually a lie), leaving a vacancy on House's team. House proposes then, giving a chance to the rest of his team, to hire a new member. After some unsuccessful tries, Cuddy hires Martha M. Masters (Amber Tamblyn), a medical student in the episode "Office Politics". In the episode "Last Temptation", Masters takes the final choice to leave House's team. After being incarcerated following the events of "Moving On", House is released on probation thanks to Foreman, who has taken Cuddy's place as the Dean of Medicine. House is initially assigned a single team member, Dr. Chi Park (Charlyne Yi). After securing funding for his department in the season eight episode "Risky Business", House brings on former prison doctor Jessica Adams (Odette Annable) and rehires Chase and Taub.
All eight seasons were released on DVD and Blu-ray by Universal in North America, Europe and Australia. As of June 16, 2009, the show has been aired in more than 60 countries, with 86 million viewers worldwide.[13] In the following list, the number in the first column refers to the episode's number within the entire series. The second column indicates the episode's number within that season. "US viewers in millions" refers to the number of Americans in millions who watched the episode live while it was broadcast or by a few hours later with a digital video recorder.
The DVDs have been released encoded for regions 1, 2 and 4 as complete season boxed sets.[197][199][202][205][208][211][232] Season one was initially released in the full-screen format, while all other seasons have been released in their originally-broadcast wide-screen format. On February 10, 2009, season one was re-released in the wide-screen format encoded for region 1.[197] Season six was the first season to be released on Blu-ray.[citation needed]
During the first three seasons, House's diagnostic team consists of Dr. Robert Chase (Jesse Spencer), Dr. Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) and Dr. Eric Foreman (Omar Epps). At the end of the third season, this team disbands. Rejoined by Foreman, House gradually selects three new team members: Dr. Remy "Thirteen" Hadley (Olivia Wilde), Dr. Chris Taub (Peter Jacobson) and Dr. Lawrence Kutner (Kal Penn). Chase and Cameron continue to appear occasionally in different roles at the hospital. Kutner dies late in season five; early in season six, Cameron departs the hospital, and Chase returns to the diagnostic team. Thirteen takes a leave of absence for most of season seven, and her position is filled by medical student Martha M. Masters (Amber Tamblyn). Cuddy and Masters depart before season eight; Foreman becomes the new Dean of Medicine, while Dr. Jessica Adams (Odette Annable) and Dr. Chi Park (Charlyne Yi) join House's team.
House was among the top 10 series in the United States from its second season through the fourth season. Distributed to 66 countries, House was the most-watched television program in the world in 2008.[3] The show received numerous awards, including five Primetime Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, a Peabody Award, and nine People's Choice Awards. On February 8, 2012, Fox announced that the eighth season, then in progress, would be its last.[4] The series finale aired on May 21, 2012, following an hour-long retrospective.
Individual episodes of the series contain additional references to the Sherlock Holmes tales. The main patient in the pilot episode is named Rebecca Adler after Irene Adler, a character in the first Holmes short story, "A Scandal in Bohemia".[23] In the season two finale, House is shot by a crazed gunman credited as "Moriarty", the name of Holmes's nemesis.[24] In the season four episode "It's a Wonderful Lie", House receives a "second-edition Conan Doyle" as a Christmas gift.[25] In the season five episode "The Itch", House is seen picking up his keys and Vicodin from the top of a copy of Conan Doyle's The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.[26] In another season five episode, "Joy to the World", House, in an attempt to fool his team, uses a book by Joseph Bell, Conan Doyle's inspiration for Sherlock Holmes.[10] The volume had been given to him the previous Christmas by Wilson, who included the message "Greg, made me think of you." Before acknowledging that he gave the book to House, Wilson tells two of the team members that its source was a patient, Irene Adler.[27] Season 7 episode 3 includes a young adult boyhood detective book series written by the patient, whose final unpublished volume ends in an ambiguous end to the main character reminiscent of "The Final Problem". The series finale also pays homage to Holmes's apparent death in "The Final Problem", the 1893 story with which Conan Doyle originally intended to conclude the Holmes chronicles.[28]
House was a co-production of Heel and Toe Films, Shore Z Productions, and Bad Hat Harry Productions in association with Universal Network Television for Fox.[30] Paul Attanasio and Katie Jacobs, the heads of Heel and Toe Films; David Shore, the head of Shore Z Productions; and Bryan Singer, the head of Bad Hat Harry Productions, were executive producers of the program for its entirety.[14] Lawrence Kaplow, Peter Blake, and Thomas L. Moran joined the staff as writers at the beginning of the first season after the making of the pilot episode. Writers Doris Egan, Sara Hess, Russel Friend, and Garrett Lerner joined the team at the start of season two. Friend and Lerner, who are business partners, had been offered positions when the series launched, but turned the opportunity down. After observing the show's success, they accepted when Jacobs offered them jobs again the following year.[31] Writers Eli Attie and Sean Whitesell joined the show at the start of season four; Attie would stay on the show's writing staff through the series finale, which he co-wrote. From the beginning of season four, Moran, Friend, and Lerner were credited as executive producers on the series, joining Attanasio, Jacobs, Shore, and Singer.[30] Hugh Laurie was credited as an executive producer for the second[32] and third[33] episodes of season five.
Shore was House's showrunner.[34] Through the end of the sixth season, more than two dozen writers had contributed to the program. The most prolific were Kaplow (18 episodes), Blake (17), Shore (16), Friend (16), Lerner (16), Moran (14), and Egan (13). The show's most prolific directors through its first six seasons were Deran Sarafian (22 episodes), who was not involved in season six, and Greg Yaitanes (17). Of the more than three dozen other directors who have worked on the series, only David Straiton directed as many as 10 episodes through the sixth season. Hugh Laurie directed the 17th episode of season six, "Lockdown".[35] Elan Soltes was the visual effects supervisor since the show began.[36] Lisa Sanders, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, was a technical advisor to the series. She writes the "Diagnosis" column that inspired House's premise.[37] According to Shore, "[T]hree different doctors ... check everything we do".[38] Bobbin Bergstrom, a registered nurse, was the program's on-set medical adviser.[38]
Laurie later revealed that he initially thought the show's central character was Dr. James Wilson. He assumed that House was a supporting part, due to the nature of the character, until he received the full script of the pilot episode.[45] Laurie, the son of medical doctor Ran Laurie, said he felt guilty for "being paid more to become a fake version of [his] own father".[39] From the start of season three, he was being paid $275,000 to $300,000 per episode, as much as three times what he had previously been making on the series.[46] Laurie was earning around $400,000 per episode by the fifth season,[47] and $700,000 per episode for the final season, making him one of the highest-paid actors on network television.[48][49] 2ff7e9595c
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