
House reached its peak Nielsen ratings in its third season, attracting an average of 19.4 million viewers per episode. According to Jacobs, the production team was surprised that the show garnered such a large audience. In its fifth season, the show attracted 12.0 million viewers per episode and slipped to nineteenth place overall.
Season 2 (2005–
Does House Die in the Series Finale? The Fan Theory, Explained - MovieWeb
Does House Die in the Series Finale? The Fan Theory, Explained.
Posted: Tue, 05 Mar 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Robert Sean Leonard had received the script for the CBS show Numb3rs, as well as that for House. Leonard thought the Numb3rs script was "kind of cool" and planned to audition for the show. However, he decided that the character he was up for, Charlie Eppes, was in too many scenes; he later observed, "The less I work, the happier I am". He believed that his House audition was not particularly good, but that his lengthy friendship with Singer helped win him the part of Dr. Wilson. Singer had enjoyed Lisa Edelstein's portrayal of a prostitute on The West Wing, and sent her a copy of the pilot script.
Sports Medicine
House's original team of diagnosticians consists of Dr. Eric Foreman (Omar Epps), a neurologist; Dr. Robert Chase (Jesse Spencer), an intensivist; and Dr. Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), an immunologist. In the Season 3 episode Family, Foreman announces his resignation, telling House, "I don't want to turn into you." During the season finale, House tells Chase that he has either learned everything he can, or nothing at all, and dismisses him from the team. 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. "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.
Production team
House is sentenced to one night in jail for contempt of court and finishes his rehabilitation under the influence of Vicodin. House was a co-production of Heel and Toe Films, David Shore's Shore Z Productions, and Bryan Singer's Bad Hat Harry Production in association with Universal Network Television for Fox. Attanasio, Jacobs, Shore and Singer, were executive producers of the program for its entirety. It's not a show about addiction, but you can't throw something like this into the mix and not expect it to be noticed and commented on. There have been references to the amount of his consumption increasing over time. It's becoming less and less useful a tool for dealing with his pain, and it's something we're going to continue to deal with, continue to explore.
Season 4 (2007–
Through the end of the sixth season, more than two dozen writers have contributed to the program. The most prolific have been 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 6, 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. Elan Soltes has been the visual effects supervisor since the show began.
Season 4
The eighth and final season of the show primarily revolves around the relationship between House and Wilson after Wilson is diagnosed with terminal cancer. While Jacobson and Wilde play central characters (as did Penn), they did not receive star billing until Season 7. They were credited as "Also Starring", with their names appearing after the opening sequence. In Season 7, Jacobson and Wilde received star billing; new regular cast member Tamblyn did not.
Season 8
Throughout Season 7, House and Cuddy try to make their relationship work. Because many of his hypotheses are based on epiphanies or controversial insights, he often has trouble obtaining permission for medical procedures he considers necessary from his superior, who in all but the final season is hospital administrator Dr. Lisa Cuddy. This is especially the case when the proposed procedures involve a high degree of risk or are ethically questionable. Frequent disagreements occur between House and his team, especially Cameron, whose standards of medical ethics are more conservative than those of the other characters.
References to the fact that House was based on the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle appear throughout the series. Shore explained that he was always a Holmes fan and found the character's indifference to his clients unique. The resemblance is evident in House's reliance on deductive reasoning and psychology, even where it might not seem obviously applicable, and his reluctance to accept cases he finds uninteresting. His investigatory method is to eliminate diagnoses logically as they are proved impossible; Holmes used a similar method. Both characters play instruments (House plays the piano, the guitar, and the harmonica; Holmes, the violin) and take drugs (House is dependent on Vicodin; Holmes is often dependent on cocaine). House's relationship with Dr. James Wilson echoes that between Holmes and his confidant, Dr. John Watson.
Jennifer Morrison felt that her audition for the part of Dr. Allison Cameron was a complete disaster. However, before her audition, Singer had watched some of her performances, including on Dawson's Creek, and already wanted to cast her in the role. Morrison left the show when her character was written out in the middle of Season 6.
He becomes a member of House's new diagnostic team in the Season 4 episode titled Games. The Dean of Medicine, and House's boss, is Dr. Lisa Cuddy, played by Lisa Edelstein. Filled with sexual tension and innuendo, their relationship is extremely complex and often stormy, as she has to deal with his often foolish and almost always disastrous escapades as well as her own complex feelings towards House. House's only real friend seems to be Dr. James Wilson, head of the Department of Oncology at the same hospital, played by Robert Sean Leonard. When things get serious, though, one of them is always there to defend the other. Wilson tries mostly unsuccessfully to help House kick his Vicodin habit, which began when House suffered an aneurysm in his thigh which was subsequently misdiagnosed.
Edelstein was attracted to the quality of the writing and her character's "snappy dialogue" with House, and was cast as Dr. Lisa Cuddy. No longer a world where an idealized doctor has all the answers or a hospital where gurneys race down the hallways, House's focus is on the pharmacological—and the intellectual demands of being a doctor. The trial-and-error of new medicine skillfully expands the show beyond the format of a classic procedural, and at the show's heart, a brilliant but flawed physician is doling out the prescriptions—a fitting symbol for modern medicine. The series' executive producers included Shore, Attanasio, Attanasio's business partner Katie Jacobs, and film director Bryan Singer.
In the two-part season finale, Volakis attempts to shepherd a drunken House home when Wilson is unavailable. All of them play doctors who work at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey. Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), the title character, heads the Department of Diagnostic Medicine. A significant plot element is House's use of Vicodin to manage pain, caused by an infarction in his quadriceps muscle five years before the show's first season, which also forces him to use a cane. In the first season, 11th episode Detox, House admits he is addicted to Vicodin, but says he does not have a problem because the pills "let me do my job, and they take away my pain".
Epps' name is superimposed upon a rib cage X-ray; Leonard's name appears on a drawing of the two hemispheres of the brain. The producers originally wanted to include an image of a cane and an image of a Vicodin bottle, but Fox objected. Morrison's title card was thus lacking an image; an aerial shot of rowers on Princeton University's Lake Carnegie was finally agreed upon to accompany her name. Spencer's name appears next to an old-fashioned anatomical drawing of a spine. Between the presentations of Spencer and Shore's names is a scene of House and his three original team members walking down one of the hospital's hallways. The opening sequence begins with an MRI of a head with an image of the boxed "H" from the logo (the international symbol for hospital) in the foreground.
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.