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The world's most-watched show starred a doctor who hated patients

House ran on Fox for eight seasons starting in 2004, built around Hugh Laurie's performance as Gregory House, a brilliant, pill-popping diagnostician who treats patients other doctors can't figure out while clashing with nearly everyone around him, including his boss Lisa Cuddy and his diagnostic team. His only real friend is oncologist James Wilson, and the show leans heavily on the idea, borrowed openly from Sherlock Holmes, that patients lie and the truth has to be deduced from small contradictions rather than taken at face value. The team itself changes repeatedly: the original trio of Chase, Cameron and Foreman breaks up after season three, a new group is chosen through an elimination-style hiring process, and later cast departures and a death among the team reshape the group again before the series ends with House's long addiction to Vicodin, stemming from a botched diagnosis years earlier, still unresolved rather than neatly cured.

The article spends a lot of time on how deliberately the show was constructed. Creator David Shore and producer Paul Attanasio originally pitched a CSI-style medical mystery, but the focus shifted toward House himself once they realized an abrasive central character was more interesting than procedure alone; Fox vetoed an early idea to put him in a wheelchair, leading instead to the damaged leg and cane that drive his drug dependence. Laurie, despite being British, won the role with a self-taped audition using an umbrella as a cane, convincing the show's backers he was simply an unusually convincing American. Filming relied heavily on tracking

Eric Foreman, hired as one of House's three original underlings, finishes the series as Dean of Medicine the boss of the man who hired him.

Read the whole of House (TV series) on Wikipedia

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