House has enjoyed a healthy eight-season run that included audiences of 20 million and more at its peak, four Emmy nominations for best drama and six for star Hugh Laurie.
Tonight, Fox wraps up Dr. House's tale with a two-hour goodbye (8 ET/PT) divided between a retrospective and the final episode.
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VIDEO: Watch a clip from the 'House' finale
Laurie, who created one of the more captivating characters of recent times, shares his viewers' sentiment: "I like him."
But why like a guy whose behavior can be downright antisocial, whether he's dealing with patients with mysterious, bizarre (though often surprisingly curable) symptoms, or colleagues on the elite diagnostic team he heads at Princeton Plainsboro Hospital?
"First of all, he's funny. That's an important ingredient to the way his mind works, professionally as well as emotionally. He's also entertaining, which explains why the character Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) tolerated him for so long," says Laurie, enjoying a breezy afternoon on a balcony terrace at the Chateau Marmont hotel.
"And there's something defiant about House. He just wouldn't bend to conventional demands of good manners or authority. He also wouldn't bend to fear of death or loneliness," Laurie says. "For all his morbid self-destructiveness, I tend to think there is something full of life about House."
The unsentimental House has been a totally different kind of TV doctor, nothing like the avuncular Marcus Welby, the heroic Doug Ross of ER or the earnest young surgeons of Grey's Anatomy. You wouldn't see any of them start to strangle a patient with his own medication line, as House did in last week's episode.
But patients will put up with a lot when a doctor has House's success rate. In a recent episode, a hospital pathologist demanded to be treated by House, based on his track record.
House's weaknesses, including an addiction to Vicodin and chronic leg pain that causes him to limp, helped humanize him, says Englishman Laurie, who perfected the limp and an American accent for the role. "Sympathetic instincts are aroused when you see people who are in pain. You want to heal them or protect them in some way."
From a different angle, series creator David Shore says, "He's a 15-year-old boy. He just does what he wants to do, which is a very attractive thing. We worked very hard to make it smart and funny, and Hugh is unbelievable in that role. I can give all the credit in the world to Hugh — and I am."
House in a predicament
One of those immature stunts — clogging the hospital's toilets with paper, causing damage to an MRI machine — puts House in a predicament in the finale, as his parole for an earlier act of destruction is revoked and he is ordered back to jail. He is supposed to serve six months, one more than the life expectancy of best friend James Wilson, an oncologist who has cancer.
"House is faced with a very difficult situation with Wilson, and he assesses what his future should or will be. How does he deal with that?" Shore says. House has "always been a good friend. I like the fact that we're ending the series focusing on the House-Wilson relationship."
Strong characters such as Wilson and Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) make House a better character, he says. "He's only as good as the people who battle him. … Any time somebody went toe-to-toe with House and won, and Lisa did that as often as anybody, it was great."
Over the years, House dueled with other able colleagues, including Dr. Eric Foreman (Omar Epps), Dr. Robert Chase (Jesse Spencer), Dr. Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), Dr. Remy "Thirteen" Hadley (Olivia Wilde) and Dr. Chris Taub (Peter Jacobson). They put up with a lot of grief, some humorous, some less so, to bask in his genius. (Morrison and Wilde will appear in the finale, as will Amber Tamblyn, who played med student Martha Masters, and Kal Penn, whose character, Lawrence Kutner, killed himself.)
"They thought he was brilliant, and they were just sponges soaking it up," Epps says. "Certain people and departments are above and beyond the rest in their field. House was that guy. The core of House represented the truth. He was always trying to get to the truth of the matter. That's one of the reasons people responded to the character."
Foreman, who became the hospital's dean of medicine during the run of the show, "tried to keep him within the boundaries of reality," Epps says. "House has a childlike quality, in that he's forever curious, and I think Foreman echoed the audience in the sense of: 'Hey, you can't do this in the real world.' "
If House the character has demanded more from an audience than the typical TV hero, so has House the series. "It was about something. It tackled ethics and morals and existential questions of religion, sex, love and marriage. It took on a great many things," Laurie says.
"It aspired to take on big ethical questions: Is it worth using bad means to achieve a good end? What are you prepared to sacrifice to achieve a desired outcome? How much are you prepared to pay in psychic and moral terms to achieve good results?" he says. "House is a character and an idea that tried to test those limits."
Going out his own way
House premiered Nov. 16, 2004, to modest ratings, starting well short of hit status. "I just wanted a large enough audience so I could keep telling my stories," Shore says.
He got far more. Fox backed House in its early struggles, eventually giving it the prime slot after TV's most-watched show, American Idol. House's audience boomed, and it became one of TV's top hits. In its peak season, 2006-07, the show averaged 19.3 million viewers. The numbers have slipped in recent years, and the show is averaging 8.6 million viewers this season.
Shore, with Laurie and executive producer Katie Jacobs, decided to end the show this season because of uncertainties about the future in such matters as budgets and casting.
"My worry was, if it's not going to get resolved in time, and it was looking like it wasn't going to get resolved in time, we're going to wind up not being able to end the series the way we want," Shore says. "If we can't do it the way we want to do it, let's go out while we're still feeling good about it."
The time feels right to Laurie, too. "You cannot have a character on the ledge threatening to jump forever, because at some point the crowd gathered below is going to start to drift away. The guy's got to jump or climb back into the building."
Will viewers see that in the finale? "You probably will. House reaches a point at which he physically and emotionally confronts the question of to be or not to be. Well, I suppose I shouldn't tell you which way he goes," Laurie says, pausing. "You can probably guess."
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