House, M.D.
The cane-tapping misanthrope, the puzzle-box cases, the Vicodin addiction, the mantra that everybody lies, and the rule that it's never lupus — House was the prestige procedural where every disease was a mystery to solve. Hugh Laurie's imperious Dr. Gregory House became appointment television for the 2000s and the most-watched show in the world in 2008.
Created by David Shore for Fox, House, M.D. premiered November 16, 2004, and ran for eight seasons of 177 episodes through May 21, 2012. The premise was elegantly perverse: Dr. Gregory House, the diagnostician at the fictional Princeton–Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, was a Sherlock Holmes figure — a detective whose cases were diseases, forever dispatching his team to break into patients' homes in search of the clue everyone else had missed. The character balanced a cane (the result of a leg infarction), an addiction to Vicodin, the flat assertion that "everybody lies," and an inability to engage in human relationships with anything resembling warmth.
Hugh Laurie, a British actor whose American accent was so seamless that audiences were routinely astonished at his real voice in interviews, anchored the show with caustic charisma. By season five, he was earning approximately $400,000 per episode, climbing to $700,000 by the final season. His supporting cast — Lisa Edelstein as hospital administrator Cuddy, Robert Sean Leonard as his only friend Wilson, Omar Epps, Jesse Spencer, and Jennifer Morrison — provided the foil against which House's genius and misanthropy could register. Massive Attack's "Teardrop" scored the opening titles.
The show became a global colossus by its middle seasons: distributed to 71 countries, it was the most-watched television program in the world in 2008, and won five Primetime Emmys, two Golden Globes, and a Peabody Award across its run. House had made the brilliant misanthrope the template for prestige drama, and by the final seasons, the show's interest had shifted from the medical puzzles themselves to the psychological cost of House's genius — his addiction, his loneliness, and the question of whether a mind as powerful as his could survive intact in the human world at all.
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