House (TV Series) - Series Overview

Series Overview

See also: List of House episodes

Anytime you try to summarize a show in one word, you sound like an ass. It's about truth.

David Shore

Gregory House, M.D., often construed as a misanthropic medical genius, heads a team of diagnosticians at the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey. Most episodes revolve around the diagnosis of a primary patient and start with a pre-credits scene set outside the hospital, showing events ending with the onset of the patient's symptoms. The typical episode follows the team in their attempts to diagnose and treat the patient's illness, which often fail until the patient's condition is critical. They usually treat only patients whom other doctors have not accurately diagnosed, and House routinely rejects cases that he does not find interesting. The story lines tend to focus on his unconventional medical theories and practices, and on the other characters' reactions to them, rather than on the details of the treatments.

The team employs the differential diagnosis method, listing possible etiologies on a whiteboard, then eliminating most of them, usually because one of the team (most often House) provides logical reasons for ruling them out. Typically the patient is misdiagnosed at least once and accordingly receives some treatments that are at best useless; this usually causes further complications, but—as the nature of the complications often provides valuable new evidence—eventually these help them diagnose the patient correctly. House often tends to arrive at the correct diagnosis seemingly out of the blue, often inspired by a passing remark made by another character. Diagnoses range from relatively common to very rare diseases.

The team face many diagnostic difficulties from patients' concealment of symptoms, circumstances, or personal histories, so House frequently proclaims during the team's deliberations, "The patient is lying", or mutters "Everybody lies"; such an assumption guides House's decisions and diagnoses, and makes the countermeasure of housebreaking a routine procedure. 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. There are frequent disagreements between House and his team, especially Dr. Allison Cameron, whose standards of medical ethics are more conservative than those of the other characters.

Like all of the hospital's doctors, House is required to treat patients in the facility's walk-in clinic. His grudging fulfillment of this duty, or his creative methods of avoiding it, constitute a recurring subplot, which often serves as the series' comic relief. During clinic duty, House confounds patients with unwelcome observations into their personal lives, eccentric prescriptions, and unorthodox treatments. However, after seeming to be inattentive to their complaints, he regularly impresses them with rapid and accurate diagnoses. Analogies with some of the simple cases in the clinic often inspire insights that help solve the team's case.

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.

Shore on House's Vicodin addiction

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; eleventh 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". His addiction has led his colleagues, Cuddy and Dr. James Wilson, to encourage him to go to drug rehabilitation several times. When he has no access to Vicodin or experiences unusually intense pain, he occasionally self-medicates with other narcotic analgesics such as morphine, oxycodone, and methadone. House also frequently drinks liquor when he is not on medical duty, and classifies himself as a "big drinker". Toward the end of season five, House begins to hallucinate; after eliminating other possible diagnoses, he and Wilson determine that his Vicodin addiction is the most likely cause. House goes into denial about this for a brief time, but at the close of the season finale, he commits himself to Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital. In the following season's debut episode, House leaves Mayfield with his addiction under control. However, about a year and a half later, in season seven's 15th episode, "Bombshells", House reacts to the news that Cuddy possibly has kidney cancer by taking Vicodin, and his addiction recurs.