Entertainment Weekly article on House
Aug. 18th, 2006 03:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silversolitaireMonster 'House'
TV's edgiest medical show returns for a third season of creepy and compelling medical mysteries -- but even with an Emmy nod and 19 million fans in his bag, don't think Hugh Laurie's brilliant bastard of a doctor is any less cranky
by Benjamin Svetkey
BACK ON CALL Laurie (right) and company return in September for a third season of House
Columbo's rumpled raincoat. Fonzie's leather jacket. Kojak's lollipop. Every great TV character needs a great prop. So when Hugh Laurie landed the part of Dr. Gregory House — the misanthropic M.D. with the gimpy leg and cranky bedside manner on Fox's hit medical drama House — the first thing he did was go shopping for a cane. "I looked all over for the perfect one," says the 47-year-old Brit. "I finally found it in a little shop in London. It was made out of some sort of rare Malaysian wood and had these beautiful ivory rings and a gorgeous horn handle. Very politically incorrect, but it called to me like Excalibur. The minute I saw it, I thought, 'This is the one. This is House's cane.'"
Alas, it wasn't around for long — the stick had to be replaced after getting smashed in a closing soundstage gate during shooting of the show's pilot — but Laurie is limping along just fine without it. In fact, thanks to his turn as prime time's brainiest healer — and biggest heel — House enters its third season (premiering Sept. 5 at 8 p.m.) as Fox's highest-rated, most talked-about drama since 24. Last season it grabbed 18.9 million viewers each week and regularly won its Tuesday time slot; this summer, when its reruns have often been administered in two-episode doses, it still pulls in a healthy audience of 10 million. And then there are the industry accolades, including a Golden Globe for Laurie earlier this year and a recent Emmy nomination for Outstanding Drama Series.
After decades of loving morally upstanding TV docs like Kildare and Welby, the audience has fallen for one who pops painkillers like breath mints (his leg, crippled by a blood clot, keeps him in constant agony), hurls slurs at the sick and infirm ("Unfortunately, there's no cure for being a bitch," he snaps at one patient), and gleefully infuriates his co-workers at Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital (Robert Sean Leonard plays his bemused best friend; Lisa Edelstein is his beleaguered boss; Omar Epps, Jesse Spencer, and Jennifer Morrison are the three young doctors he handpicked for his staff ). His only redeeming quality, aside from scalpel-sharp wit, is that he's pretty amazing at saving lives. Each week the show sets up a different mystery malady — radiation poisoning, Black Plague, uncontrollable laughter — which only House is able to diagnose, thanks to his superior powers of deduction and utter disregard for medical ethics. In some ways, House is just like all the other "procedural" dramas on TV today — the CSIs and Law & Orders — only the criminals are diseases and the good guys wear lab coats (except House, who usually sports jeans and a hip T-shirt).
But in one way, House is unlike anything you've seen on broadcast television in aeons. You have to go back to the 1970s, to All in the Family, to find a network series centered on so irresistible a bastard. (And no, Becker didn't count.)
Come to think of it, it's been a while since any sort of eccentrically written character has been a smash on TV. And that makes House something of a throwback to that long-ago era when dramas were built around quirky personalities rather than methodical procedures.
"I look at the show as part Quincy and part Archie Bunker, with a little West Wing thrown in," says Bryan Singer, who took time off from directing superhero movies like X2: X-Men United to help launch the series as an executive producer. "There's a procedural element to it, sure, but if all House did was cure a disease every week, he'd get boring pretty fast."
And this testy doc is anything but staid, a fact that was not lost on Laurie when he first eyed the script. "I couldn't believe House was the main character," he confesses. "The tradition on American TV is that the hero is always morally good — which also means he's always good-looking, since good looks and moral rectitude go together in Hollywood. This character wasn't any of those things. I couldn't believe anybody would put him in the middle of a one-hour drama." Actually, Laurie's not bad-looking, even with his perpetual stubble. But there's another tradition on American TV, which is to hire somebody with an American accent when casting an American doctor, preferably an actor who isn't completely unknown to the vast majority of the audience.
But then, this show — like the doctor at its center — doesn't always follow the rules.
"Ex-you-date? Ex-yuh-date? Ex-eh-date? How do I say it?"
Laurie and the rest of the cast are on the Fox lot on a hazy August afternoon, shooting one of the show's "differential diagnosis" sequences (every episode includes at least one scene in which House writes the patient's symptoms on a whiteboard and fiddles with them like pieces of a puzzle). At the moment, the word he's struggling with is exudates — that's ek-s(y)ü-da-t — a noun meaning a fluid oozing from tissue or capillaries. Like so many terms on the show, it's of Latin derivation, but that's not what's tripping up the Cambridge-educated actor; he's just having trouble speaking Latin like an American.
'HOUSE' MATES Spencer, Morrison, and Epps play the young docs House drafted for his team
"I haven't identified a single word that is pronounced the same in America as it is in England," complains Laurie in his natural British burr. "Lately, I've even been having problems with words like boy.... And that can really take you out of the moment, having to constantly listen to yourself and check your accent. It makes it harder to immerse yourself in the scene. It's as if you're playing left-handed. Or like everyone else is playing with a tennis racket and you have a salmon. I moan about it a lot." Laurie should relax a bit, seeing as from day one his accent has been dead-on, so flawless that Singer mistook him for a Yank when he first saw Laurie's audition tape. "I was like, 'Now this is the sort of strong American actor I'm looking for!'" recalls Singer. "I had no idea who he was at all. I just thought he was great."
Laurie is far better known in England, where he first gained notice after college, goofing around on sketch-comedy shows with classmates Stephen Fry and onetime girlfriend Emma Thompson. On this side of the Atlantic, he's sometimes recognized for his turn as doofy Prince George on the classic '80s Britcom Black Adder, as well as big-screen appearances in Sense and Sensibility and Stuart Little (not to mention his rakish author's portrait on the book flap of The Gun Seller, his best-selling 1997 spy-novel spoof, which he's now adapting into a screenplay). Still, even those who did know his work weren't initially ready to hand over the House.
"I was a huge fan of his comedy," says exec producer David Shore. "But I honest to God never thought he'd be right for this role." Denis Leary's name was discussed before he launched Rescue Me, and meetings were taken with Patrick Dempsey and Rob Morrow. But nobody quite wowed Shore, Singer, or the show's two other executive producers, Katie Jacobs (Gideon's Crossing) and Paul Attanasio (who'd originally dreamed up House while reading a medical column about rare diseases in The New York Times Magazine).
It wasn't until half of the other actors on the show had been cast that the producers received a grainy, self-made audition tape shot inside a men's room in Namibia. "I was there making Flight of the Phoenix, and the only place that had enough light was the shaving mirror in that bathroom," says Laurie, explaining why he taped his tryout in an African toilet. (Phoenix costars Jacob Vargas and Scott Michael Campbell squeezed in to help with the camera.) Excerpts had been faxed to Laurie on the Phoenix set, and, he says, "you could tell straightaway that it was different. Even from the few pages I saw, I thought, 'Now this is good stuff.'... Besides, at the time, I was thinking, 'It's a pilot, that's all. Maybe 10 or 12 days' work.' I didn't assume it would go any further than that. Most times they don't."
This time it did.
Fox began airing the show at 9 p.m. on Tuesdays in the fall of 2004. Early ratings were respectable, if less than spectacular. But last season, the network gave it a new lead-in of questionable compatibility — a little sing-along called American Idol — and viewership soared.
"We had a core of fans who discovered us on their own before Idol moved," says Jacobs, "but we never imagined we'd have this huge an audience." The growth is evident here on the lot, where new expansions have been bulking up the show's sleek glass-and steel hospital sets (the pharmacy where House gets his Vicodin still needs work; you can't find a single pill in any jar). And Laurie should be feeling pretty swell too. Not only has the series brought him fame in America, but his season 3 salary has been bumped to a reported $300,000 an episode. Now he can afford to buy all the rare Malaysian canes he wants.
IN RESIDENCY Leonard (shown with Edelstein) doesn't envy Laurie's schedule -- about 40 scenes a week, compared with his own eight
"I actually never wanted to make an American TV show," Laurie admits. "But when you're sent good material, you follow it, whether it's American TV, Latvian TV, or a traveling circus in Iceland." That said, he had no clue what he was getting into when he sent off that videotape. Compared with the cushy working conditions in the English TV business (where a mere six episodes per season are the norm), Stateside TV acting is more like indentured servitude (with stars cranking out at least 22 episodes at a time). For the lead in a one-hour drama series, things can get especially brutal.
"I show up every week and do eight scenes," says Robert Sean Leonard. "Hugh does, like, 40. I would shoot myself in the mouth if I were him." Despite the grueling schedule, Laurie and his wife, Jo Green, decided not to move the family to L.A. from London (they have three kids: Rebecca, 14; Bill, 16; and Charlie, 18). He explains, "I'd never have time to see them anyway." To say nothing of time for other acting opportunities; not even Singer could pry Laurie away from the House set long enough for him to play Perry White in Superman Returns.
And then there's the acting part of the job, which turns out to be more labor-intensive than merely twanging like an American. "You know, for Hugh, it's not just showing up and saying a few lines," says Jennifer Morrison, who plays the idealistic Dr. Cameron, whom House never succeeds in cracking (on the contrary, she developed a crush on him in season 1). "He's saying medical terms constantly. He's got huge chunks of medical terms to memorize. And then along with the accent, he's got the limp and then figuring out how to handle all the props because he's only got the use of one hand. He's constantly juggling — and that's a lot to think about when you're just trying to act."
"It does sometimes seem a bit more than I bargained for. I didn't read the contract before signing — big mistake," jokes Laurie. "But it's not coal mining. That's what people always say, isn't it? They're absolutely right to be skeptical that acting is hard. Still, any job is hard if you care how it turns out, and easy if you don't. I could go out and do brain surgery if I didn't care if the guy lived or died."
In case he still hasn't read it, Laurie's contract commits him to two more years of playing doctor. And he may be House-bound for longer if the show maintains its current hit status. There's certainly no shortage of exotic new diseases for him to cure: Every week, show staffers collect scads of graphically disgusting specimens from the Internet and other sources for the writers to plunk into their scripts. Producers won't give away details about the new season, except to say House dives right back into work after recuperating from the gunshot wounds he received in last season's cliff-hanger finale (although he doesn't heal as completely as he might have hoped), and that Hack's David Morse will drop by for seven episodes as an equally crabby cop when House gets busted for possession of painkillers without a prescription.
Whatever happens next, it'll soon be difficult for all of us, not just Laurie, to avoid dealing with House. Bestowing the ultimate Hollywood compliment, producers all over town are now pitching copycat shows stuffed with all kinds of huggable A-holes (like Shark, a new CBS law drama with James Woods playing an unlikable prosecutor, and Justice, another Fox procedural,starring Victor Garber as a jerky defense attorney).
"People like the character because he gives it to them straight," says Epps (who knows from doctors, having done 10 episodes of ER). "That whole Mr. Cleaver thing doesn't work anymore. People want it plain and simple these days." Singer's attraction to the material was more personal — "I'm a terrible hypochondriac" — but he also has some theories about its appeal: "House is not a nice guy and he never will be, but the audience knows deep down he cares. That's what makes him bearable."
Laurie, for his part, won't venture to guess why the character has caught on in America; he just plays the guy, he can't explain him. "He was all there on those pages they faxed me," he says. "I could hear him in my head — the rhythm of his speech. What he was hiding behind the meanness and sarcasm. I could see him very clearly in my head from the start." Right down to the handle on his cane.
(Posted:08/17/06)
TV's edgiest medical show returns for a third season of creepy and compelling medical mysteries -- but even with an Emmy nod and 19 million fans in his bag, don't think Hugh Laurie's brilliant bastard of a doctor is any less cranky
by Benjamin Svetkey
BACK ON CALL Laurie (right) and company return in September for a third season of House
Columbo's rumpled raincoat. Fonzie's leather jacket. Kojak's lollipop. Every great TV character needs a great prop. So when Hugh Laurie landed the part of Dr. Gregory House — the misanthropic M.D. with the gimpy leg and cranky bedside manner on Fox's hit medical drama House — the first thing he did was go shopping for a cane. "I looked all over for the perfect one," says the 47-year-old Brit. "I finally found it in a little shop in London. It was made out of some sort of rare Malaysian wood and had these beautiful ivory rings and a gorgeous horn handle. Very politically incorrect, but it called to me like Excalibur. The minute I saw it, I thought, 'This is the one. This is House's cane.'"
Alas, it wasn't around for long — the stick had to be replaced after getting smashed in a closing soundstage gate during shooting of the show's pilot — but Laurie is limping along just fine without it. In fact, thanks to his turn as prime time's brainiest healer — and biggest heel — House enters its third season (premiering Sept. 5 at 8 p.m.) as Fox's highest-rated, most talked-about drama since 24. Last season it grabbed 18.9 million viewers each week and regularly won its Tuesday time slot; this summer, when its reruns have often been administered in two-episode doses, it still pulls in a healthy audience of 10 million. And then there are the industry accolades, including a Golden Globe for Laurie earlier this year and a recent Emmy nomination for Outstanding Drama Series.
After decades of loving morally upstanding TV docs like Kildare and Welby, the audience has fallen for one who pops painkillers like breath mints (his leg, crippled by a blood clot, keeps him in constant agony), hurls slurs at the sick and infirm ("Unfortunately, there's no cure for being a bitch," he snaps at one patient), and gleefully infuriates his co-workers at Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital (Robert Sean Leonard plays his bemused best friend; Lisa Edelstein is his beleaguered boss; Omar Epps, Jesse Spencer, and Jennifer Morrison are the three young doctors he handpicked for his staff ). His only redeeming quality, aside from scalpel-sharp wit, is that he's pretty amazing at saving lives. Each week the show sets up a different mystery malady — radiation poisoning, Black Plague, uncontrollable laughter — which only House is able to diagnose, thanks to his superior powers of deduction and utter disregard for medical ethics. In some ways, House is just like all the other "procedural" dramas on TV today — the CSIs and Law & Orders — only the criminals are diseases and the good guys wear lab coats (except House, who usually sports jeans and a hip T-shirt).
But in one way, House is unlike anything you've seen on broadcast television in aeons. You have to go back to the 1970s, to All in the Family, to find a network series centered on so irresistible a bastard. (And no, Becker didn't count.)
Come to think of it, it's been a while since any sort of eccentrically written character has been a smash on TV. And that makes House something of a throwback to that long-ago era when dramas were built around quirky personalities rather than methodical procedures.
"I look at the show as part Quincy and part Archie Bunker, with a little West Wing thrown in," says Bryan Singer, who took time off from directing superhero movies like X2: X-Men United to help launch the series as an executive producer. "There's a procedural element to it, sure, but if all House did was cure a disease every week, he'd get boring pretty fast."
And this testy doc is anything but staid, a fact that was not lost on Laurie when he first eyed the script. "I couldn't believe House was the main character," he confesses. "The tradition on American TV is that the hero is always morally good — which also means he's always good-looking, since good looks and moral rectitude go together in Hollywood. This character wasn't any of those things. I couldn't believe anybody would put him in the middle of a one-hour drama." Actually, Laurie's not bad-looking, even with his perpetual stubble. But there's another tradition on American TV, which is to hire somebody with an American accent when casting an American doctor, preferably an actor who isn't completely unknown to the vast majority of the audience.
But then, this show — like the doctor at its center — doesn't always follow the rules.
"Ex-you-date? Ex-yuh-date? Ex-eh-date? How do I say it?"
Laurie and the rest of the cast are on the Fox lot on a hazy August afternoon, shooting one of the show's "differential diagnosis" sequences (every episode includes at least one scene in which House writes the patient's symptoms on a whiteboard and fiddles with them like pieces of a puzzle). At the moment, the word he's struggling with is exudates — that's ek-s(y)ü-da-t — a noun meaning a fluid oozing from tissue or capillaries. Like so many terms on the show, it's of Latin derivation, but that's not what's tripping up the Cambridge-educated actor; he's just having trouble speaking Latin like an American.
'HOUSE' MATES Spencer, Morrison, and Epps play the young docs House drafted for his team
"I haven't identified a single word that is pronounced the same in America as it is in England," complains Laurie in his natural British burr. "Lately, I've even been having problems with words like boy.... And that can really take you out of the moment, having to constantly listen to yourself and check your accent. It makes it harder to immerse yourself in the scene. It's as if you're playing left-handed. Or like everyone else is playing with a tennis racket and you have a salmon. I moan about it a lot." Laurie should relax a bit, seeing as from day one his accent has been dead-on, so flawless that Singer mistook him for a Yank when he first saw Laurie's audition tape. "I was like, 'Now this is the sort of strong American actor I'm looking for!'" recalls Singer. "I had no idea who he was at all. I just thought he was great."
Laurie is far better known in England, where he first gained notice after college, goofing around on sketch-comedy shows with classmates Stephen Fry and onetime girlfriend Emma Thompson. On this side of the Atlantic, he's sometimes recognized for his turn as doofy Prince George on the classic '80s Britcom Black Adder, as well as big-screen appearances in Sense and Sensibility and Stuart Little (not to mention his rakish author's portrait on the book flap of The Gun Seller, his best-selling 1997 spy-novel spoof, which he's now adapting into a screenplay). Still, even those who did know his work weren't initially ready to hand over the House.
"I was a huge fan of his comedy," says exec producer David Shore. "But I honest to God never thought he'd be right for this role." Denis Leary's name was discussed before he launched Rescue Me, and meetings were taken with Patrick Dempsey and Rob Morrow. But nobody quite wowed Shore, Singer, or the show's two other executive producers, Katie Jacobs (Gideon's Crossing) and Paul Attanasio (who'd originally dreamed up House while reading a medical column about rare diseases in The New York Times Magazine).
It wasn't until half of the other actors on the show had been cast that the producers received a grainy, self-made audition tape shot inside a men's room in Namibia. "I was there making Flight of the Phoenix, and the only place that had enough light was the shaving mirror in that bathroom," says Laurie, explaining why he taped his tryout in an African toilet. (Phoenix costars Jacob Vargas and Scott Michael Campbell squeezed in to help with the camera.) Excerpts had been faxed to Laurie on the Phoenix set, and, he says, "you could tell straightaway that it was different. Even from the few pages I saw, I thought, 'Now this is good stuff.'... Besides, at the time, I was thinking, 'It's a pilot, that's all. Maybe 10 or 12 days' work.' I didn't assume it would go any further than that. Most times they don't."
This time it did.
Fox began airing the show at 9 p.m. on Tuesdays in the fall of 2004. Early ratings were respectable, if less than spectacular. But last season, the network gave it a new lead-in of questionable compatibility — a little sing-along called American Idol — and viewership soared.
"We had a core of fans who discovered us on their own before Idol moved," says Jacobs, "but we never imagined we'd have this huge an audience." The growth is evident here on the lot, where new expansions have been bulking up the show's sleek glass-and steel hospital sets (the pharmacy where House gets his Vicodin still needs work; you can't find a single pill in any jar). And Laurie should be feeling pretty swell too. Not only has the series brought him fame in America, but his season 3 salary has been bumped to a reported $300,000 an episode. Now he can afford to buy all the rare Malaysian canes he wants.
IN RESIDENCY Leonard (shown with Edelstein) doesn't envy Laurie's schedule -- about 40 scenes a week, compared with his own eight
"I actually never wanted to make an American TV show," Laurie admits. "But when you're sent good material, you follow it, whether it's American TV, Latvian TV, or a traveling circus in Iceland." That said, he had no clue what he was getting into when he sent off that videotape. Compared with the cushy working conditions in the English TV business (where a mere six episodes per season are the norm), Stateside TV acting is more like indentured servitude (with stars cranking out at least 22 episodes at a time). For the lead in a one-hour drama series, things can get especially brutal.
"I show up every week and do eight scenes," says Robert Sean Leonard. "Hugh does, like, 40. I would shoot myself in the mouth if I were him." Despite the grueling schedule, Laurie and his wife, Jo Green, decided not to move the family to L.A. from London (they have three kids: Rebecca, 14; Bill, 16; and Charlie, 18). He explains, "I'd never have time to see them anyway." To say nothing of time for other acting opportunities; not even Singer could pry Laurie away from the House set long enough for him to play Perry White in Superman Returns.
And then there's the acting part of the job, which turns out to be more labor-intensive than merely twanging like an American. "You know, for Hugh, it's not just showing up and saying a few lines," says Jennifer Morrison, who plays the idealistic Dr. Cameron, whom House never succeeds in cracking (on the contrary, she developed a crush on him in season 1). "He's saying medical terms constantly. He's got huge chunks of medical terms to memorize. And then along with the accent, he's got the limp and then figuring out how to handle all the props because he's only got the use of one hand. He's constantly juggling — and that's a lot to think about when you're just trying to act."
"It does sometimes seem a bit more than I bargained for. I didn't read the contract before signing — big mistake," jokes Laurie. "But it's not coal mining. That's what people always say, isn't it? They're absolutely right to be skeptical that acting is hard. Still, any job is hard if you care how it turns out, and easy if you don't. I could go out and do brain surgery if I didn't care if the guy lived or died."
In case he still hasn't read it, Laurie's contract commits him to two more years of playing doctor. And he may be House-bound for longer if the show maintains its current hit status. There's certainly no shortage of exotic new diseases for him to cure: Every week, show staffers collect scads of graphically disgusting specimens from the Internet and other sources for the writers to plunk into their scripts. Producers won't give away details about the new season, except to say House dives right back into work after recuperating from the gunshot wounds he received in last season's cliff-hanger finale (although he doesn't heal as completely as he might have hoped), and that Hack's David Morse will drop by for seven episodes as an equally crabby cop when House gets busted for possession of painkillers without a prescription.
Whatever happens next, it'll soon be difficult for all of us, not just Laurie, to avoid dealing with House. Bestowing the ultimate Hollywood compliment, producers all over town are now pitching copycat shows stuffed with all kinds of huggable A-holes (like Shark, a new CBS law drama with James Woods playing an unlikable prosecutor, and Justice, another Fox procedural,starring Victor Garber as a jerky defense attorney).
"People like the character because he gives it to them straight," says Epps (who knows from doctors, having done 10 episodes of ER). "That whole Mr. Cleaver thing doesn't work anymore. People want it plain and simple these days." Singer's attraction to the material was more personal — "I'm a terrible hypochondriac" — but he also has some theories about its appeal: "House is not a nice guy and he never will be, but the audience knows deep down he cares. That's what makes him bearable."
Laurie, for his part, won't venture to guess why the character has caught on in America; he just plays the guy, he can't explain him. "He was all there on those pages they faxed me," he says. "I could hear him in my head — the rhythm of his speech. What he was hiding behind the meanness and sarcasm. I could see him very clearly in my head from the start." Right down to the handle on his cane.
(Posted:08/17/06)
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Date: 2006-08-18 07:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-19 12:45 am (UTC)