Shuttered House: Series closes its doors with a bang
Small- screen’s most drunken, difficult doctor and supporting cast will bow out in bittersweet season finale
No regrets, David Shore says. Dr. Gregory House — brilliant diagnostician, boorish human being — drying out in rehab to start the 2009 season? No regrets. Shaking up the supporting cast at the end of House’s third season? No regrets. Having House ram his car through the living room of his on- again/ off- again companion and would- be soulmate Dr. Lisa Cuddy, to end the 2011 season?
Again, no regrets. Shore, the London, Ont.- born creator and, for eight seasons, head writer of one of popular television’s most fondly recalled dramas, was both unapologetic and philosophical as he talked about House’s past, present and non- future in a conference call with reporters this past week.
“I’m not big on regrets,” said Shore, who was also co- executive producer for eight seasons with former Washington Post film critic Paul Attanasio and Katie Jacobs.
House closes for good Monday with an hour- long finale, preceded by a retrospective program.
“That’s not to say everything was perfect,” Shore continued.
“I do fundamentally believe that we had to do what we did with House and Cuddy. I know a lot of people think we could have done it better; a lot of people think we shouldn’t have done it at all; a lot of people think that, once we paired them, we should have kept them together. It was going to be a lightning rod, no matter what we did.
“Fundamentally, though, we had to do it. You can’t have people just go on. You can’t have sexual tension go on and on and on and on. At a certain point we had to put them together, and at a certain point we had to drive them apart.”
Shore admitted being both taken aback, and pleasantly surprised, by the way House evolved over the years from a struggling first- year drama to one of the past decade’s most successful, widely- seen television series.
“It was unexpected,” Shore said. “It remains an unexpected success, somehow. Maybe the fact that it was an unexpected success, maybe the fact that we succeeded beyond what we initially hoped for, freed us to be ourselves, to say, ‘ This is what we want to do now. If it fails, that’s okay.’ I think that’s the right way to do a show. You have to do stories that interest you, and hope an audience likes them, rather than do stories you think an audience will like, whether you yourself like them or not.
“There has to be something you find interesting and compelling, and then, hopefully, the audience will agree with you.”
The time has come, though, to call it a day. Shore made the decision to end House earlier this year, together with Attanasio, Jacobs and series star Hugh Laurie.
“I never had an end game,” Shore insisted. “In my mind, that would have been incredibly pompous. The idea that this was going to last more than 12 episodes and that I could plan the ending is just way too arrogant. This is American network TV. I expected it might stay on the air, and I would tell individual stories about this individual until they told me I couldn’t do that any more.
“I was never looking 80 episodes down the road. At most, I was looking 10 episodes or 15 episodes ahead.”
Dr. House did some reprehensible things during his time as a TV doctor. Shore said that, as a writer, if he had to do it again, he wouldn’t change a thing — including having Dr. House’s near- demolition derby with Cuddy’s house.
“I know there was a real hue and-cry over that, but he never intended to cause her harm,” Shore explained. “He intended to cause her home harm – he looked through the window. It was an irrational act. I thought it was a logical and motivated irrational act, but it was an irrational act just the same, an irrational act from a rational man, which is what we intended, and why we had to pay a price the next year.
“Other times, when he came close to killing people, it was always in an effort to save lives. There was no upside to driving that car, except for the satisfaction of lashing out.”
Shore admitted he might have made mistakes with House over the years. In the end, he insisted, none of that mattered.
“I’m sure we made mistakes. I know we made mistakes.
“It’s one of those things, though, where you just keep going. You can’t really assess it because there’s no point in doing that; you can’t do it over again. You make choices, you make decisions, and you’re never going to know if they’re the ideal choices. You just make your decisions, and then you make the most of them.
“There are things we did I’m quite proud of. There are episodes we did that I’m extremely proud of. The House/ Wilson relationship, from Day 1, has been a great one.
“I think constantly refreshing the show was a risky move, but I am proud, because it worked more often than it didn’t. It’s basically a procedural show. It has enough serialized elements that it could get tiresome, and I’m sure some people believe it did.
“I think we kept it fresh, though, by creating new situations. That’s against the instincts of a network show, and so I’m grateful to the network for letting us do it.”
Shore wouldn’t divulge much about the ending, except to suggest that the finale’s title, Everybody Dies, is a play on one of Dr. House’s favourite expressions, “Everybody lies.”
“It’s definitely an ending,” Shore said. “I don’t want to say more than that. We never do happy endings – but we also try not to simply do miserable endings. Bittersweet is the most you can hope for from us.”