David Shore

October 2006

By Anna Carugati

Last season, the series House
on FOX quickly became the
fastest-growing prime-time drama in the U.S. It features the irreverent and
cantankerous Dr. Gregory House, an infectious-diseases specialist who, together
with a team of doctors, loves to solve medical puzzles in order to save lives. House’s was the most-watched finale for any prime-time
drama last spring in the 18-to-49 demographic. David Shore, the show’s creator,
promises to serve up more mysteries in season three—about patients’
medical conditions and about House’s complex personality.

WS: Did you come up with House’s character first or
with the idea for the show?

SHORE: The procedural aspect of it came first. Paul
Attanasio, one of the executive producers of the show, was reading The New
York Times’ Sunday magazine, which
has a diagnosis column. It’s a few hundred words of: patient comes in, patient
has this symptom and that symptom, what is it? We figured out it was this. So
the show was sold largely on that basis, a medical procedural paralleling a
traditional cop show where instead of bad guys, the suspects are the germs. We
quickly realized that would not sustain a series, and I wasn’t getting too
excited about it. We kept looking at it, trying to figure out what to do.

I had done some cop shows
and what makes them interesting is the motives for why people do things, and I
realized that was what was missing. If the germs are the bad guys, germs don’t
have motives. Germs don’t kill somebody and then hide the knife under the bed
of another germ, so it seems the other germ did it, because the other germ is
having an affair with the first germ’s wife! That’s not the way it works in the
human body. And to a great extent, that’s what makes these cop shows
interesting. So I realized we had to invert it. We had to find a way to get at
human interaction and motives and what makes people tick. So we put this guy at
the center of it and it’s about what makes him tick, but also what makes people
tick. We solve so many of our cases not based on medical tests, but based on
some deduction about the patient and what they are hiding—often from
themselves.

WS: What served as inspiration for House’s character?

SHORE: The initial idea happened very quickly and it was
a long time between when we sold it and when I actually sat down to write it.
There was a lot of fermentation that went on in my mind during that time.
Sherlock Holmes comes into play, and so do my own experiences and feelings in
the workplace. There is always somebody at work, in any job, who is annoying.
Usually we enjoy the job aspect of our job, but there is always somebody around
who just makes us miserable. Then we go home and bitch about that guy or we
bitch to a co-worker about that guy. It seemed really cool to me to have
somebody do that bitching while the guy was still in the room.

WS: Did you have Hugh Laurie in mind, or did the
network cast him?

SHORE: Neither one of those things. I did not have Hugh
Laurie in mind at all. I was familiar with his great comedic work, but it never
occurred to me that he could do dramatic work so well. His agent sent him a few
scenes from the script. Laurie was doing a movie in Africa at the time. He put
himself on tape. We watched the tape and it was just so obvious that he was our
guy. So we flew him over and he auditioned for the network and they agreed,
which was a lucky thing.

WS: How much did Hugh Laurie bring to the role?
Sometimes his silences and his expressions say more than his sarcastic remarks.

SHORE: Exactly. He did not change the dialogue. If you
watch his audition tape, the script is almost exactly the same as what you see
in the episode. What I can tell you is there would be no House without him
doing the part. I really believe that. He captures the humanity without me
having to give him maudlin, earnest dialogue. He’s able to bring that about,
which allows us to do what we want to do.

WS: Several elements make up the show—medical
issues, the ethical issues, procedural drama—how do you get all of that
into each episode?

SHORE: It’s tricky! It is a real balancing act. I think
of the show as a character show, but I also know I can’t get to the character
stuff I find interesting unless I have a really good medical mystery at the
core—one which allows House to do something that only House would do. So
we have to find a medical mystery that involves a character that allows us to
do something really interesting with House and challenge us ethically while
exploring these characters. And that is the challenge of this show.

WS: Religion is interwoven into the show, too, and
that’s not seen very often on television.

SHORE: No it isn’t, and that is sort of a pet peeve I
have with TV. I find that even people who aren’t religious deal with religion
in their own way. They are conscious of it, especially people in a hospital.
Dealing with death, you can’t help but question what’s next. I do think that is
something that to some extent is dishonest within TV. It doesn’t mean you have
to have religious characters, or all your characters have to be religious, but
there has to be an awareness of that issue.

WS: If I were sick, I would certainly want a doctor
with House’s competence, but I don’t think I could take his bedside manner. Are
there a lot of doctors like that out there?

SHORE: If he were a typical doctor, we’d have a problem
out there! [Laughs] My uncle is
a doctor. He watched the first episode then came into work the next day and
talked to one of the nurses. He said, “I thought it was a good show but I
thought the doctor was a bit out there.” And she gave him a look and said, “Not
that much!” The profession is known for a certain amount of arrogance, but
hopefully they are not exactly like House!

WS: How does your writing team work?

SHORE: We’ve got a big writing team. Usually the writers
go off in small teams and find a character and a disease that we can drag out
over four acts. And then they will come to me and pitch the idea and then we’ll
go from there.

WS: How many notes do you get from the network and how
much freedom do you have to pursue the vision you have for the show?

SHORE: They’ve been very good. The notes have
always—well, not always!—been helpful, and the number of notes has
gone down each year. Right from the beginning, the one big note I expected to
get, I never got, which was to make him nicer.

WS: You were a lawyer before you became a TV writer
and producer. Why did you leave the law profession to get into television?

SHORE: Ah, I’m not sure! [Laughs] It worked out OK! I was practicing law in Toronto
and I wasn’t thrilled. I wasn’t miserable, though. I had this in the back of my
mind, itching at me for a couple of years, and I decided either I do this now,
or I’m never going to do it. I was aware of the fact that if I fell on my face
I’d come back to law and five years later it would just be a good story to
tell. There didn’t seem to be a huge downside.

WS: But it still took guts, though.

SHORE: That’s what everybody says, but I wasn’t married
and I didn’t have kids, and it didn’t feel that dangerous to me. Maybe I was
being naïve.

WS: What can you tell us about the third season?

SHORE: At the end of season two House is shot. He’s
undergoing experimental treatment at the beginning of season three, and he will
be pain-free. And we’re going to explore how much of who he is is defined by
his pain; to what extent he is defined by his pain; and to what extent the ways
people interact with him are defined by the pain. And of course I don’t think
it’s just as simple as the pain, and it’s not. We’re all very complicated, and
we explore that for a couple episodes as the pain returns.

And then we have this very
nice arc coming up in which House does what House always does in that clinic,
which is piss off people. But he pisses off the wrong person. He pisses off a
cop who goes after him because of his Vicodin addiction.

WS: Kindness or truth, which is more important?

SHORE: Truth, I’m backing truth, which is maybe why I’m
doing this series, although I do like exploring the fact that it’s not as
simple as House would like it to be. I like the episodes where we explore the
ways in which House may be wrong.