1
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House Explained.
2
00:00:07,914 --> 00:00:10,394
The people running the show had one rule early on:
3
00:00:10,914 --> 00:00:12,514
the lead had to be American.
4
00:00:13,154 --> 00:00:15,554
They were looking at Denis Leary, David Cross,
5
00:00:15,814 --> 00:00:20,894
Rob Morrow. Meanwhile, Hugh Laurie was in Namibia shooting Flight of the Phoenix.
6
00:00:21,514 --> 00:00:22,674
He found a hotel bathroom,
7
00:00:23,154 --> 00:00:25,634
propped an umbrella against the wall as a stand-in cane,
8
00:00:26,154 --> 00:00:28,994
and filmed an audition tape in the worst lighting imaginable.
9
00:00:29,714 --> 00:00:34,354
Bryan Singer watched it and told everyone in the room he'd found the perfect American actor.
10
00:00:34,954 --> 00:00:36,414
Laurie is from Oxford.
11
00:00:36,894 --> 00:00:39,834
Singer described the tape quality as looking like a bin Laden video,
12
00:00:40,074 --> 00:00:43,614
his words. And Laurie had no idea he was auditioning for the lead;
13
00:00:44,034 --> 00:00:45,394
he expected a supporting role,
14
00:00:45,514 --> 00:00:46,854
thought the audition was for Wilson.
15
00:00:47,474 --> 00:00:51,474
His father was a physician and a gold medalist rower at the 1948 Olympics.
16
00:00:52,294 --> 00:00:55,414
Laurie has described the role as playing a fake version of his own father,
17
00:00:55,734 --> 00:00:57,934
and that lands differently once you know that background.
18
00:00:58,714 --> 00:01:01,534
Robert Sean Leonard came into this in almost the opposite way.
19
00:01:01,994 --> 00:01:04,034
He had two shows on the table at the same time,
20
00:01:04,034 --> 00:01:09,434
House and Numb3rs. Numb3rs wanted him for the lead, Charlie Eppes.
21
00:01:09,434 --> 00:01:12,274
He turned it down because the character was in too many scenes.
22
00:01:13,034 --> 00:01:20,394
His actual quote is "the less I work, the happier I am." His audition for Wilson wasn't particularly strong by his own account,
23
00:01:20,874 --> 00:01:24,574
but he and Singer had a prior relationship and that carried him through.
24
00:01:24,874 --> 00:01:27,114
Leonard had been doing theater for years by that point.
25
00:01:27,494 --> 00:01:30,934
Dead Poets Society came out in 1989 when he was twenty,
26
00:01:30,934 --> 00:01:32,894
and he parlayed that into stage work,
27
00:01:32,894 --> 00:01:37,894
Stoppard on Broadway, an acclaimed run in Long Day's Journey alongside Philip Seymour Hoffman.
28
00:01:38,514 --> 00:01:41,414
He'd co-founded a theater company in New York with Ethan Hawke,
29
00:01:41,674 --> 00:01:45,114
Steve Zahn, and Frank Whaley back in the early nineties.
30
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Television was always the thing he kept at arm's length,
31
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deliberately.
32
00:01:48,754 --> 00:01:51,974
Lisa Edelstein's path in was almost entirely Singer's memory.
33
00:01:52,534 --> 00:01:53,894
He'd seen her in The West Wing,
34
00:01:54,474 --> 00:01:58,874
a one-episode guest appearance as a high-priced call girl putting herself through law school,
35
00:01:59,374 --> 00:02:03,014
and when he was building House he sent her the pilot script directly,
36
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without her going through the normal process.
37
00:02:05,934 --> 00:02:09,714
One guest spot, out of probably two hundred she'd done by that point,
38
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is what got her in the room.
39
00:02:11,694 --> 00:02:13,654
She'd been in New York since the mid-eighties,
40
00:02:13,654 --> 00:02:16,534
part of that downtown arts and club scene before it dispersed.
41
00:02:17,314 --> 00:02:22,134
She put together an original musical about the AIDS crisis and staged it at La MaMa in the Village.
42
00:02:22,694 --> 00:02:25,354
Then years of television, Seinfeld, ER,
43
00:02:25,654 --> 00:02:28,414
Ally McBeal, The West Wing, all guest work,
44
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nothing that stuck. Singer caught her on one of those and filed it away long enough to matter.
45
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Jennifer Morrison says her audition was a complete disaster.
46
00:02:37,974 --> 00:02:41,274
She froze, lost lines, left thinking it was over.
47
00:02:41,934 --> 00:02:44,354
Singer had already made up his mind before she walked in,
48
00:02:44,834 --> 00:02:46,954
he'd screened her in Dawson's Creek and decided.
49
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She'd been building a career since childhood;
50
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there's a Sports Illustrated for Kids cover with her and Michael Jordan from 1992.
51
00:02:54,674 --> 00:02:56,714
She trained at the Steppenwolf theater in Chicago,
52
00:02:57,094 --> 00:03:02,734
went to Loyola, and then moved steadily through film and TV through the nineties and early 2000s.
53
00:03:02,874 --> 00:03:04,534
Her credits before House were scattered,
54
00:03:04,934 --> 00:03:07,574
Urban Legends: Final Cut, Stir of Echoes,
55
00:03:07,734 --> 00:03:09,354
a recurring run on Dawson's Creek.
56
00:03:09,954 --> 00:03:13,554
This was the first role where she was asked to carry something for more than a season.
57
00:03:14,194 --> 00:03:21,234
She went on to play Kirk's mother in the 2009 Star Trek reboot and then spent years as the lead on ABC's Once Upon a Time.
58
00:03:21,794 --> 00:03:23,094
House was the pivot point.
59
00:03:23,534 --> 00:03:25,514
Omar Epps had already played a doctor before,
60
00:03:25,514 --> 00:03:29,254
a recurring arc on ER as a troubled surgical intern,
61
00:03:29,934 --> 00:03:33,234
and he's said that experience directly shaped how he approached Foreman.
62
00:03:33,894 --> 00:03:35,854
He came out of LaGuardia High School in New York,
63
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the school the movie Fame was based on.
64
00:03:38,954 --> 00:03:40,614
Marlon Wayans came out of the same school.
65
00:03:41,494 --> 00:03:45,414
Not many actors come into a medical drama having already spent time inside one.
66
00:03:45,774 --> 00:03:48,774
He came out of a specific tradition in nineties American film,
67
00:03:49,274 --> 00:03:51,994
Juice in 1992 opposite Tupac Shakur,
68
00:03:52,494 --> 00:03:54,494
Higher Learning, Love and Basketball.
69
00:03:54,494 --> 00:03:57,474
And then there's this detail that I find genuinely funny:
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the character's name is Eric Foreman.
71
00:04:00,214 --> 00:04:03,174
That '70s Show had a character named Eric Forman,
72
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different spelling, but same sound,
73
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and both shows were on Fox at the same time for two full seasons.
74
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Jesse Spencer's agent suggested he audition assuming it would be like General Hospital,
75
00:04:13,894 --> 00:04:15,574
Spencer had been in Neighbours for years.
76
00:04:16,274 --> 00:04:18,474
He read the scripts and changed his mind immediately.
77
00:04:19,134 --> 00:04:21,774
What's unusual is that Chase was not written as Australian.
78
00:04:22,534 --> 00:04:26,614
Spencer got the part first and then persuaded the producers to rewrite the character's background,
79
00:04:27,234 --> 00:04:29,394
he made Chase Australian after the fact.
80
00:04:30,654 --> 00:04:32,594
Patrick Dempsey auditioned specifically for Chase.
81
00:04:32,934 --> 00:04:35,694
He also came up in the wider conversation about the House lead,
82
00:04:35,694 --> 00:04:37,974
alongside Leary and Cross and Morrow.
83
00:04:38,674 --> 00:04:40,734
He ended up on Grey's Anatomy the same year.
84
00:04:41,234 --> 00:04:46,714
It's one of those moments where two enormous medical dramas were pulling from the same pool at essentially the same time,
85
00:04:46,714 --> 00:04:49,414
and the people who didn't get one got the other.
86
00:04:50,274 --> 00:04:54,894
Spencer and Laurie both ended up in a charity music ensemble called Band From TV,
87
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Spencer on violin, Laurie on piano.
88
00:04:58,734 --> 00:05:01,154
Laurie's background before this was British sketch comedy:
89
00:05:01,694 --> 00:05:03,634
A Bit of Fry and Laurie with Stephen Fry,
90
00:05:04,174 --> 00:05:07,054
Blackadder with Rowan Atkinson, Jeeves and Wooster,
91
00:05:07,674 --> 00:05:12,394
years of work that shares almost nothing with playing a misanthropic American doctor on Fox.
92
00:05:13,554 --> 00:05:15,994
David Shore came to the show from Canadian television,
93
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Due South, NYPD Blue.
94
00:05:18,674 --> 00:05:22,654
The pitch he developed with Paul Attanasio was Sherlock Holmes applied to medicine.
95
00:05:23,154 --> 00:05:28,874
The working title was "Chasing Zebras, Circling the Drain." Fox had a specific condition going in:
96
00:05:29,114 --> 00:05:31,994
no scenes of white coats walking down a hospital hallway.
97
00:05:32,934 --> 00:05:35,614
Shore built the Holmes parallel into the architecture from the start.
98
00:05:36,154 --> 00:05:38,634
House lives at 221B Baker Street,
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the name itself is a deliberate homage.
100
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Leonard described Wilson as the Watson figure,
101
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though the diagnostic team absorbed portions of that role too.
102
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Both characters play instruments,
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Holmes the violin, House the piano and guitar.
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Shore's framing was that medicine gave him what crime gives detective fiction:
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a puzzle structure where the symptoms are the suspects.
106
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The mystery format was the whole point of using a doctor instead of a cop.
107
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The two major recurring players in season one came from very different directions.
108
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Chi McBride had spent four years as the lead of Boston Public on Fox right before this,
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same network, completely different kind of role.
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Sela Ward also joined the first season,
111
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and she had been offered the leads on CSI:
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Miami and Desperate Housewives before this and passed on both.
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McBride's move from carrying a Fox drama to a season-long arc is the kind of lateral step that usually means something about what the writing offered.
114
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Ward had built her name on Sisters in the nineties and Once and Again in the early 2000s.
115
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Choosing a recurring part over two series leads suggests she read something that made it worth the smaller commitment.
116
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Almost every principal hire in that first season traces back to something personal.
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Singer's friendship with Leonard,
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his memory of one Edelstein guest spot three years earlier,
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a British comedian with a bathroom tape in Namibia,
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Morrison screened in Dawson's Creek footage months before she auditioned.
121
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The casting process looks less like a formal search and more like a series of recalled impressions that happened to click at the right moment.
122
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And then there's this:
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Spencer changed his character's nationality after the job was already his.
124
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Morrison and Spencer started dating the same month the show premiered,
125
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July 2004. He proposed in Paris in 2006.
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They called it off in 2007.
127
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The distance between on-screen and off-screen was thinner on this show than most.
128
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So you end up with eight seasons that started in a hotel bathroom in Namibia.
129
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A Broadway stage actor who wanted the lightest possible television commitment.
130
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An Australian who rewrote his own character from scratch once he had the part.
131
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A British comedian who'd spent a decade in sketch television with Stephen Fry and Rowan Atkinson.
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A director who filed away one West Wing guest spot long enough to build a core cast around it.
133
00:07:57,454 --> 00:07:59,514
There's no clean version of how this show got made,
134
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it was an accumulation of accidents that happened to hold together.
00:00:05,914 --> 00:00:07,214
House Explained.
2
00:00:07,914 --> 00:00:10,394
The people running the show had one rule early on:
3
00:00:10,914 --> 00:00:12,514
the lead had to be American.
4
00:00:13,154 --> 00:00:15,554
They were looking at Denis Leary, David Cross,
5
00:00:15,814 --> 00:00:20,894
Rob Morrow. Meanwhile, Hugh Laurie was in Namibia shooting Flight of the Phoenix.
6
00:00:21,514 --> 00:00:22,674
He found a hotel bathroom,
7
00:00:23,154 --> 00:00:25,634
propped an umbrella against the wall as a stand-in cane,
8
00:00:26,154 --> 00:00:28,994
and filmed an audition tape in the worst lighting imaginable.
9
00:00:29,714 --> 00:00:34,354
Bryan Singer watched it and told everyone in the room he'd found the perfect American actor.
10
00:00:34,954 --> 00:00:36,414
Laurie is from Oxford.
11
00:00:36,894 --> 00:00:39,834
Singer described the tape quality as looking like a bin Laden video,
12
00:00:40,074 --> 00:00:43,614
his words. And Laurie had no idea he was auditioning for the lead;
13
00:00:44,034 --> 00:00:45,394
he expected a supporting role,
14
00:00:45,514 --> 00:00:46,854
thought the audition was for Wilson.
15
00:00:47,474 --> 00:00:51,474
His father was a physician and a gold medalist rower at the 1948 Olympics.
16
00:00:52,294 --> 00:00:55,414
Laurie has described the role as playing a fake version of his own father,
17
00:00:55,734 --> 00:00:57,934
and that lands differently once you know that background.
18
00:00:58,714 --> 00:01:01,534
Robert Sean Leonard came into this in almost the opposite way.
19
00:01:01,994 --> 00:01:04,034
He had two shows on the table at the same time,
20
00:01:04,034 --> 00:01:09,434
House and Numb3rs. Numb3rs wanted him for the lead, Charlie Eppes.
21
00:01:09,434 --> 00:01:12,274
He turned it down because the character was in too many scenes.
22
00:01:13,034 --> 00:01:20,394
His actual quote is "the less I work, the happier I am." His audition for Wilson wasn't particularly strong by his own account,
23
00:01:20,874 --> 00:01:24,574
but he and Singer had a prior relationship and that carried him through.
24
00:01:24,874 --> 00:01:27,114
Leonard had been doing theater for years by that point.
25
00:01:27,494 --> 00:01:30,934
Dead Poets Society came out in 1989 when he was twenty,
26
00:01:30,934 --> 00:01:32,894
and he parlayed that into stage work,
27
00:01:32,894 --> 00:01:37,894
Stoppard on Broadway, an acclaimed run in Long Day's Journey alongside Philip Seymour Hoffman.
28
00:01:38,514 --> 00:01:41,414
He'd co-founded a theater company in New York with Ethan Hawke,
29
00:01:41,674 --> 00:01:45,114
Steve Zahn, and Frank Whaley back in the early nineties.
30
00:01:45,114 --> 00:01:47,554
Television was always the thing he kept at arm's length,
31
00:01:47,794 --> 00:01:48,154
deliberately.
32
00:01:48,754 --> 00:01:51,974
Lisa Edelstein's path in was almost entirely Singer's memory.
33
00:01:52,534 --> 00:01:53,894
He'd seen her in The West Wing,
34
00:01:54,474 --> 00:01:58,874
a one-episode guest appearance as a high-priced call girl putting herself through law school,
35
00:01:59,374 --> 00:02:03,014
and when he was building House he sent her the pilot script directly,
36
00:02:03,374 --> 00:02:05,134
without her going through the normal process.
37
00:02:05,934 --> 00:02:09,714
One guest spot, out of probably two hundred she'd done by that point,
38
00:02:10,114 --> 00:02:11,174
is what got her in the room.
39
00:02:11,694 --> 00:02:13,654
She'd been in New York since the mid-eighties,
40
00:02:13,654 --> 00:02:16,534
part of that downtown arts and club scene before it dispersed.
41
00:02:17,314 --> 00:02:22,134
She put together an original musical about the AIDS crisis and staged it at La MaMa in the Village.
42
00:02:22,694 --> 00:02:25,354
Then years of television, Seinfeld, ER,
43
00:02:25,654 --> 00:02:28,414
Ally McBeal, The West Wing, all guest work,
44
00:02:28,674 --> 00:02:33,614
nothing that stuck. Singer caught her on one of those and filed it away long enough to matter.
45
00:02:34,274 --> 00:02:37,354
Jennifer Morrison says her audition was a complete disaster.
46
00:02:37,974 --> 00:02:41,274
She froze, lost lines, left thinking it was over.
47
00:02:41,934 --> 00:02:44,354
Singer had already made up his mind before she walked in,
48
00:02:44,834 --> 00:02:46,954
he'd screened her in Dawson's Creek and decided.
49
00:02:47,534 --> 00:02:49,354
She'd been building a career since childhood;
50
00:02:49,854 --> 00:02:53,814
there's a Sports Illustrated for Kids cover with her and Michael Jordan from 1992.
51
00:02:54,674 --> 00:02:56,714
She trained at the Steppenwolf theater in Chicago,
52
00:02:57,094 --> 00:03:02,734
went to Loyola, and then moved steadily through film and TV through the nineties and early 2000s.
53
00:03:02,874 --> 00:03:04,534
Her credits before House were scattered,
54
00:03:04,934 --> 00:03:07,574
Urban Legends: Final Cut, Stir of Echoes,
55
00:03:07,734 --> 00:03:09,354
a recurring run on Dawson's Creek.
56
00:03:09,954 --> 00:03:13,554
This was the first role where she was asked to carry something for more than a season.
57
00:03:14,194 --> 00:03:21,234
She went on to play Kirk's mother in the 2009 Star Trek reboot and then spent years as the lead on ABC's Once Upon a Time.
58
00:03:21,794 --> 00:03:23,094
House was the pivot point.
59
00:03:23,534 --> 00:03:25,514
Omar Epps had already played a doctor before,
60
00:03:25,514 --> 00:03:29,254
a recurring arc on ER as a troubled surgical intern,
61
00:03:29,934 --> 00:03:33,234
and he's said that experience directly shaped how he approached Foreman.
62
00:03:33,894 --> 00:03:35,854
He came out of LaGuardia High School in New York,
63
00:03:36,314 --> 00:03:38,674
the school the movie Fame was based on.
64
00:03:38,954 --> 00:03:40,614
Marlon Wayans came out of the same school.
65
00:03:41,494 --> 00:03:45,414
Not many actors come into a medical drama having already spent time inside one.
66
00:03:45,774 --> 00:03:48,774
He came out of a specific tradition in nineties American film,
67
00:03:49,274 --> 00:03:51,994
Juice in 1992 opposite Tupac Shakur,
68
00:03:52,494 --> 00:03:54,494
Higher Learning, Love and Basketball.
69
00:03:54,494 --> 00:03:57,474
And then there's this detail that I find genuinely funny:
70
00:03:57,994 --> 00:03:59,674
the character's name is Eric Foreman.
71
00:04:00,214 --> 00:04:03,174
That '70s Show had a character named Eric Forman,
72
00:04:03,174 --> 00:04:04,774
different spelling, but same sound,
73
00:04:05,194 --> 00:04:08,354
and both shows were on Fox at the same time for two full seasons.
74
00:04:09,094 --> 00:04:13,274
Jesse Spencer's agent suggested he audition assuming it would be like General Hospital,
75
00:04:13,894 --> 00:04:15,574
Spencer had been in Neighbours for years.
76
00:04:16,274 --> 00:04:18,474
He read the scripts and changed his mind immediately.
77
00:04:19,134 --> 00:04:21,774
What's unusual is that Chase was not written as Australian.
78
00:04:22,534 --> 00:04:26,614
Spencer got the part first and then persuaded the producers to rewrite the character's background,
79
00:04:27,234 --> 00:04:29,394
he made Chase Australian after the fact.
80
00:04:30,654 --> 00:04:32,594
Patrick Dempsey auditioned specifically for Chase.
81
00:04:32,934 --> 00:04:35,694
He also came up in the wider conversation about the House lead,
82
00:04:35,694 --> 00:04:37,974
alongside Leary and Cross and Morrow.
83
00:04:38,674 --> 00:04:40,734
He ended up on Grey's Anatomy the same year.
84
00:04:41,234 --> 00:04:46,714
It's one of those moments where two enormous medical dramas were pulling from the same pool at essentially the same time,
85
00:04:46,714 --> 00:04:49,414
and the people who didn't get one got the other.
86
00:04:50,274 --> 00:04:54,894
Spencer and Laurie both ended up in a charity music ensemble called Band From TV,
87
00:04:55,554 --> 00:04:57,834
Spencer on violin, Laurie on piano.
88
00:04:58,734 --> 00:05:01,154
Laurie's background before this was British sketch comedy:
89
00:05:01,694 --> 00:05:03,634
A Bit of Fry and Laurie with Stephen Fry,
90
00:05:04,174 --> 00:05:07,054
Blackadder with Rowan Atkinson, Jeeves and Wooster,
91
00:05:07,674 --> 00:05:12,394
years of work that shares almost nothing with playing a misanthropic American doctor on Fox.
92
00:05:13,554 --> 00:05:15,994
David Shore came to the show from Canadian television,
93
00:05:16,434 --> 00:05:18,054
Due South, NYPD Blue.
94
00:05:18,674 --> 00:05:22,654
The pitch he developed with Paul Attanasio was Sherlock Holmes applied to medicine.
95
00:05:23,154 --> 00:05:28,874
The working title was "Chasing Zebras, Circling the Drain." Fox had a specific condition going in:
96
00:05:29,114 --> 00:05:31,994
no scenes of white coats walking down a hospital hallway.
97
00:05:32,934 --> 00:05:35,614
Shore built the Holmes parallel into the architecture from the start.
98
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House lives at 221B Baker Street,
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the name itself is a deliberate homage.
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Leonard described Wilson as the Watson figure,
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though the diagnostic team absorbed portions of that role too.
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Both characters play instruments,
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Holmes the violin, House the piano and guitar.
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Shore's framing was that medicine gave him what crime gives detective fiction:
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a puzzle structure where the symptoms are the suspects.
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The mystery format was the whole point of using a doctor instead of a cop.
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The two major recurring players in season one came from very different directions.
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Chi McBride had spent four years as the lead of Boston Public on Fox right before this,
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same network, completely different kind of role.
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Sela Ward also joined the first season,
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and she had been offered the leads on CSI:
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Miami and Desperate Housewives before this and passed on both.
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McBride's move from carrying a Fox drama to a season-long arc is the kind of lateral step that usually means something about what the writing offered.
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Ward had built her name on Sisters in the nineties and Once and Again in the early 2000s.
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Choosing a recurring part over two series leads suggests she read something that made it worth the smaller commitment.
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Almost every principal hire in that first season traces back to something personal.
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Singer's friendship with Leonard,
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his memory of one Edelstein guest spot three years earlier,
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a British comedian with a bathroom tape in Namibia,
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Morrison screened in Dawson's Creek footage months before she auditioned.
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The casting process looks less like a formal search and more like a series of recalled impressions that happened to click at the right moment.
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And then there's this:
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Spencer changed his character's nationality after the job was already his.
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Morrison and Spencer started dating the same month the show premiered,
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July 2004. He proposed in Paris in 2006.
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They called it off in 2007.
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The distance between on-screen and off-screen was thinner on this show than most.
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So you end up with eight seasons that started in a hotel bathroom in Namibia.
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A Broadway stage actor who wanted the lightest possible television commitment.
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An Australian who rewrote his own character from scratch once he had the part.
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A British comedian who'd spent a decade in sketch television with Stephen Fry and Rowan Atkinson.
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A director who filed away one West Wing guest spot long enough to build a core cast around it.
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There's no clean version of how this show got made,
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it was an accumulation of accidents that happened to hold together.
