Few can have failed to catch at least one episode of David Shore’s award-winning television series House MD. Over the course of eight seasons running from 2004 to 2012, Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of the eponymous Dr Gregory House received consistently positive reviews and earned the British actor worldwide fame. His accolades for the role include two Golden Globe Awards for Best Actor in a Television Series Drama, two Screen Actors’ Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance in a Drama Series, two Satellite Awards for Best Actor in a Television Series Drama and two Television Critics Association Awards for Individual Achievement in Drama. He was also honoured with six Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. The list goes on. Clearly his performance didn’t go unnoticed.
Although virtually unknown in America until 2004, Laurie had already been a household name in the UK and Ireland for almost two decades. A veteran of the comedy series Blackadder, he was also Stephen Fry’s comedy partner in both the BBC sketch show A Bit of Fry and Laurie and an ITV adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s novels entitled Jeeves and Wooster. Rumour has it that Laurie was asked to audition for the role of House while filming Flight of the Phoenix in Namibia around 2003. Not expecting the show to amount to much (and thinking that Dr James Wilson was the main protagonist), Laurie threw together a rather amateur audition tape in the bathroom of his hotel.[1] He neither shaved nor changed his scruffy clothes for the tape (something that would later influence the on-screen portrayal) while he substituted the requisite walking cane with the nearest thing available, namely an umbrella. It is said David Shore and his casting colleagues thought the end result looked ‘like an Osama Bin Laden video’ but were nonetheless sufficiently impressed to offer Laurie the role.[2]
The similarities between Gregory House and Sherlock Holmes are striking when you examine them. First is the manner in which each character solves the case in front of him empirically, using evidence that sometimes goes unnoticed by others. Both characters base much of their induction on a mixture of psychology and physical evidence. In the pilot episode, for example, House is consulted by a man whose skin has mysteriously turned orange. He immediately identifies the cause, while also correctly guessing that the man’s wife must be having an affair. In another episode, he manages to wriggle out of his clinic by standing in the waiting area for a minute and diagnosing each patient one by one based purely on their appearances. He then shuffles impatiently out the door and is gone. Indeed, House only takes on cases he finds intriguing and avoids all others like the plague. Just like Holmes.
While Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based Holmes on various real people including Professor Joseph Bell (his old medical school lecturer at Edinburgh), Shore is thought to have based House on a prominent professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. But House is also undoubtedly based on Holmes himself. Phonetically, their names mean the same thing. On one occasion, House is introduced to someone who politely remarks that he recognises his name. House replies glibly that he is unsurprised because, ‘It’s also a noun’. And while on the topic of houses and homes, both characters share the same fictional address albeit in different cities, namely 221B Baker Street. House’s best friend is Dr James Wilson (played by Robert Sean Leonard), while Holmes’ best friend, Dr John Watson. Their dynamics are rather similar too.
Both House and Holmes have encountered serious addiction problems; the former is addicted to Vicodin (an opioid analgesic) and the latter to cocaine. Both men play instruments purely for personal pleasure; Holmes plays the violin, while House plays the piano, the guitar and a symphony of other instruments. In the Season Two finale, House is shot by a man named Jack Moriarty. Holmes’ nemesis, the man with whom he shares a common demise at the Reichenbach Falls, is Professor James Moriarty. Finally, in Season Five, Wilson suggests the name of an imaginary girlfriend for House – Irene Adler is also the name of Holmes’ femme fatale in A Scandal in Bohemia. She is indeed the only villain ever to outwit him.
But House has other strings to his bow. He is the Head of Diagnostic Medicine at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey, likely based on the real-life Yale New Haven Hospital. House leads a team of three or four clever-but-damaged disciples who do his bidding with every case, even if this means breaking the law or putting their own health at risk. House offers them little thanks for their loyalty; indeed, he tends to treat them with distain until (after two or three seasons) they each become fed up of him or decide that he is more of a liability than an asset to their careers and consequently move elsewhere. Occasionally they return in a position of similar or sometimes greater status, but they can never manage to equal House’s intellect.
House’s methods are unorthodox. He leaves polite bedside manner to his junior doctors, while he mulls over diagnoses in his office or holds dry rounds around a white board. He rarely seems to have more than one patient at a time, except for the public outpatient clinics that his boss Lisa Cuddy (played by Lisa Edelstein) insists he serve. But this one diagnostic case garners one hundred percent of his attention. House is rational in the extreme, often at the expense of any empathy for the patient. He pays little heed to the patient’s account of their history; as he insists repeatedly, ‘Everybody lies’. Instead, his investigations involve his junior doctors breaking into the patient’s home in search of potential causes of illness. On occasion, he is quite willing to expose himself or his staff to medical misadventure by way of infectious diseases, noxious chemicals, experimental medicines or even surgery.
In the end, with Sherlock Holmes at the back of his mind, David Shore created a unique fictional doctor in Gregory House. An updated version of Holmes perhaps, whose arena is that other area of detective endeavour, namely clinical medicine.
Stephen McWilliams is a consultant psychiatrist and author. His latest book, Psychopath? Why We are Charmed by the Anti-hero, is published by Mercier Press.
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