TV Guide

The issue of TV Guide for the week of August 21-27 features a cover story on House, MD. I just got mine in the mail today and thought I'd type up the articles for those interested.



Doctor In Love - **Season 2 Spoiler Warning**
By Mary Murphy

Physician, steel thyself. While shooting a scene for the Season 2 premiere of House, lovesick doctor Gregory House catches a glimpse of old flame Stacy Warner and instinctively pops a Vicodin. "I have to take so many pills to deal with this relationship," the permanently stubbled British actor Hugh Laurie says between takes. "I feel like I'm going to choke."

Laurie might choke, but there's little chance his show will. Fox's medical drama built in to a ratings powerhouse during its first season, culminating with a finale in which endearingly grumpy Dr. House discovered that his heart still belonged to his ex-lover, played by Sela Ward. One complication, and it's a big one: She's married - and House saved the life of her husband (Currie Graham). "I doubt they will kill him off," Ward says. "It would get rid of a big piece of the conflict."

Their relationship is about to get even more complicated. Now that Ward's character has been hired as legal counsel at House's hospital, the Emmy-winning actress (Once and Again) will return for seven of the first 13 episodes. And the chemistry between the elegant Ward and the idiosyncratic Laurie will only grow more explosive. "There are real sparks between them," says creator David Shore. "We've thrown Stacy into House's world and House into Stacy's world, and we want to see what happens. We'll walk them right up to the precipice and see if they step over it."

In other words, House fans can expect some hanky-panky. "We don't want to turn House into a soap opera," Shore says. "But we want it to be real, and fully dimensional people have sex." Adds Ward: "When they talk about more sex this season, I wonder if I'm included in that." She should be, especially since House has ended his flirtation with underling Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), who'll likely play doctor with hunky colleague Robert Chase (Jesse Spencer).

Laurie and Ward's characters will experience professional tension, too: In the opener, House dupes Stacy into admitting a death row inmate (LL Cool L) to the hospital. "Almost every scene between us is a confrontation," Ward says. "It's a battle of wills." No wonder this guy needs to keep popping painkillers.


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And Hugh Laurie's thoroughly enjoyable personal account of how he landed the role of House:



"He's the Phantom of the Operating Suite"
By Hugh Laurie

It's a funny old world, as an observant person once said.

One minute you're running across an African desert, while giant wind machines fling sand into your head with enough force to rearrange the memories of your childhood; the next, you're in a breezy California studio, being photographed alongside the ineffably glamorous Sela Ward and trying hard not to look like a smudge on her collar.

Well of course it wasn't one minute. But it felt like it.

At the end of 2003, I was in Namibia, shooting a movie called "Flight of the Phoenix." There were 12 actors in the cast, but the star, unquestionably, was the sand. It didn't have it's own trailer, because it didn't need to; it simply got into everyone else's, the same way it helped itself to the food, the water, the cell phones, the tooth enamel, the senses of humor, the private places. Even now, 18 months later, if I get the shower head at a correct angle, I can winkle out a few grains for old times' sake.

So when my agent called with news of a TV pilot for Fox, the dunes seemed to shimmer slightly.

"'A doctor,'" he said, "in a medical show."

Cool linoleum floors, Vegetation. Hydrated nurses in white uniforms. Above all - oh sweet mercy, above all - no sand.

"They want you to put yourself on tape," he added.

And, as quickly as it had appeared, the mirage vanished.

Any actor will tell you that putting yourself on tape is a dispiriting process. You commit half a dozen pages to memory, you agonize about pace and voice and angle of eyebrow, you seal the envelope - and, if you're very, very, lucky, a distant casting director might, just might, use your tape to wedge open the fire exit on a hot day. That is absolutely the best you can hope for.

So I hugged the FedEx man goodbye with a rueful smile and no expectation at all.

The weeks passed, as weeks do, and I went back home to London when my agent called again: Katie Jacobs, the executive producer, wants you to fly to Los Angeles. Executive producer of what, I asked, being the sort of fellow who likes to move on. That medical show, he said. (At that time, the show had no name - it was simply The Untitled Shore/Attanasio Project, which itself sounded like early Robert Ludlum.) I asked what class - not because I am any sort of legroom queen, but because it's a measure of one's chances, of how seriously they take you - and when he said coach, I knew I was still long odds. In the meantime, he sent me a copy of the complete script.

I was astounded.

From the pages I had read, I had assumed that House was a peripheral grouch, lobbing in zingers from the outfield while better-looking youngsters did all the emoting. Now it appeared that House was the main character, and a brilliantly written one at that; a scarred, lame, dysfunctional misanthrope, intent on punishing himself and the world - the Hunchback of Princeton, the Phantom of the Operating Suite, with all the nasty, self-pitying egocentricism of a spoiled adolescent.

He was also, to my mind, a hero, a relentless seeker after truth, a knight errant, slaying emotional and microbial dragons with equal skill, and with a psychopathic disregard for his own safety.

I couldn't imagine what Fox thought they were doing, contemplating such a jagged protagonist for a prime-time drama. I only knew that I wanted the role very much.

A week later, I was sitting in an office at Fox, watching the incredibly handsome Bryan Singer eat salad. It was an unnerving experience. I'd flown 5,000 miles to read a scene that lasted about a minute, and here was this Singer chap spending a good half of that minute auditioning the next piece of tuna. So I angled my chair toward the equally handsome David Shore, who was not eating salad, and I did the best I could.

(I later discovered that Bryan Singer, as well as being handsome, has an IQ in the high 900s and eyes on the back of his head. He can carry on five conversations at once while eavesdropping on 10 more, so the tuna trick was small stuff for him.)

After two more meetings with Bryan, David, and Katie, I was set for the final at the Fox Coliseum, where 30 prowling executives were ready to devour my juicy Christian hide. I armed myself with an umbrella from Barneys (you can't buy a cane in Los Angeles - implications of physical decay are not welcome in the city), while my shield was a small lapel pin bearing the word SEXY.

I think it was the pin that did it.

A couple of weeks later, in the lobby of a Vancouver hotel. I met Robert Sean Leonard and Lisa Edelstein, checking in at the same time. For that reason, I will always think of them as a couple, even though they'd only met each other 30 seconds previously. Omar Epps, Jesse Spencer, and Jennifer Morrison showed up the next day looking impossibly young. I asked them if they'd heard of Jethro Tull. Nope. Even so, I liked them all instantly - funny, bright, humble people who took stuff seriously, and that meant we had a chance.

The shooting of the pilot was uneventful, if you don't count the events. I had brought my own cane (London, in case you didn't know, is the cane/umbrella capital of the world), which made everyone nervous because there were no duplicates in the event that mine got broken. I told them not to worry - there were no duplicates of me, either, and how could I possibly break a cane? Two days later it was matchwood, after I left it under a roll-down studio door.

Now I was worried the same thing might happen to me, and it nearly did - feeling grumpy one day about I can't remember what, I turned on my heel and strode huffily into a glass wall that had been reinstalled without my noticing. Jennifer Morrison laughed until she hurt herself, and we both went to Vancouver General for stitches. Luckily it was on a Friday, and I healed like a wild thing over the weekend. People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw tantrums.

So we finished the pilot and went our separate ways, feeling we had done a good job, but that good jobs weren't necessarily long jobs. To our astonishment, Fox picked up 13 shows, then five more, then four after that.

We now have embarked on our second season, and life is once more a daily jumble of baffling medical terms that ring around my head like foreign nursery rhymes: I eat vasculitis for breakfast, wear clothes woven from myocardial infarctions, brush my teeth with hyperinsulinemia.

The days, and the shows stretch out before me now in great, undulating waves, like . . . no, not remotely like a desert.