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Changes are afoot at “House.”
(Spoiler alert: Don’t read on if you don’t want a few clues about the upcoming season of “House.”)
For one thing, Dr. House does not have his three trusty underlings around him. Or rather, he does but he doesn’t.
Allow me to explain. As the season begins, the doctors who assisted House (actor Hugh Laurie) have moved on. Drs. Allison Cameron and Robert Chase, who are played by Jennifer Morrison and Jesse Spencer, have new jobs at a hospital in Arizona. Dr. Eric Foreman (Omar Epps) is leading his own diagnostic practice at another New Jersey hospital.
So House is on his own, and, in the estimation of his friend Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), is going a little bonkers.
Wilson has reasons for his concerns. Though House protests that he’s fine without his old crew, he’s “seeing” them when they’re not there—as in hallucinating. Hence Wilson thinks House is losing his mind.
Wilson isn’t the only person who’s worried about the brilliantly cranky doctor. House is trying to fly solo in his diagnostic practice, but Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) forces House to find a new support staff.
“Over the first bunch of episodes he’s going to call in all the candidates ... 40, I think it is,” executive producer Katie Jacobs said at the Television Critics Association press tour panel on the hit Fox show. “And we’re going to see who survives. We’re going to play a `House’ version of `Survivor’ and see what candidates” make it to House’s team.
House being House, he doesn’t bother to learn the candidates’ names—he makes them wear numbers.
“I actually met (one actress) on the set, and she said, `Hi, I’m 13,’” said Leonard. “And I honestly had no idea what she was talking about. I said, `Stop it. You’re at least 9.’ She wasn’t charmed by that at all.”
Jacobs said the new direction for the show, which involved the casting of five new actors (including Olivia Wilde and Kal Penn) as guest stars, started to emerge at the end of last season. And because Chase, Cameron and Foreman all had three-year fellowships with House, it made sense for them to theoretically move on after the show’s third year. Of course, working with House had its trials as well.
“How many years can you stand working beside House?” Jacobs said. “Or, how many years can he stand working with you and getting close to you? And does he really want that kind of intimacy? So we started thinking about it at the end of last season.”
But have no fear—Chase, Cameron and Foreman will be back for the show’s fourth season.
“Everybody is back eventually,” Jacobs said. “And everybody is back having changed and in different capacities.”
It’s courageous for the show to change up its game well before too much familiarity with the “House bickering acerbically with Cameron, Chase and Foreman” formula sets in. But “House,” which has ridden its clever blend of fine acting, moral excavation and tightly plotted medical mystery to the top echelon of the Nielsen ratings chart, is a success for a reason—it usually finds ways to zig just when you thought it was going to zag.
“I will add that the first three scripts that I read of this season are not only three of the best `House’ scripts I’ve ever read, they’re three of the best scripts I’ve ever read,” Laurie said. “It may be that in the execution of it, we’ll make a dreadful hash of it and you’ll go, `Well, I don’t see what the fuss was about. That was a terrible piece of television.’ But purely as scripts, I find them absolutely phenomenal.
“I’ve never read anything that so ambitiously tries to mix broad comedy and gut-wrenching tragedy and philosophical musings and bizarre literary references all in the space of five seconds,” Laurie continued. “The speed with which it jumps from tone to tone is quite phenomenally ambitious.”
A few more “House”-keeping details (sorry, I had to):
At the semi-joking insistence of Edelstein, Jacobs promised a big “makeout scene” for Cuddy, though she wouldn’t say who it would be with.
The “House” episode that is set to air after the 2008 Super Bowl will be the first part of a two-parter, but other than that, Jacobs didn’t divulge much about what’s in store for that episode, beyond the thought that the show would try not to do anything too “wacky” or “gimmicky” after the big game.
One of the newbie doctors whom House tries out is a former plastic surgeon. “But what House discovers about him is, having done plastic surgery, he has amazing insights into human behavior, you know, because of his experience. So it’s that kind of thing that we’re having fun with,” Jacobs said.
