New York Times

November 14, 2004

 

By HUGH HART

 

Los Angeles 

 

THE doctor cuts to the quick with his first diagnosis in Fox's new medical series: ''House'': ''Brain tumor. She's going to die.  Boring.'' He  then calls his second patient a moron and says to his third charge, when she refuses his recommendation, ''You're being an idiot.'' 

 

It's all in a day's work for Dr. Gregory House, the gimpy, scraggly-bearded, Vicodin-popping genius who hates people but loves solving medical mysteries.

 

'House,'' which has its premiere Tuesday night at 9, stars Hugh Laurie, a lanky Cambridge University-educated British actor familiar to ''Stuart Little'' fans as the movie mouse's adopted dad. Casually outfitted in jeans, boots and T-shirt - not unlike his new, dress-code-shirking character - Mr. Laurie was hurling darts at a cork target in a Fox production office one recent afternoon before stopping to explain his attraction to the formidable Dr. House.  ''I instinctively sympathized with this guy's resistance to sentiment, his obsession with fact and truth and logic as opposed to emotion and kindness,'' Mr. Laurie said. ''In a touchy-feely fuzzy world, there's something rather bracing about a character who just doesn't give a damn what anybody thinks, who only wants to know the truth.''

 

A fixture on British television since the early 80's, Mr. Laurie formed a comedy team with Stephen Fry, a college classmate, and they landed their own BBC show. He then played the butler's foppish boss for four seasons in ''Jeeves and Wooster'' on PBS's ''Masterpiece Theater'' and appeared in several installments of BBC's ''Blackadder'' series. ''I was sort of a brainless upper-class twit in the first 'Blackadder.' and then oddly enough I played a brainless upper-class twit in the last one as well,'' Mr. Laurie said.  

 

Mr. Laurie videotaped his ''House'' audition in a hotel bathroom in Namibia while filming the war movie ''Flight of the Phoenix.'' He was still sporting the beard he'd grown for his ''Phoenix'' role as a stranded pilot, and Bryan Singer, a co-executive producer  of ''House'' and  director of the  first two episodes, asked him to keep it. ''Bryan still refers to it as the bin Laden tape because I was looking kind of bearded and haggard,'' Mr. Laurie said wryly

 

"In 'House,' I get the best of both worlds inasmuch as we're dealing with matters of life and death, but it's also got some cracking jokes.  I mean, he's not the Marquis de Sade or anything but there is a caustic element to this character which I hope people will like.'' 

 

David Shore, a co-executive producer of the series, created the lead character, named as a homonymic tip of the hat to Sherlock Holmes, about a year ago, after learning that Fox was looking for procedural medical shows. ''I came up with this investigating-the-diagnosis thing, but to be honest, that didn't particularly excite me until I started developing the House character,'' said Mr. Shore, whose producing credits include ''Law & Order,'' ''Hack'' and ''Family Law.''. ''He's the anti-Dr. Welby in the sense that he doesn't care about bedside manner but only cares about results.'' Dr. House's scathing patient evaluations, Mr. Shore said with a laugh, are informed by ''my paranoia about what my doctors say behind my back after I leave the room, when I've come to see them with my lame complaints.'' 

 

Orbiting around the curmudgeonly Dr. House are a group of testy hospital colleagues, played by Linda Edelstein, Omar Epps, Robert Sean Leonard, Jennifer Morrison and Jesse Spencer. But much of the dramatic tension is perpetrated each week by microscopic culprits. Shots of wiggling tapeworms, mightily magnified blood corpuscles and through-the-throat close-ups of vibrating tonsils call to mind the ''eewww''-inducing visual effects popularized by ''CSI'' and its progeny. ''Clearly that's in the air,'' Mr. Shore said. ''There's so much we can do nowadays with computer graphics and other methods. I see it as a great opportunity for dramatizing a story.  Somebody telling you 'The tapeworm goes through the bloodstream'- who cares? But actually seeing that is cool.''

 

A different twist on the ''CSI''-with-live-bodies subgenre can be found in ''Medical Investigation,'' which focuses on disease outbreaks that pose threats of epidemic proportions. When it had its premiere in September, ''Medical Investigation,'' shown Fridays at 10 p.m. on NBC,  prompted comparisons to CBS's forensic franchise, but Jason Horwitch, its creator and co-executive producer, said, ''I was not personally at all inspired by 'CSI.' Some reviews said this is a knockoff, and that surprised me. The biggest difference in our show is that the subject of each episode isn't dead. It's not a fascination with how did this person get killed, but how did this person get sick and let's hope we can save them. We feel it's a new wrinkle.''

 

Mr. Horwitch said his ''Medical Investigation'' premise was inspired in part by an ophthalmologist he sat next to during a plane flight several years ago. The eye doctor claimed he'd been secretly dispatched to Cuba, where he helped trace the outbreak of a baffling blindness epidemic to a moonshine operation in a Havana slum. ''I didn't believe a word this guy was saying until he pulled out a photograph of him and Castro together,'' Mr. Horwitch said. ''That was tucked away in the back of my mind. I thought it would be interesting to have a sort of all-star team of doctors. 

 

Mr. Horwitch modeled his protagonist Dr. Stephen Connor (Neal McDonough of ''Boomtown''), after Don Francis, the Centers for Disease Control AIDS researcher portrayed in HBO's 1993 movie ''And The Band Played On.'' In fact, Dr. Francis serves as a consultant on ''Medical Investigations.'' ''Like Dr. Francis, Neal's character is an exceptional talent,'' Mr. Horwitch said.  ''He is tough. I would call him driven, because he knows letting down his guard in the smallest way means that people he's never met before might lose their lives and he takes that responsibility extremely seriously.''  

 

As to the mysterious appearance of two procedural medical shows on the fall schedule - both anchored by brilliant, stern diagnosticians, both owned by NBC-Universal Studios, both featuring evil tapeworms in early episodes - the people behind ''House'' and ''Medical Investigation'' chalk it up to mere coincidence. Mr. Shore and Mr. Horwitch have never met, and neither had heard about the other's project until both pilots were already in development.

 

 ''We were notified by NBC, after we'd gotten our outline approved, that there was a tapeworm in something they did which had a similar story,'' Mr. Shore said. ''But it's tough to be too annoyed. We're going to do stories in arenas that they're doing, and vice versa. In the infectious disease world, there's only so much available. It's all going to be about the execution. People will like us, hopefully - or they could like both.''