When we last left Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) on House, he was being institutionalized, and nothing was as it had seemed. House and Cuddy (Lisa Adelman) sleeping together? That was just a figment of his unhinged brain – a brilliant twist writers concocted to allow the show’s leads to hook up when fans demanded it.
As the strains of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” from The Rolling Stones played, House’s BFF Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) dropped the troubled doctor off at Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital, while former team members Chase (Jesse Spencer) and Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) tied the knot in an outdoor wedding.
With so many questions up in the air for Season 6, we called House creator David Shore, who – despite being a little leery about revealing too much – discussed the two-hour return of the good doctor.
“The episode will represent about three months in time,” Shore says from the House set, where four episodes have been completed.
“It’s basically the summer. Normally we end a season, and pick up the new one a few months later. We’re not wed to it, but notionally the last episode aired in May, and the new season takes place in September. We like to stick – more or less – to the time of the year that the audience is watching it.”
Shore likens the first episode to a movie in its scope and tone, and says that devoting anything less than 120 minutes to dealing with such a game-changer in the House mythology would short-change the characters and fans.
“We left things so provocatively that we decided to play it out. Normally, an episode plays out over the course of a few days, or a week, and we thought that that would be wrong, after putting a guy in an institution,” he explains.
“You have to deal with House’s ups and downs. You have deal with him not wanting to get healthy, trying to get healthy, the back and forth. This is a big deal. It’s not ‘take two pills and call me in the morning,’ so we pick up Season 6, literally, hours after we left of Season 5.”
When asked about the curveball writers threw at fans, making the much-ballyhooed horizontal bop between House and Cuddy a figment of House’s imagination, Shore admits it was a gamble, but defends the decision.
“Whenever you’re dealing with sex between two television characters, you’ve got to be careful,” he says of his Emmy-nominated series.
“You’ve got that whole Sam and Diane [from Cheers] thing hanging over your head. It’s important to us that we don’t just comply with television rules. We tell the story we want to tell as we tell it. It became more of a way of dealing with his unravelling, leading up to the end, but also revealing something about the inner workings of his world, and the world that he would like to live in.”
House isn’t the only Fox show in which the two leads slept together, only to have fans discover it was all in a character’s mind. Bones had Booth (David Boreanaz) and Brennan (Emily Deschanel) finally consummate their burgeoning relationship – in Booth’s mind anyway.
“[Creator] Hart [Hanson] and I are friends,” Shore says with a chuckle. “I spoke to him before either of our episodes had aired, but long after we were both committed to it, and we said, ‘We both work for the same network … nobody said anything to you about this?’ We were both surprised.”
House returns with a two-hour episode on Monday, Sept. 21, at 8 p.m. ET on Global/Fox.
Check out House’s Season 6 promo:
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