HOST: Yes, HOUSE M.D. I need to see a sirly looking Hugh Laurie waiving people aside in the hospital hallway with his cane in the air. There comes some bitter comment to a vulnerable patient desperately in the need of his brilliant and medical mind. HOUSE has become a mega hit with its killer combination of two TV faves: the medical drama and the mystery and it’s all built around a brilliant jackass of a character: Dr House. He’s acerbic, addicted to pain killers. He regularly manipulates his patients or their loved ones to arrive at a diagnosis and sometimes… well, sometimes he’s mean just for the heck of it.
The Emmy winning series was created by a London-Ontario-native David Shore from his Canadian beginnings, “Due South” and “Traders”. He’s created one of the most popular television shows on the air today and we’ve reached David Shore in California.
Hello, David.
DAVID SHORE: Hello!
HOST: Good to talk to you again man.
DAVID SHORE: Good to talk to you.
HOST: You’re back at work, right? Following the writers strike.
DAVID SHORE: I am, yeah.
HOST: How is it going?
DAVID SHORE: They have taken me away from my writing. Thank you.
HOST: Well, this is what I’m curious about. Did you find the break useful at all? A time to get new insights or ideas or did it just derailed what you’re been working towards for the season?
DAVID SHORE: A little bit of both. I’m not sure I got too many new insights. It definitely derailed stuff a little bit but not too badly. Now… that’s the first thing we did when we got back: try to figure out how we can solve the second half of the season which now will have 4 episodes instead of 12 episodes and how to work all that out, but… I think we got some good stuff planned and we’re gonna be back on air by the end of April to May and… we had a great two-part episode that we were going to air for the Superbowl which we now are going to do in May.
HOST: Didn’t we see… wasn’t…?
DAVID SHORE: Yeah, we did an episode after the Superbowl but that was supposed to be aired in the middle of January, so…
HOST: Oh, ok. So that was, was not the one that was gonna air after the Superbowl. Still looked post-Superbowl friendly. How does it manifest itself the walking back into a room with your team and everybody is kinda looking at you, I guess, going “OK, we had a plan, we had a story arch over 12 shows, now what do we do, sir?”
DAVID SHORE: Well, luckily we didn’t have it
that planned. But, yeah… there’s some… it was insane ‘cause usually the way it works is, you finish a season and the actors… the get like a 2/3-month holiday and the writers get like a ½ week holiday and then we go back to work, we get like 6 weeks to map everything out. This time we got like 3 weeks to map stuff out and get stuff going. So, yeah… we are going a little crazy here trying to get stuff back on the air as quickly as possible.
HOST: So, will the remaining HOUSE show just suck?
[laughs The writing won’t be that good
DAVID SHORE: There’s a good chance, yeah… of that happening.
HOST: David, you were one of the only big US shows to have new episodes, you mentioned the chosen that aired after Superbowl, that aired during the strike. How did you manage that?
DAVID SHORE: Ohm… they held some back. You know… most of the shows that weren’t on strike at the beginning of November, most of the shows that continued their regular air schedule, simply ran out. We… this show kept shooting for a little while, but not for that long, for a few weeks, to finish the stuff that was in the plot line. Any script that was finished and ready to be shot, was shot. But then was only really… we could only finish what we were shooting and the next one was kinda ready, well as ready, actually in good shape. And they held them back. Our Christmas episode aired by the end of January. So, that was… that was the key.
HOST: Right. Take us back (David) to your pre-House days, I mean, your life, as I would imagine, dramatically changed since what you’ve been doing a few years ago: you practiced Corporative Law in Toronto before getting into the TV rocket. How did you make the transition?
DAVID SHORE: How do you go from being a rock star to being a radio person?
HOST: laughs Good question.
DAVID SHORE: I don’t know… well, it’s one of those things; I guess you just do it. It’s… I don’t have…. I have an answer for it but it’s not particularly insightful… I literally told my partners on the firm that “I’m thinking of going to Hollywood to write”, which is one of the weirdest statements to tell people and I just did it. It took me a couple of years but it’d been at the back of my mind for a long time, it’s not something that I decided on the spur-of-the-moment to do, but…
Sir James Hugh Callum Laurie ♥