PREMIUM: One of the most critically acclaimed television dramas of the last decade, House, starring Hugh Laurie, is ending its run after eight seasons. Creator David Shore talks to World Screen Newsflash about the thought-provoking themes that have made the show such a success.
WS: There have been some constant themes in House: people never change, people, or at least House, can’t really be happy, and people always lie. Why are these themes important to you?
SHORE: I believe the truth is important. Most movies and TV shows are naïve: there are major arcs that people have and they change dramatically. In one episode, House said to Foreman that almost dying changes everything forever for two weeks! First of all, House is not quite as cynical as those themes would make him seem. Nobody changes but it’s pretty clear watching the show that life is about striving to change. You may fail, but you’re doomed to fail and you’ll take steps backward if you don’t strive to change. We certainly see that—striving. Even if you fail it’s about striving. In terms of “everybody lies” that’s a pithy little catch phrase. What it really means is that the truth is elusive and people’s views of the truth are often very, very wrong. We all look at the world through our own subjective lenses and that our own subjective lenses distort the truth and House is striving to find an absolute truth. So it’s not so much that people say that something is white when they know it’s black, or vice versa, it’s when something is gray, some people will say it’s black and other people will say it’s white and truly believe that.

WS: And sometimes it’s easier for us to lie to ourselves about things too.
SHORE: Very much, very much so.

WS: Are there others themes are important to you? You have a great platform, don’t you? You get to communicate with millions of people.
SHORE: It’s absolutely fantastic as a writer and as a person with a point of view on the world, to be able to spout off my own personal point of view and have millions and millions of people in countries all around the world watch it and respond. That’s what’s really gratifying—having people respond to the same things in all nations. It’s trite on one hand that we’re all the same, but on the other hand it really does serve as a reminder to me that we are all the same. It’s incredibly obvious and yet we think of these vast cultural differences, but they’re not so vast.

In terms of other themes—and it’s all part of the same theme: emotion versus the intellect is a thing that we’ve constantly gone at, but that’s just another way of to some extent looking at that pursuit of truth, objective truth.

WS: What have been your major concerns at the beginning of each season in keeping the show interesting and fresh?
SHORE: There’s a bit of a contradictory thing that happens at the beginning of every season, and in a sense, in every episode. What themes do we want to explore now? What haven’t we explored before? What stories do we want to tell? Specifically, what different stories do we want to tell? What you have to do is something new and interesting—what you have to avoid is doing something new and interesting just because it’s new. It’s got to be new and interesting. This is all very obvious and yet it’s very tricky as you’re going along. It’s finding the themes you haven’t explored, the different ways of exploring your central character and all the characters around him. So it’s “what haven’t we done?” and trying to find something that when you start talking you go, “Oh, that’s cool. We haven’t done that. Let’s explore that. Let’s go deeper with that.”

WS: I’m speaking to a lot of showrunners working in pay television that say they have so much creative freedom. Have you ever felt constrained writing for advertiser-supported television?
SHORE: For whatever reason, I really haven’t. I look at TV and I see that difference that they’re talking about, but I haven’t felt it for whatever reason, either because we were successful, though we weren’t successful right from the top, or just because I chose to deal with these issues when maybe other shows don’t. I don’t know how it slipped by, but there’s never been an issue that I decided to explore that the network said we’d rather you didn’t go there. Obviously there are limitations—I can’t swear, I can’t show nudity—but that’s fine; I don’t have a problem with that. That’s not what the show’s about. We have fun with working around that actually. The constraints that are annoying are producing 22 episodes instead of 13—that can be very tiresome, but more is good, too. And having to write an episode that is exactly 42 minutes and 43 seconds, or whatever it is, that’s a nightmare. [Laughs]

WS: It has been announced that this is the last season of House. Are there other subject matters that you would like to explore or are you going to take time off from TV?
SHORE: I like TV. TV’s been good to me and I love that you can really explore characters, explore the human condition over extended periods of time in a different way. It’s wonderful. It allows for a much more nuanced approach to character. So I will probably come back to TV—in what form, I’m not sure. Hopefully I’ve got more to say.
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