Gregory House, M.D., is a misanthropic medical genius who heads a team of diagnosticians at the Princeton?Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey. Most episodes revolve around the diagnosis of a primary patient and start with a pre-credit sequence set outside the hospital, showing events leading up to the onset of the patient's symptoms. The typical episode follows the team in their attempts to diagnose and treat the patient's illness, attempts that often fail until the patient's condition is critical. House's department usually only treats patients that have already been to other doctors but have failed to receive an accurate diagnosis yet. House habitually rejects cases that he does not find interesting. The storylines tend to focus on House's unconventional medical theories and practices, and the other characters' reactions to them, rather than on the intricate details of the treatments. The team employs the differential diagnosis method, with House guiding the deliberations. Using a whiteboard, House writes down and eliminates possible etiologies with a marker. The patient is typically misdiagnosed during the episode and treated with medications accordingly. This usually causes further complications, but eventually helps House and his team diagnose the patient correctly, as the nature of the complications often provides valuable new evidence. House tends to arrive at the correct diagnosis seemingly out of the blue, often inspired by a passing remark made by another character. Diagnoses range from relatively common to very rare diseases. In a running joke, the team often questions if the patient has lupus early in the diagnostic deliberations, but this diagnosis is never correct. Many ailments House and his team encounter cannot be easily diagnosed because patients have lied about their symptoms, circumstances, or personal histories. House frequently mutters, "Everybody lies", or proclaims during the team's deliberations, "The patient is lying"; this assumption guides House's decisions and diagnoses. Because many of his hypotheses are based on epiphanies or controversial insights, he often has trouble obtaining permission from his superior, hospital administrator Dr. Lisa Cuddy, to perform medical procedures he considers necessary. This is especially the case when the proposed procedures involve a high degree of risk or are ethically questionable. There are frequent disagreements between House and his team. Especially Dr. Allison Cameron, whose standards of medical ethics is more conservative than those of the other characters. House, like all of the hospital's doctors, is required to treat patients in the facility's walk-in clinic. His grudging fulfilment of this duty, or his creative methods of avoiding it, constitutes a recurring subplot. During clinic duty, House confounds patients with unwelcome observations into their personal lives, eccentric prescriptions, and unorthodox treatments. However, after seeming to be inattentive to their complaints, he regularly impresses them with rapid and accurate diagnoses. The insights that occur as he deals with some of the simple cases in the clinic often inspire him to solve the main case. A significant plot element is House's use of Vicodin to manage pain, caused by an infarction in his quadriceps muscle some years earlier, which also forces him to use a cane. In the first season episode "Detox", House admits he is addicted to Vicodin, but says he does not have a problem because the pills "let me do my job, and they take away my pain". His addiction has led his colleagues, Cuddy and Dr. James Wilson, to encourage him to go to drug rehabilitation several times. When he has no access to Vicodin or experiences unusually intense pain, he occasionally self-medicates with other narcotic analgesics such as morphine, oxycodone, and methadone. House also frequently drinks liquor when he is not on medical duty, and classifies himself as a "big drinker". Toward the end of season 5, House begins to hallucinate; after eliminating other possible diagnoses, he and Wilson determine that his Vicodin addiction is the most likely cause. House goes into denial about this for a brief time, but at the close of the season finale, he commits himself to Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital.

	Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) – Department Head: Diagnostic Medicine. As the show's protagonist, Dr. Gregory House is a maverick diagnostician with a double specialty in infectious disease and nephrology. Dr. House utterly lacks bedside manner and prefers to avoid direct contact with his patients whenever possible. Due to an infarction in his right thigh, House lost a substantial portion of the muscle in his upper leg and must use a cane to assist with walking. As a result, House is also forced to deal with constant physical pain, which he manages through a dependency on the prescription pain medication Vicodin. Although his behaviour can border on antisocial or misanthropic, House is viewed as a maverick physician whose unconventional thinking and excellent instincts have afforded him a great deal of respect and an unusual level of tolerance from his colleagues and the medical world.
	Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) – Administration: Dean of Medicine, endocrinologist. Dr. Cuddy attended the University of Michigan for graduate studies, where she first met Gregory House. She has the distinction of being one of the few characters on the show (Dr. Wilson being the other) who can match wits with the fast-talking Dr. House in conversation (and arguments) and be considered one of his "friends". She often is left to pick up the pieces of House's questionable medical practices. She is also one of the few people who can stand House's rude manner, strange requests, and his many obnoxious (sometimes nosy) habits. Although she frequently criticises House's methods, she does trust his decisions to be in the best interest of his patients. Over the course of the show, it is seen that she is one of the few, if not only, people who would hire House at all, due to widespread disapproval of House's results-oriented methods and constant insubordination. A developing arc in season five indicates that she has (and may have always had) very strong feelings for House; in season five's "Saviours" she refuses to answer when asked if she is in love with House, dismissing it as "a ridiculous question." House has described her as a Second Rate doctor.
	Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) – Department Head: Oncology. Dr. Wilson is Dr. House's best friend. Dr. Wilson is very well-respected and well-liked by both his colleagues and his patients, making his close friendship with the antisocial House especially puzzling to the other hospital employees. Wilson claims that his job and his "stupid, screwed up friendship" with House are the two most important things to him. He, along with Dr. Cuddy, usually finds himself aiding and abetting House's Vicodin addiction and his very unorthodox methods.		Dr. Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) – Department Head: Emergency Medicine, immunologist. Cameron was written as an earnest and sincere character and the most empathetic of the team. Her character history reveals an early marriage to a victim of thyroid cancer, whose subsequent death had a lasting impact on her. In the first season, she has a flirtatious relationship with House, but eventually embarks upon a tenuous affair with Robert Chase. Cameron resigned at the end of Season 3, but returned in Season 4 as a member of the Princeton Plainsboro Emergency Room staff.
	Dr. Robert Chase (Jesse Spencer) – Department: Surgery, intensive care specialist, Senior Surgeon. Dr. Chase's demeanour appears to have been either influenced or amplified by House, as he has previously displayed a penchant for insulting patients behind their backs, takes clear and vicarious joy in watching House tear into others, finds House's antics more amusing than others do, and repeats House's mantra of "everybody lies" whenever a patient's full disclosure of any required medical history is called into question. Moreover, when suggesting treatments to diagnoses, Chase is arguably the most creative member of House's staff, often proposing unconventional treatments that had not previously been considered, but whose perceived effectiveness is generally agreed upon. Chase was fired by House at the end of Season 3, but he returned in Season 4 as a member of Princeton Plainsboro's surgical staff.
	Dr. Eric Foreman (Omar Epps) – Department: Diagnostic Medicine, Senior Fellow, neurologist; attended Johns Hopkins Medical School. Of all the members of House's staff, it is strongly implied that Foreman performed better than the other fellows academically throughout college and medical school. However, during the pilot, Dr. House tells Foreman that a major factor in his hiring was the fact that he was a former juvenile delinquent who once stole cars and had 'street smarts'. As a result, he frequently voices his disapproval of House's maverick methods and daring decisions. Foreman resigned at the end of Season 3, feeling that the more time he spent with House, the more he became like him. Foreman then took a position as Head of Diagnostic Medicine at New York Mercy Hospital. During that time, he saved a patient's life by going against their protocols, something that House frequently does. Foreman is then told that while he may have saved the patient's life, he cannot be there if he cannot be trusted to obey his senior medical officers. Foreman is then fired. Although he applied at other medical facilities, no one would hire him because of the incident, attributing it to his past association with House. He later returned to Princeton Plainsboro because Cuddy was the only person willing to hire him after his actions.

REVIEW

TV Show: This is my review for the House TV Show.

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