20 years later, House creator offers an ode to lupus

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the premiere of House, M.D., the long-running medical drama that taught a generation that there’s no medical problem so shocking or horrifying that it can’t be solved by Hugh Laurie being very mean to it in an American accent. To mark the occasion, Entertainment Weekly talked this week with series creator David Shore about the legacy of the series, which went off the air back in 2012. And while the conversation was wide-ranging, if a bit cagey—Shore isn’t going to tell you what happens after the show’s well-received finale, for instance, because “every now and again, it does cross my mind that I would like to explore that”—it did start where it must: With an ode to lupus.

“Lupus was the perfect disease for us!” Shore asserted in the interview. (He’s not kidding: The show tossed the autoimmune disorder out as a red herring nearly 30 times over its eight-season run, and it was only the culprit once, in a fourth-season episode.)

Shore:

The fact was we were looking for diseases that could be serious but could manifest in a lot of different ways. And unfortunately for many — for us, it was fortunate, lupus was the perfect disease for us! It was a disease that manifested in a lot of ways, and so it could be the wrong diagnosis many times. And so we just kind of embraced that and ran with that.

In other spots in the interview, Shore (who’s since gone on to serve as showrunner for ABC’s recently ended The Good Doctor) did move beyond lupus, touching on his occasional regrets about the show—notably, not being able to get Lisa Edelstein, who left the series over pay disputes ahead of its last season, back for its final episode. He also shot down the possibility of one of those reunion specials that have been so in vogue in recent nostalgia-starved years: “Not really. I wouldn’t say no to it, but those things are very, very difficult to do. You don’t want to spoil anything. As Hugh said at the time, Dr. House is the type of guy who leaves the party early rather than late. People are going, ‘Where’d House go?’ Rather than, ‘Why is House still here?’ You don’t want to spoil your legacy.”