Within the fall of 2004, Fox didn’t have a trusty procedural like NBC’s Regulation & Order and CBS’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. So the community took an opportunity on Home, a medical drama with episodic storylines pushed by situations, not crimes, and a British actor little identified to stateside audiences enjoying a diagnostician with zero bedside method. Home turned a business and important hit, and it began with the pilot episode, which aired on Fox on November 16, 2004.
In that first episode, Gregory Home (Hugh Laurie) is shirking his obligation on the Princeton-Plainsboro Educating Hospital’s walk-in clinic, and he additionally brushes off the case of a kindergarten instructor named Rebecca Adler (Robin Tunney), who’s experiencing speech issues and seizures. When boss Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) revokes Home’s diagnostic authorizations, he relents and takes a shift on the clinic — and whereas treating an asthmatic boy, he flashes on the prognosis of vasculitis for Rebecca. At first, it appears he’s proper: Rebecca responds properly to steroids… till she begins seizing once more. It’s solely after Home discovers Rebecca seems to have consumed undercooked pork that he realizes she could have neurocysticercosis. Positive sufficient, an X-ray reveals a number of tapeworms in her physique, and Rebecca begins her restoration after a course of albendazole.
Alongside the best way, Home’s first episode tells us all we have to know concerning the title character: He’s reclusive, impatient, grouchy, cynical, smug, and crass. He makes use of a cane and gobbles Vicodin after different docs misdiagnosed an infarction and left him with agonizing leg ache. And but he has the grudging respect of Cuddy, the devotion of his colleague and pal James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), and the admiration of his gaggle of diagnostician proteges, initially Eric Foreman (Omar Epps), Robert Chase (Jesse Spencer), and Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison).
In an interview with College of Toronto Journal, Home creator David Shore mentioned that he based mostly Gregory Home on himself — or a “larger a**gap” model of himself. “And Home is smarter than I’m, which permits him to get away with stuff,” Shore added. “If he was of common intelligence with that very same perspective and if he was unsuitable 50 % of the time, he would simply by no means be tolerated. The one cause he’s tolerated is as a result of he’s proper, invariably. I don’t assume I fall into that class. However his attitudes, his outlook towards the mind versus feelings, his outlook towards nearly all the pieces comes from me.”
Paul Michaud/NBCU Photograph Financial institution/NBCUniversal by way of Getty Photos
Shore advised Leisure Weekly he imagined the lead character after going to a physician’s appointment for a sore hip, although the ache had dissipated by the point of his appointment. “The docs have been extremely well mannered, and I couldn’t assist pondering, ‘Why?! I’m losing your time!’” he recalled. “Writing Home, I fell in love with the thought of a man who would truly say that to a affected person.”
Shore and fellow govt producers Katie Jacobs and Paul Attansio pitched Home to Fox as a medical detective present — nearly like against the law procedural, “with germs and illnesses as suspects and culprits,” as Shore defined to EW. The writers gave their protagonist powers of deduction impressed by Sherlock Holmes — see: the drug behavior, the delinquent character, the sidekick with the initials J.W., the 221B avenue tackle — and medical instances impressed by diagnostic tales that Berton Roueché reported for The New Yorker and Lisa Sanders reported for The New York Occasions Sunday Journal.
“Till Home happened, prognosis [in TV medical dramas] was the one-liner between signs and the horrible response to remedy. Home takes that second and appears at it, which is what my column did,” Sanders, who turned a medical technical advisor for the present, defined to Yale Medication Journal.
And the Home producers ultimately discovered their star in Hugh Laurie, whom Shore knew “as a British twit” from his work in U.Ok. productions like Blackadder, as Shore advised The New York Occasions. Laurie despatched in an audition tape from a movie shoot in Namibia, sure that the unsympathetic Gregory Home have to be a supporting character. However after seeing what then-Fox exec Craig Erwich known as “one of many nice auditions of all time,” the producers knew they’d their main man.
Fox execs had notes on the unique script — they determined that Home ought to stroll with a cane as an alternative of utilizing a wheelchair, for instance — however by no means shied away from Home’s character. “The telephone name I anticipated to get from Day 1 I by no means obtained: ‘The whole lot is nice, nice, however you’ve obtained to make the character extra likable,’” Shore advised the Occasions. “You at all times get that decision, and we by no means obtained that decision.”
One of many remaining touches of Home’s development was deciding upon that title. Different titles thought-about have been Chasing Zebras, Circling the Drain — in medical slang, a “zebra” is an unlikely prognosis — and Jagged Little Tablet. However Home received out, and the community’s advertising and marketing division added an “M.D.” on the title card and a sq. across the letter “H” to emphasise the medical setting.
Home debuted on November 16, 2004, with critics applauding the “humorous, probing, and unsentimental” and its protagonist, “probably the most electrifying new foremost character to hit tv in years.”
However the present hit it large with viewers that January when it served as a lead-out for the then-behemoth American Idol. Earlier than lengthy, Home was a rankings behemoth in its personal proper, with tens of tens of millions of weekly viewers. Not that Gregory Home wish to meet any of them.
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