House (TV series)/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Actor Allusion:
    • Leslie Hope and Sarah Clarke, who played the female leads in the first season of Fox's other big hit of the early 2000s, 24, each appears as a patient of the week in the first season, and both have fates that mirror those of their 24 characters. Hope, who played Teri Bauer, plays the first patient in the series to die on House's watch, while Clarke, who played Nina Myers, pulls a Karma Houdini.
    • Sarah Clarke's character did die in a later season of 24.
    • In one episode, Blackadder can be seen on House's list of Tivo'd shows.
      • Not to mention the dual-joke of House showing up to an 80s party in Regency period costume.
      • And occasionally he will imitate a posh English accent, which is ironically LESS of a departure for him as an actor.
    • House MD exists in an Alternate Universe where Neil Perry actually does become a doctor.
    • In one episode Jolene Blalock plays a porn star who mentions that emotions are emotions and sex is mechanical, and there's no reason to overlap the two.
    • In another episode, Taub comments that he figured Foreman's house would have a more "Mod Squad" kind of feel.
    • Season 7 Episode 17 wasn't the first time Chris Marquette and Amber Tamblyn worked together. They have a lot of appropriately intimate scenes between them.
  • Billing Displacement: Despite appearing in barely a quarter of the episodes in Season 7, Olivia Wilde was billed as a main cast member over Amber Tamblyn, who had a far larger role in the season.
  • The Danza: Lisa Edelstein as Lisa Cuddy.
  • Dawson Casting:
    • The 15-year old model in "Skin Deep" is played by a then-27 year old actress.
    • Cuddy's daughter is usually played by a much older child actress (looking about four or five) but is treated as though she's two. This is pretty jarring as it looks like the child has developmental disabilities.
  • Defictionalization (sort of)/Life Imitates Art: The Princeton University Hospital at Plainsboro, which opened in May 2012 (replacing the already existing University Medical Center at Princeton) and even looks somewhat like the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital. However, it has nothing to do with Princeton University (which has no medical school); it is instead loosely affiliated with the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, the medical unit of Rutgers University (in full: Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey).
  • Development Gag: "Dead and Buried" had a toy zebra as an important clue. "Chasing Zebras" was considered as a title for the show, based on the medical saying “If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”
  • Directed by Cast Member: "Lockdown", by Hugh Laurie himself.
  • Executive Meddling: The reason why Vogler was introduced in Season 1 (see page 2 of the article).
  • Fake American: Hugh Laurie as Dr. House. His American accent is one of the better examples, though the way he pronounces some words can give it away. Strangely, he keeps the accent even when he's screwed up lines, as can be seen in the outtakes. When executive producer Bryan Singer saw Hugh Laurie's audition tape, he turned to the casting department and said, "See? This is an American actor!" The casting department had to correct him.
    • Lampshaded in Season One when House calls a doctor in the early hours of the morning. When asked to explain why he is calling at such an early hour, he "puts on" an English accent and pretends he was calling from the UK and hadn't considered the time difference. For this scene, Hugh Laurie is of course putting on the silly voice he used for oddball sketch comedy in the 80s.
    • Like most fake-American accents, Laurie uses a "gruff voice" as a cover-up in order to fake an American accent over his British-- ala Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and John Mahoney on Frasier not coincidentally, they're all playing stereotypical "tough American detectives" who supposedly all speak in gruff Midwestern dialects.
  • Hey It's That Girl/Guy: Blair Waldorf had a crush on House in season three.
  • Hey, It's That Voice!: Well yeah you see James Earl Jones but do you really care about anything but the voice?
  • McLeaned: When Kal Penn left the show to serve in the Obama administration, the producers had his character, Kutner, commit suicide. Though this was due to the first reason, not because of any friction with the rest of the cast. They just wanted some drama and a Very Special Episode. The director later joked that if he'd left for another acting role, the death would have been autoerotic asphyxiation.
  • Playing Against Type: Before House, Hugh Laurie was famous in Britain as a comedian and half of the Fry and Laurie comedy team, as well as various Upper Class Twits on Blackadder.
  • Romance on the Set: Jesse Spencer and Jennifer Morrison, who play Drs. Chase and Cameron. They were at one point engaged to be married, but called it off shortly before the wedding. Meanwhile, in a case of Real Life Writes the Plot, their characters also got together romantically... but the plot didn't catch up to their Real Life breakup, so the actors were filming proposal and wedding scenes well after they had broken up.
    • Almost but not quite: Michelle Trachtenberg (best known for playing Dawn Summers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) guest starred in the episode "Safe". She has admitted to having had a crush on Hugh Laurie and writing "I love you" on her inner thigh before a scene where he would see it. We might be getting to Stalker with a Crush territory with that.
  • What Could Have Beens:
    • Felicia Day auditioned for the pilot. She showed up as the POTW in a Season 5 episode.
    • Not to mention that Patrick "Dr. McDreamy" Dempsey originally auditioned for the lead role.
    • A physical deformity or handicap was always part of the character design for House, but early versions of the show put him in a wheelchair rather than giving him a bum leg; this was thrown out because it limited the character but showed up in the episode "Needle in a Haystack", where House tries to go a week in a wheelchair as a bet. In another early character design, he had a giant scar on his face.
    • "Chasing Zebras" was an early working title for the show, after the common med-school saying "if you hear hoofbeats, you think horses, not zebras" (i.e. a simple, mundane explanation for a group of symptoms is likelier to be right than an exotic or complicated one).
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