From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell.

Bitter and ruminative usually don't make you a star. Look at me.

On the other hand, my guest, Hugh Lorry, has gotten not only an Emmy nomination, but has turned House

MD into a real hit, and I thank him for being here. Thank you, Hugh. It's a real pleasure.

Thank you. If you could describe, and I know you've done this a couple of times before,

the character and the show for the listeners. Well, bitter and ruminative. I think that's a good place to start and probably a good place to end as well because I'm very anxious about over describing

or over-analyzing the character

because I feel in some sense

if the show has any fascination

it's partly to do with that

the unknowability of this character

and if we ever get to the point where we can describe him

in a couple of easy sentences we're probably it's time to pack up and go home.

A bitter and ruminative is a good sort of chapter heading but I don't think the chapter's

written yet and I sort of certainly hope we don't get to the end of the book for a long time

yet because he's an enigmatic complicated figure and I think complexity is good complexity is good I love it

and I hope that it continues to interest a decent chunk of the audience because he is a complicated

guy but he's essentially a doctor-detector would you say it's the best way to describe him that's right

he is there is definitely a mystery element to these shows. He's a very highly qualified Uber doctor, head of diagnostic medicine at a fictional hospital in New Jersey. But there is an element of mystery. In a sense, the villain, the criminal is the virus or the bacterium that he's tracking down.

There is an element, a pretty strong element, of Sherlock Holmes in this character.

I think David Shaw would sort of would admit that he's modelled House to some degree on.

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