101 Best Written TV Series

Aired: FOX, 2004-2011

Creator David Shore's series came along a decade after ER and gave the medical drama a jolt, basing a show on a physician who didn't have a God complex so much as a complex that was vociferously godless. Gregory House, played by the British actor Hugh Laurie, was at once an omniscient and irascible figure, priding himself on the lack of comfort he gives. The idea for the procedural was brought to Shore by executive producer Paul Attanasio, who'd been reading a column in The New York Times Magazine called "Diagnosis" by Dr. Lisa Sanders, who became a consultant on House. Shore, at the end of his series' run, told Written By that he never thought of House as a medical drama. It was more an "exploration of philosophical issues. What is reality? What is true?" The rest, he said the office romances, the stubborn mystery of a diagnosis was "just the colorful ribbons we wrap around it."

David Shore on how to keep a show fresh and scripting the end of House 

Credited Writers

Sara B. Cooper
John Mankiewicz
Liz Friedman
Peter Blake
Leonard Dick
Russel Friend
Doris Egan
Matt Witten
Michael R. Perry
Sean Whitesell
Thomas L. Moran
Charles M. Duncan
Kerry Ehrin
Garrett Lerner
David Shore
David Hoselton
Lawrence Kaplow
Eli Attie
Pamela Davis
Joel Anderson Thompson
David F. Foster
John C. Kelley
Sara Hess
Kath Lingenfelter
Pamela Davis
Dustin Paddock
Matthew V. Lewis
Seth Hoffman
Carol Green
Marqui Jackson
Danny Weiss
Jamie Conway