| When Hugh Laurie first met with the producers of House four seasons ago, he wore a pin his daughter had given him that read, “Sexy.” Obviously, it was worn with irony. If you spend 10 seconds with Laurie, you realize the last thing he considers himself is a sex symbol. As Laurie puts it, “If my daughter had given me a pin that said, ‘Idiot,’ I would have worn that one.” But David Shore, who created House, now realizes the true irony of that moment. “Hugh told us that day, ‘You can’t wear a sexy pin if you actually are sexy,”’ Shore says. “But guess what? After years of playing House, Hugh can no longer wear that pin.”
Maybe it’s his noble limp or the gentle rattle of his Vicodin bottle, but there’s something about Dr. House, crankiness and all, that brings out the hots in people. Just listen to the women on the show: “House speaks his mind in a way that’s really attractive, even if you don’t agree with half of what he’s saying,” says Lisa Edelstein, who plays Dr. Lisa Cuddy. “He’s damaged and hurting, and that just makes you want to take care of him,” gushes Jennifer Morrison, who plays Dr. Allison Cameron. And here’s Olivia Wilde, who plays House’s new resident, Thirteen: “House just looks at you with those beautiful blue eyes and” — here Wilde sighs — “you get kind of quivery.”
Not that the sirens of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital are falling at House’s feet. Season 4 has been all about strong women who don’t take his crap. His superior, Cuddy, remains in constant competition with him. Cameron, having resigned last season from House’s team, now has the distance to see through his games. And Thirteen, with her hazy background and ability to stand up to her new boss, is driving him bonkers. (”Daughter of an alcoholic?” House hypothesizes about her. Bzzz. “Wrong again.”)
“On the surface, you look at House’s female relationships and you wonder why these women put up with him,” Shore says. “But then you realize the women are winning. By constantly sparring with House, they learn they’re stronger and tougher than they realize.”
On February 3, House encounters a woman who doesn’t need much help in the toughness department. In a special episode airing after the Super Bowl, House meets a sexy research scientist (played by Oscar winner Mira Sorvino) who sucks the doctor into a very long-distance relationship. Trapped at the South Pole with cancer symptoms, she calls on House to save her life.
He must walk her through a series of improvised and painful diagnostic tests, which she performs under his watchful eye. Although it’s all done via webcam, the chemistry that develops between them is hot enough to melt a hole in the ice cap. “Hugh and I joked that the web cam scenes are the medical equivalent of a striptease,” Sorvino says. “Because House is really into her, there’s a high degree of sexual tension — or as much as there can be when two people are looking for cancer.”
But as usual with House, it’s a relationship fraught with miserable complications, starting with the fact that they’ll probably never see each other again. Then, in another new episode on Feb. 5, House tangles with two more women: a former music producer who has converted to Hasidic Judaism and collapses at her wedding, and a new girlfriend of Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), a woman whose personality is weirdly similar to House’s.
Laurie says, “House’s relationships with women require a complex Venn diagram, and there aren’t enough -colored pens in the world to make sense of it.” Consider his connection with Cuddy, his most deep-rooted and perhaps closest female relationship. Even after Cuddy’s dating escapades with Wilson last season and her attempts to get pregnant via in vitro fertilization, it’s her quietly smoldering affection for House that really defines her on the show.
“We know House and Cuddy had an affair ages ago and that it didn’t work, and that it could never work between them,” Edelstein says. “Yet that struggle and chemistry is a huge part of what keeps the show interesting.” Laurie adds, “I think they both look back on the amour that happened as a mistake but one nonetheless they cherish.”
Edelstein likes to image what would happen if House and Cuddy got toguether again. “They’re not romantic, so it wouldn’t be romantic,” she says. “But they’re both very intense. I think it would be like everything else in their relationship: supercharged, maybe a little andy and definitely explosive.”
There’s chemistry with Cameron, too, of course, which is what made last season’s kiss between them so hot. Who cares that she was merely trying to sneak a blood sample from him to run some tests - House kissed back. Furthermore Morrison says, “Cameron Could have gone to another hospital after she redigned, but let’s face it, she’s addicted to House.”
What’s new this season is Cameron’s sense of power. Since she heads up a deparment of her own, House can no longer fire her, “She’s not answering to him which means she’s freer to be herself,” Morrison says. That certainly keeps House on his toes. As Laurie says, “Cameron makes House uneasy. He’s very conscious of the gap in age between them, and my guess is he feels a bit like Phantom of the Opera around her. He likes being near her but he wants to hide himself away.”
Of all the women in House’s life, though, it’s Thirteen who’s getting the old goat’s goat the most lately. When House recently discovered that her mother died from Huntington’s disease, for instance, he insisted on testing Thriteen for the illness. But she insisted even harder that he nor reveal the results to her. Laurie’s take: “He loses his never around Thirteen. A man who know everything doesn’t know what to do with a woman who’s unknowable.”
House may lose it complretely when Thirteen’s love life stars to sizzle later this season. Wilde won’t reveal what happens but says, “There’s romance ahead, and it’s shocking. Whoever you’d imagine her with isn’t who she ends up with, and it causes all sorts of complications.”
What about House’s romantic life? Will he ever find the love that eludes him? Fat chance. “I don’t think the show cold be called House anymore and have a happy-go-lucky House in love with someone,” Morrison says.
Laurie’s not optimistic either. It’s not that he thinks House doesn’t fantasize about hooking up. “I assume House is, shall we say, get-ting it, somewhere, though I won’t say how out of a delicacy for your readers,” he says. “It’s not happy sex, I can assure you that. Happy sex will always remain out of his grasp.”
Because in the end , House’s loneliness is part of what drives him. As Laurie says, “I don’t think you’ll ever see him walking hand in hand off into the sunset with some young tart. That just wouldn’t be House of him to do that.”
Cameron: “At Some level, House is always going to hold people at a distance,” Morrison says. “Even though he says one thing, you see a twinkle in his eye… We’re duking it out in a fun way
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Title: House M.D. 
Title: Big Stan 
Title: Table for Three 
