House M.D. premiered in 2004, beginning its eight-season run on Fox.
The first episode, titled “Pilot,” aired in the United States on November 16, 2004. The series was created by David Shore and centered on Dr. Gregory House, a brilliant but unconventional diagnostician at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey.
Although the show is a medical drama, its structure was strongly influenced by detective fiction. Each episode usually presented a difficult medical mystery, with House and his diagnostic team testing hypotheses and eliminating unlikely explanations. The character’s surname also echoes Sherlock Holmes, a major inspiration for the series.
House became one of Fox’s most successful scripted programs and was broadcast internationally. It concluded in 2012 after 177 episodes. The premiere year is sometimes confused with the year the series was announced or developed, but the broadcast debut occurred in 2004.