David Shore

David Shore
Born	(1959-07-03) July 3, 1959 London, Ontario
Occupation	Writer, producer, Director
Notable works	House
Spouse	Judy (3 children)

David Shore (born July 3, 1959) is a Canadian writer, and former lawyer, best known for his work writing and producing in television. Shore became known for his work on Family Law, NYPD Blue and Due South, also producing many episodes of the latter. He went on to create the critically acclaimed series House and more recently, Battle Creek and Sneaky Pete.^[1]

Biography

Early life

Shore was born in London, Ontario, to Jewish parents. His younger twin brothers, Ephraim and Raphael, are Aish HaTorah rabbis. David is the only member of his family involved in television, although his younger brother Raphael Shore made three political documentaries about the Middle East conflict.

Education

Shore attended the University of Western Ontario for his undergraduate studies after graduating from A.B. Lucas Secondary School with distinction. He subsequently attended the University of Toronto for his law degree in 1982. Following his education he initially worked as a municipal and corporate lawyer in his native Canada before he moved to Los Angeles to break into television. He sees this as a lateral move, as he did not consider being an attorney an uncreative occupation.

Television (Shore Z Productions introduced July 31, 1995)

David Shore in 2009

He wrote for the television series Due South — about another Canadian transplanted in America, albeit a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Force — before he became a producer on the ABC drama NYPD Blue. His work on that series was nominated for two Emmy Awards.

He then moved on to the series Family Law, Hack and Century City, but these were not commercial successes. In 2003, producer Paul Attanasio — who had previously worked with NBC on such shows as Homicide: Life on the Street and Gideon's Crossing — approached Shore to request a procedural, as he knew the network was looking for another one to follow up on the success of Law & Order and to imitate CBS's success with CSI and NCIS. Attanasio's idea was to apply the police procedural genre to a show about medicine. While in most procedurals the characters are secondary to the mystery, Shore decided that a medical procedural should place the mystery secondary to the hero. He therefore conceived of a hero similar to the iconic detective Sherlock Holmes.^[2]

That hero was Dr. Gregory House, the main character of House, M.D played by the British actor, comedian and musician Hugh Laurie. Although NBC took a pass on the series, Fox picked it up, and by the end of the first season, it was their biggest new hit of 2004–05. Shore wrote or co-wrote five episodes of that first season, including its pilot and the Season One pre-finale, "Three Stories", in which he intricately wove the stories of three patients whilst also revealing the reason for Dr. House's limp and Vicodin (hydrocodone) addiction. The latter of these won the 2005 Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. Shore made his directorial debut on the series House by directing the Season Two finale "No Reason". Due to the success of House, Shore was granted a generous contract for a fourth, fifth and sixth season. The sixth season began with a two-hour season premiere titled "Broken," which he co-wrote. Shore and his co-writers won the Writers Guild of America Award for episodic drama at the February 2010 ceremony for the premiere.^[3][4] It was renewed for a seventh season, which began airing on September 20, 2010, and an eighth and final season. In 2009 he finished production of the short-lived police TV show Winters starring Famke Janssen.

In February, 2013, Entertainment Weekly reported that Shore would write for an upcoming ABC television show entitled Doubt, about "a 'charming low-rent' lawyer battling his demons"^[5] starring Steve Coogan.

In August 2015, Amazon Video released a pilot episode for Sneaky Pete, a show Shore and Bryan Cranston created. The first season of Sneaky Pete was exclusively released in its entirety on Amazon Video on January 13, 2017.

Personal life

He lived in Encino Hills, California, with his wife Judy and their three children until 2010, when the family moved to a larger home in nearby Pacific Palisades.

Credits

House

References

External links

• "House creator David Shore and Katie Jacobs interview", media pundit, Paul William Tenny
• "More with 'House' creator David Shore", The Star-Ledger, Alan Sepinwall, August 05, 2008
• "David Shore", The New York Times
• "The House That Dave Built ", profile of Shore in U of T Magazine
• David Shore on IMDb
• David Shore interview video at the Archive of American Television