I realize they have technical consultants. But even if they’re in the room with the writers (as opposed to reviewing the script), I’m having trouble figuring how the whole thing would work.
Suppose it were a show about a curmudgeonly old philosopher who grades papers with his grad students. Dialog might go something like this:
Student 1
This guy says his existence is individuated by his bounds.
Student 2
Nonsense. Kant argued conclusively the existence isn’t a predicate.
Professor
Conclusively? What about Miller? Miller argued conclusively that Kant is wrong.
Student 3
How about we examine the ontological consequences of individuation by bounds.
Professor
Duh. What the hell did you think we were doing? Examining the aesthetics of it?
Student 4
Maybe we can never know.
Professor
[sarcastic] Well, maybe the student doesn’t exist. God you guys are pathetic.
In other words, how do they write medical jargon conversation without having studied medicine in a way that it is both entertaining and makes sense. Do they do something like toss out a couple lines of dialog and ask doctors to medicalize it? Or what exactly?
TV writers have all kinds of weird backgrounds. The Simpsons, for instance, has writers who came from former careers in mathematics, computer science, and physics. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if House had a writer or two who at least went through some med school, or if not that, someone on the writing staff who’s familiar with medical literature.
The writers have to know the subject, and it helps to have a background in it. But most of it is just research. It isn’t all that hard to fake expertise in a medical drama:* just find an account of an actual case and use that for a basis.
For last night’s episode, for instance, all you needed was to find an account or two about someone who had symptoms that resulted from the same cause.
After the script is written, then it goes to a technical adviser to read and comment to make sure you’ve got it right, and then rewrite the mistakes.
*I like to point to the example of Frank Norris’s McTeague, in which he describes several dental procedures correctly and accurately in full detail. Some have tried to indicate that this took years of study, but one researcher found the details were almost identical to those in a dental procedure manual in the Harvard Library – and that Norris had checked out the book.
Not a medical drama, but David Milch has described how he got the police procedure on NYPD Blue, which was basically by listening to Bill Clark and his buddies tell war stories, then make them into TV scripts. (Obviously I’m simpliyfing, but a good writer can go a long way with some anecotes.)