One of the most popular and highly regarded television dramas of the last decade, the medical series “House,” will come to an end this season, the show’s producers and the Fox network announced last week.

The decision was cast as the choice of the producers. In a statement, they said: “The producers have always imagined House as an enigmatic creature; he should never be the last one to leave the party. How much better to disappear before the music stops, while there is still some promise and mystique in the air.”

But over the last several months, there had been intense negotiations over a potential new deal that would extend the series for a ninth season. It had been reported that Fox was trying to bring the show back at a sharply reduced cost.

Any potential new deal was complicated by the fact that “House” was not owned by Fox, but by NBC Universal. That meant that the show’s ancillary profits — which have been considerable because “House” is among the most popular television shows in the world — went completely to the studio, not to its network.

Though the show has remained a solid performer for Fox, with its ratings still at the upper end of dramas during the 8 p.m. hour, Fox’s incentive to continue the show was not nearly as strong as it would have been had the show been produced by its own sister studio, Twentieth Century Fox Television.

A new deal to continue the series would have required new contracts for the top producers and most of the cast, including the show’s star, Hugh Laurie.

Laurie had created, in the ever cynical and drug-addicted Dr. Gregory House, one of television’s most indelible characters, and the show became a personal showcase for him. In recent seasons he had also taken on the title of executive producer.

In an interview late in Season 6, Laurie said he never tired of the character and in fact still loved the creation. One reason was it had been modeled on a character the actor had grown up loving: Sherlock Holmes.

Dr. House (the title was an obvious play on “Holmes”) was a similar type, a brilliant detective solving dense, convoluted medical mysteries who was a loner in real life, addicted to a drug, and apparently graced with only one friend, named Wilson here instead of Watson.

The show took a somewhat bizarre turn at the conclusion of last season when a bitter House, thrown over by the woman he loved, the hospital’s top administrator, played by Lisa Edelstein, drove a car into her living room.

Edelstein’s contract was up last season and in a move that presaged the tightening of the show’s budget, she was asked to take a pay cut. She refused and left the show. The writers sent House off to prison.

The decision to end the series now does afford the show’s creators, led by David Shore, who conceived the series in 2004, the opportunity to fashion a series finale for their unapologetically unsentimental doctor. The producers may have offered one indicator of a direction they will take in closing the series in how they closed their official statement Wednesday.

It was the signature line from the character: “Everybody lies.”