The trouble actually began with an ending. In the season 3 finale, House's original team of lackeys — Foreman (Omar Epps), Cameron (Morrison), and Chase (Spencer) — were all fired or quit, leaving the cranky boss to solve his own medical mysteries. ''Everybody leaving House seemed like a natural result,'' says Shore. ''He's not the type of guy you're going to work for in a contented relationship for five, six, seven years.'' The producers then hit upon the particularly House-ian way of finding a new team, in which House, to paraphrase Laurie, hires three doctors by firing 37 of them. While he toyed with a cattle call of candidates on a months-long audition spanning eight episodes, his original team was exiled to the farthest corners of the hospital. Foreman eventually found a role middle-managing the three new docs, but Cameron and Chase were relegated to a few lines per show — and were almost never together. ''We were just trying to excite ourselves,'' explains Jacobs of the experiment, but ''at the same time maybe we should have been smarter about the effects it would have.'' The effect was a message-board backlash, with many fans complaining that the telegenic duo had virtually disappeared.
Complicating the situation for Morrison and Spencer were rumors that their characters were sidelined to give the actors time to adjust after their real-life breakup in August 2007, a few weeks before House’s season 4 premiere. ''[Jesse and I] were still together when they made the decision'' to hire a new team, refutes Morrison. The rumors might never have gained traction but for the writers' strike: Given the forced three month break, several plotlines — including episodes that would have featured Cameron and Chase's budding onscreen romance — had to be dropped. ''There was a whole stretch of story lines that had to shift and then got lost,'' says Morrison. ''We went from thinking we were going to have eight more episodes to explore how Cameron's world was going, how Chase's world was going, how Foreman was feeling about [the new team].... All of a sudden, we needed a big finale.''
Despite the problems, it's hard to blame House's producers for trying to pump new blood into the series. The simple fact is that by season 5 — rounding the corner on 100 episodes — there isn't much most shows haven't already done. Put someone in danger of losing their freedom and/or career? House did it in season 3. Bring back a mysterious ex-lover? That's how season 1 ended. Shoot the lead character? Season 2. They've hit all the go-to tropes—even putting one character on a stripper pole. (Edelstein, who performed a striptease in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform in one of House's hallucinations from last season's finale, quips, ''My only disappointment is that they cut out some of my best moves.'') And while some on staff acknowledge that maintaining a high level of creativity can be a strain — ''One of the challenges we face is how to keep ourselves excited about venturing into another episode of House,'' says Jacobs — others have reached an almost Zen-like level of contentment. ''I don't necessarily get excited or not excited about plotlines,'' says Leonard, sitting in the show's cafeteria set. ''I know actors who live to work, and I've never been one of those... The less I'm in each show, the better for me, because actors get paid per show. So whether you're in two scenes or all of them, you get paid for that show. I'd be crazy to want to be in scenes.''
NEXT PAGE: ''I was obsessive about every aspect of [the show]. My performance in it, everyone else's performance, and the camera angles, how it was cut... I was a pain in the ass. I am a pain in the ass.''
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