Having intimately explored Dr. Gregory House’s personal pathology and plundered many of the more rare illness barley known to medical science for several years already,
House creator and exec producer David Shore said he entered the show’s fifth season a year ago “expecting this to be the season in which we start suffering creatively.” As it turned out, addition by subtraction worked in favor of the producers. The sudden departure of series regular Kal Penn to work in the Obama Administration gave them a hook – Dr. Lawrence Kutner’s suicide in a spring episode became the one mystery House cannot solve, driving him into the loony bin by season’s end and breathing an entirely fresh story arc into the show. “When we found out Kal was leaving, we had a writers retreat in September, then mapped out the entire rest of the season,” Shore says.