You wouldn’t have expected a show about an egotistical doctor who’s not only a curmudgeon but also a full-fledged drug addict to have a whole lot of staying power. In fact, way back when I received an advance copy of the pilot for “House,” these were the opening lines of my review: “Infectious diseases specialist Dr. Gregory House isn’t particularly likable; in fact, at times, he presents himself to others in such a fashion that it’s almost impossible to stand him.” The entire thrust of my piece was that the show was great and deserved to be a success, but I was highly skeptical that viewers would be willing to embrace such a unabashed anti-hero.*

Whoops. My bad.

(Actually, I hadn’t looked at that review since I wrote it, but now that I’ve scanned it again, I’d like to share another line, one which I’m quite proud of: “[House is] consistently grumpy as hell, walks with the aid of a cane as a result of a past malady, and pops Vicodin like they’re the jellybeans that he surreptitiously prescribes to a hypochondriac in the pilot episode.” Damn, you’d think I actually wrote for a living or something!)

By the end of Season 3, Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) had managed to alienate his team - Drs. Foreman (Omar Epps), Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), and Chase (Jesse Spencer) - to the point that all three of them had made the decision to get the hell out; he also hadn’t exactly endeared himself to Drs. Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) or Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), either, but at least they had the advantage of not having to work directly under him. As Season 4 picks up, House is still flying solo, which is bad on a couple of different levels; for one, he can’t accomplish nearly as much without a team, and, worse, if he continues to be able to work just as well without a team, his ego will inflate to a heretofore-unimagined size. (Unsurprisingly, it’s Wilson who’s most concerned about the latter, since he pretty much lives to keep House’s ego in check.)

After realizing that isn’t nearly as easy to maintain his reputation as a genius without having other doctors to bounce theories off of (and finding that the janitor’s ideas just don’t match up to those of Foreman, Cameron, and Chase), House eventually concedes that it might be worth his while to dig up a new team…but, unsurprisingly, he does it on his own terms, weeding out the possible candidates by using a method that’s equally reminiscent of “Survivor” and “The Paper Chase.” Here’s a hint about the proceedings: he refuses to learn any of the candidates’ names…but he finds a way around needing to. By the way, one of the would-be team members is Dr. Lawrence Kutner, played by Kal Penn; we’re not telling whether he makes the cut or not, but we will say that, even in the one episode in which we’ve seen him, he’s already been better utilized than he was in his entire stint on “24.”

Will we see House’s old team again? Obviously. Will we see them sooner than later? Probably, since they’re still in the opening credits. The bigger question is, when we see them, will we really be seeing them? (Wow, how enigmatic of me.) Funny thing is, I’m not even in all that big a hurry to see them pop up; watching House interacting with fresh meat…uh, I mean, with new doctors…is a lot of fun. Also, I’m a little nervous about watching Chase and Cameron together again; Spencer and Morrison had been a couple in real life as well, but they recently broke up, and to see them still playing a couple on the show…I mean, how can you not think, “Wow, that’s gotta be weird for them”? I am, however, interested to see how the producers are planning to bring Foreman back into the mix, given that his departure seemed so definitive. I’d like to think it’d be too predictable for him to just realize that he misses the medical challenges he had while working with House, so I’m hoping they at least have some kind of twist to it. (I’m thinking maybe it’ll have something to do with Foreman’s mom, who’s battling mental deterioration…but that’s just a guess.)

Whatever else happens this season, at the very least, things are definitely starting strong for “House.”

Here’s a teaser: