"We had talked about bringing in a new team, new cast members," Hoselton explained. "It gets harder and harder to write fresh material for cast members that have been around for a long time, so it was a way to inject new blood."

"Each writer is assigned a piece of that story," he continued. "Part of the problem is you may not find out until late in the process what piece you're doing, and that can affect the script immensely. With the new team, it was always 'which guys am I going to have in my episode?' You'd find out a couple of weeks before your script was due."

Whether an episode is part of an ongoing arc or not, the individual writer is responsible for pitching ideas and coming up with the medical mystery that forms the core of the story. They write three or four drafts, again with input and changes along the way, a week of prep, an eight day shoot "that always runs nine days" with the writer on set the entire time, before the episode enters post-production for a week. "The writers have nothing to do with post."

Finally, he said, "we go back and come up with another one-line idea: 'House on a train.'" (See Anatomy of a House Episode: "Airborne" for more on how an initial concept changes through that process.)

Jeff Greenstein prefers to arc out a season by himself or with a smaller group of writers. On Desperate Housewives, for example, four of the upper level writers, including Greenstein, started this season with a "two week boot camp" where they came up with the year's mystery and how to deal with the five-year flashforward, a creative choice they'd made to "reset the predicaments of the women in ways that were very relatable."

After network approval of their overall plans, the full writing staff convenes. At that point, Greenstein feels the showrunner's job changes from "being the person with all the answers to being a facilitator and question asker."

"As the showrunner, you have to be the person who draws on all these talented people you're paying tons of money for. I need to get very good at understanding the ball club I've put together, because I've chosen people for story sense and comedy and character development and point of view and I need to be constantly looking in the eyes of people around the table and checking in on them. I need to stay tuned in to the show's frequency so when the right answer comes in I can recognize it."

Whatever the exact process, each script goes through many hands, from writers to producers to executives, all aiming to make it stronger. (For mind-boggling levels of collaboration, check out how the Hannah Montana writers work.)

"I think people have the idea that the team writing process results in something that is bland and attenuated," the articulate and animated Greenstein said. "If it's working properly, it results in stuff that's better. I've never had a draft of mine go through the room and come out with something that I liked less. That's the secret of the process. If it's working right, you feel like the writers have helped you take the armature that you've built and make it into something that's more funny and more beautiful and more moving."