On House, Hoselton said, two of the writing executive producers fall under head writer David Shore, and the rest of the writers report to those two. That show doesn't operate with a full writers' room the way Greenstein's comedies do (fellow House writer Pamela Davis described the process in more detail), but Hoselton described the collegial work environment in our Banff interview. "There's 14 other writers who will help you with anything. They know exactly what you're doing, what the show is, who the characters are. So you can walk into anybody's office and pitch a scene that you're working on and they know what you're going for and they know how House should react."
Occasionally, all the House writers gather to discuss potential story arcs. For example, at the beginning of season four, someone threw out the idea of a "Survivor arc," spawning House's game of replacing Foreman, Chase, and Cameron, who had all quit or been fired at the end of season three.
"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.)
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