Well, you may not have liked it, but at least the David Morse arc was an arc... the IMDB tells me he appeared in six episodes, and they were good episodes, even if they didn't really go anywhere. (I'm surprised you didn't mention how Cuddy hired House's ex- as the hospital lawyer in the first season as an early example of this trend).

Not being a CSI watcher, other than YouTube clips of David Caruso removing his sunglasses, I can't speak to the quality of that show. But don't you think that, while formulaic, the show isn't as good as it used to? At some point it stopped being about the formula. The weekly case on House seems more like an afterthought to me now. I don't care if the patient lives or dies, or what little real-life occurrence is going to trigger House to find the answer.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it didn't used to be like this. The cases used to be the main focus, with the characters being slowly developed, with the audience getting glimpses of their personal lives through the case work. Now, it's flipped. We are focusing on characters, and the cases take a back seat. This isn't helped by the fact that there are simply too many characters vying for screen time.

Now we have Kutner's suicide to deal with.... I had serious, serious issues with this episode. Issue the first: I had seen it before, better, 15 years ago. Issue the second, I didn't really care.

Homicide: Life on the Street, was a show that premiered in 1993, created by Paul Attanasio, who, not coincidentally, is the executive producer of House. NBC informed the folks running Homicide that Jon Polito needed to be written out of the show in order for it to continue. This was after the show's second season. So, season 3 opens, and Polito's character, Crosetti, is nowhere to be seen. For the first three episodes he is on vacation. The fourth episode begins with his body being pulled from the Baltimore Harbor.

It's clear that it's a suicide. The lead detective (Bolander) is convinced, even before they realize that the unrecognizably bloated body is that of a police officer, and friend. Crosetti's partner (Lewis) will not accept this. He starts to investigate the case as a murder. There was no suicide note, no indication that Crosetti was going to end his life. It comes as a shock to his coworkers, and the show rather brilliantly handles their reactions to the death. There's even a scene where Bolander attempts to question Crosetti's daughter as to his mental state, with Lewis running interference, not to protect her from the pain of questioning, but rather to protect his insistence that it was a murder.

The climactic scene of the episode involves a confrontation between Lewis and Bolander in the squad room; Bolander: "Is that what you want? You want Crosetti's name up their [as an unsolved murder] for the rest of time? A murder with no killer? He decided to end his life, he made that his last statement in life; who are we to question that?" The phone rings, the toxicology report comes in, Crosetti was a 'walking drug store' when he died. Lewis breaks down crying in Bolander's arms. Scene.

That, my friends, is good television. The Kutner suicide, with House clumsily telling the parents that Kutner killed himself because he changed his name, and then investigating it as a murder, and then finally coming to the realization that yes, Kutner offed himself. And, all going on at the same time is Dying-and-then-not-Dying Meat Loaf and his actually-dying wife as the case of the week.

Aside from Taub, whom we actually saw interacting with Kutner over the last two seasons in a meaningful manner, the reactions of the other characters seemed forced and artificial. Perhaps this is because any reaction I would have had was distanced and disinterested. Because, seriously, why should I care that Kutner is dead?  Wilson, House, Cuddy, Taub, Foreman. One of those five would have moved me.... and, with the exception of Taub, that is based more on track record than any recent episodes.

So, that circles us back to the question of the hour: Has House Jumped the Shark? Is it over? Well, we've had a cast reboot, we've got the Thirteen and Three-Fifths Romance, we've had a Gimmick Episode (Mos Def's POV-cam experience) FOLLOWED DIRECTLY by "A Very Special Episode of House," complete with suicide hotline information and an online memorial.

Can it be fixed? Riddle me this, Mr. Craft, what if House went on a losing streak? Say, four or five dead patients in a row. Let's show him to be fallible, let's see how he deals with that. Focus on the cases, stop wasting screen time on Chase and Cameron, let 13 be a doctor on the team and stop focusing on her case of jungle fever. Granted, this isn't going to happen this season, it's almost over and we already know that next week is a big House/Cameron episode..... but wouldn't that be an interesting way to start season 6 off? Can they just hire David Simon to write the show already?

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From: Jesse
To: Jim
Subject: Why don't we start watching Chuck instead?

Jim, hiring David Simon is your answer for everything. But I think you've also go the right answer here: "The cases used to be the main focus, with the characters being slowly developed, getting glimpses of their personal lives through the case work. Now, it's flipped. We are focusing on characters, and the cases take a back seat." House should try to be less like ER and more like Law and Order. Remember when Law and Order was great? Jerry Orbach was cracking wise, and Sam Waterston hadn't started dying his eyebrows yet? House should be more like that. We didn't know jack about Jerry Orbach's personal life, and we didn't want to know. Remember when the blonde ADA played by Elisabeth Rohm got fired, and she asked if it was because she was a lesbian, and we all went WHAAAA?? Elisabeth Rohm might even be a worse actress than Olivia Wilde, but we were never asked to care about Elisabeth Rohm and her lesbian personal life.

Unfortunately, I don't see the show going this way. Instead I see wedding bells for House and Cuddy. Because once you go to the killing off a character well twice in less than a season, you know that well is running pretty dry. And maybe that's for the best, because we should be watching Chuck in that timeslot, anyway. You know Scott Bakula is on it, right?