WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Season 4 of HOUSE. Read at your own risk.

In what I can only assume must have been one of the most fun panels to attend on the TCA press tour, MeeVee Editor Joel Brown got to hang with the cast of HOUSE yesterday. It seems that Hugh Laurie and his Princeton-Plainsboro colleagues, Jesse Spender, Omar Epps, Lisa Edelstein, Jennifer Morrison and Robert Sean Leonard were ready to spill the scoop on S4.

The big question stemming from the season finale was whether or not Drs. Cameron, Foreman and Chase will be returning to work alongside House. The answer…YES…well, eventually.

“…the truth is, everybody is back eventually. And everybody is back having changed and having different capabilities. …

As the season opens, though, House’s three acolytes are working elsewhere…and House is sifting through 40 potential replacements.

As [Executive Producer Katie] Jacobs explained it, “In the first episodes, House is alone and he is solving cases by himself. And Cuddy is pissed and (Wilson) thinks he is losing his mind. And Cuddy will insist, and eventually win, that he hire a new team. And he will do it in a very House-ian way. So essentially the truth is over the first episodes he’s going to call in all the resumes on his desk, it’s a very large number, I think 40, a large number, and we’re going to see who survives. We’re going to play a ‘House’ version of ‘Survivor.’

“We were on the phone with Fox, and we said, ‘We’re going to kind of play ‘Survivor’ with ‘House,’ and they said, ‘Don’t you mean you’re going to play ‘American Idol’ with ‘House?’”