Image Credit: Gene Page/USA Network

It’s still blue skies in the Hamptons when Royal Pains returns tonight for its fifth season (9 p.m. ET on USA), but things will be getting a little stormy for Hank, Mark Feuerstein says. “A director I worked with, in of all places sitcoms, James Burrows, would say that in order to find the dimension and depth of a character, we need to find the dirt under his fingernails — which we were always looking for on Good Morning, Miami and Conrad Bloom and never necessarily found. But the writers of Royal Pains,” he says, “are so excellent at creating dimensional characters who you love, that this year they’ve earned the right to go to a darker place. So while Hank’s greatest flaw in the first four seasons has been like in a job interview, when you’d say ‘I just care too much about my job, I have to save everybody, and at times it’s at the expense of my private life,’ this year, Hank will realize that in trying to be perfect and invulnerable, he actually will get very vulnerable.”

More specifically, there are hints that Hank will develop a chemical dependency in his recovery from a craniotomy performed six months ago, after the explosion at Shadow Pond that he believes killed Boris (Campbell Scott). It won’t be in the foreground of every episode, Feuerstein says, “But what the writers do so well is introduce an issue and plumb the depths of that story line throughout the season, so it will come back to bite me.” READ FULL STORY »