'Scrubs': My (Probably) Final Appreciation

In stitches: The move to ABC gives the Scrubs cast another shot at comedy on its own terms.ABC

 

by Marc Hirsh

Scrubs begins its eighth, and in all likelihood final, season tonight at 9:00 — on ABC. I mention this because you might otherwise miss it, since you might have assumed that last year's doofy medieval-fantasy episode was the series finale.

Or you might remember that the show's returning, but accidentally tune in to NBC, where it spent its first seven years, and be faced with the second half of The Biggest Loser instead.

Or you might not watch Scrubs, might have never watched Scrubs, might not be inclined to start now, and might be quite sure you couldn't care less.

Any of those would be more or less par for the course. Since its debut in 2001, Scrubs has been very possibly the most underrated show on television; certainly it's the most under-appreciated.

Most obviously, it was under-appreciated by NBC. The network could never settle on a time slot. It dismissively burned off episodes two at a time on occasion (a habit that ABC has, for now, dismayingly picked up). It even switched around the running order so that, if ABC hadn't picked it up, the entire series would have ended with an episode that creator Bill Lawrence never intended as a finale.

NBC's meddling may not have even stopped with the network switch: Rumors abound that Heroes' Masi Oka and Chuck's Sarah Lancaster have been prevented from reprising their roles as lab assistant Franklyn and Lisa The Gift Shop Girl for the show's actual finale.

Why Scrubs never got enough love, after the jump...

Thanks perhaps to such an indifferent network parent, Scrubs never generated the same level of buzz enjoyed by a lot of its peers. Arrested Development was denser, The Office more zeitgeisty, 30 Rock flashier. But Scrubs, at its best, had those shows' respective surreality, emotional vulnerability and mix of pop-culture savvy and tangential humor, while adding a bracing honesty all its own.

I once asked a psychiatric-resident friend-of-a-friend whether Heather Graham's Dr. Molly Clock was an accurate portrayal of her vocation. Her answer: "Not especially, but that show is the most realistic representation of hospital life on television. I've actually seen doctors hiding in janitors' closets so that they wouldn't have to respond to a code."

When I mentioned this to a friend who's a nurse, she simply nodded in agreement.

Maybe that's why Scrubs so often subverted its audience's expectations about sitcom formula, explicitly in episodes like the laugh-tracked "My Life In Four Cameras" and implicitly in the way that patients would die, perfectly packaged storylines would unravel (see the first season's "My Old Lady" for a prime example) and relationships would be rocked by issues far more interesting than boyfriends being caught in compromising but ultimately explainable positions (of which there were many).

Add to that the show's excellent use of guest stars (strong enough to turn Chris Meloni into a puppet-wielding pediatrician and Tara Reid into someone you actually looked forward to watching) and the best and most populous cast of supporting characters of any show that doesn't have the word "Simpsons" in its title, and Scrubs starts looking like a lost classic.

If I'm talking about the show in the past tense, that's partly because I'm preparing to say goodbye after this season. ABC is supposedly keeping the door open to additional seasons without star Zach Braff, who is almost certainly leaving when his contract expires, but that would require a complete recontextualization of what the show's about, so I'm not holding my breath.

And it's partly because of the mild downturn in quality after the first four top-notch seasons.

But considering that Lawrence once thumbed his nose at the killing of his meta-sitcom pilot Nobody's Watching by posting the thing to YouTube — and then noting how many people seemed to do just fine with the show's complicated concept — it's entirely possible that Scrubs' creative team will be juiced by the chance to show NBC what they slept on all those years.

I'll be watching for that — and for the opportunity to see a show that deserved far more accolades than it ever received go out entirely on its own terms.

12:15 PM ET | 01- 6-2009 | permalink

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