Sam's Scrubs Retrospective

Scrubs ended a couple of weeks ago and I wish it had come a few years sooner. Scrubs has to be on my list of all-time favorite sitcoms but for the last three years or so it has fallen lower and lower on that list. I shouldn’t have been so happy to see a show end but it just lost its funny and it was time to go. To my surprise ABC has reportedly RENEWED Scrubs. WHY?? It seems having your main character(Zach Braff’s JD) leave the show is just another reason to continue to drag this rotting corpse of horse. More surprising is that Braff is signed on for six episodes. WHY??

This post was supposed to be about the final episode of this season which felt like a series finale and at the worst just a Zach Braff finale. The last episode was really great which was classic Scrubs, funny throughout and packing a strong emotional punch. We find out Janitor’s real name, JD walks down the hallway at Sacred Heart to see all the people he’s known there (dead and alive) and then there is a beautiful final dream sequence. It is projected on the back of the sheet hanging outside the hospital which reads “Goodbye JD”. With Peter Gabriel’s cover of “Book of Love” playing over JD’s possible future which includes having a kid with Elliot and his son marrying Turk’s daughter. It was really sweet and Scrubs-y. And the show ends. Perfect. Show Over. But no.

ABC has refused to let this show die in peace. It was a lot of fun with a great cast and they are just going to ruin it with every subsequent episode of “Scrubs: The New Class!” or whatever the fuck the show will be in the future. Maybe Dr. Cox will have a new doctor to mentor named K.E. who’s looking for a father figure. I’ve got to hand it to the Brits here; they know when to stop a good thing. In the US we do not know when to end a series (usually when it stops being profitable or one of the cast members demands to be paid 20 million an episode).

The next season(s) of Scrubs will just water down the brilliance of the first few seasons and make people forget why they even watched this show in the first place. To remind myself of why I watch the show, I check out the reruns on Comedy Central sometimes. I always like to go and watch the first episode of the show and compare it to the season’s that’s on. It is like another universe. The tone and quality are completely different. Watching Scrubs became simply a habit rather than something I looked forward to. I just wanted to see how it would end. But the big storyline of the show (JD and Elliot) was resolved last year to little surprise or fanfare BECAUSE IT CAME YEARS TOO LATE! As the show smartly pointed out in a nice bit of self-awareness, no one cares about JD and Elliot. We may have cared if that’s how they ended the show.

I may sound like someone who just hates this show but I watched every week and always looked forward to it. Well, until Kim told JD she was pregnant. It was the only time in my life I wished someone would have a miscarriage. She had the baby, but you wouldn’t know cause JD’s CHILD never shows up on the show unless there is a storyline that can somehow loosely relate to having a kid.

I don’t think there’s a show that has made me laugh for so many years and then made me angry for years like Scrubs. Why is it so hard to stop? Doesn’t everyone have a boatload of money already? Didn’t you all make a boatload of money when the show became syndicated? I have no idea how this show keeps going. It’s not like the show gets great ratings either, it never has. Scrubs was always something that managed to get low ratings but everyone I knew in high school watched and enjoyed.

So as Scrubs somehow begins to plan out its 9th and probably not last season (but I’m sure its most embarrassing), I’ll say this, Scrubs was a great show that was the best at being absolutely absurdist and at times incredibly based in reality dealing with issues like death. I wouldn’t say the show was groundbreaking, but it was really funny. I can only hope that the shows weaker recent seasons won’t make people forget how good it once was. Enjoy season 9 because I won’t.