Comedy 'Scrubs' washes up on new network
Like a terminal patient that just won't die - something a newcomer to the series evidently knows something about - "Scrubs" washes up on ABC at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 6, on WLS Channel 7.
Even lowly NBC had had its fill of "Scrubs." Keep in mind, the once-proud peacock network decided it would rather have "Kath & Kim" than a seventh season of the off-kilter hospital comedy, incomprehensible as that may be. Yet, since ABC Studios produces it, the affiliated network decided - why not? - "Scrubs" would have to be better than still more episodes of "According to Jim."
As the commissioner of the More Taste League might say, "Good call."
Yet that's just the thing. "Scrubs" has been gone so long, and those crummy beer commercials have been so incessant, John C. McGinley now seems more familiar as "the Commish" than he does as the surly Dr. Cox (no relation) at Sacred Heart Hospital.
Even more painful, however, is that Bill Lawrence's sitcom continues to strain for laughs with slapstick humor and running gags that often fall flat.
Tuesday's season premiere finds Zach Braff's Dr. "J.D." overseeing a new bunch of interns.
"They (stink)," he says matter-of-factly, using a term that's just as overused and dimwitted and out of place in a newspaper as those beer commercials.
"I'm done with you guys," he later announces, adding, "Someone needs to send those interns to an internment camp."
Clever play on words. Very.
Aside from introducing the new interns, the season premiere injects some much-needed new blood in the welcome form of Courteney Cox (again sadly, no relation). She plays the new chief of medicine, Dr. Maddox, but beyond the standard "Scrubs" slow-motion cleavage-shot introduction all they can think of for her to do is stomp spiders as an arachnophobe.
Oh, yes, and she soon reveals herself to be an insurance-conscious bean counter, showering unnecessary tests on the well-insured and, in the second of two back-to-back episodes Tuesday, using a pillow to suffocate the uninsured.
Hooha, now that's some bedside humor.
"Scrubs," like "Arrested Development," was championed on its debut as an unconventional sitcom, but also like "AD" it too often proved to be simply unfunny. The cast is top-notch, with Braff leading an ensemble including Sarah Chalke, Donald Faison and the aforementioned McGinley, but at this point I'd rather see them in an independent film written and directed by Braff than I would in another tiresome season of "Scrubs."
The good news (or what passes for good news, anyway) is that, after the barrel-of-laughs season premiere, involving running jokes about a touchy-feely internist and cyberdates holding red balloons in the hospital waiting room, "Scrubs" intends to get serious with a return to the "more emotional notes of the early seasons," in Lawrence's words, and it gets started with the nightcap episode, in which J.D. and Faison's Dr. Turk give up their "steak night" tradition to get touchy-feely themselves with some patients in need.
Great. At this point, the only thing that could make "Scrubs" worse would be a series of "very special" episodes.
Still, I'm not saying the prime-time schedule can't use some help, especially in the area of comedy, where CBS seems to be the only network out there right now capable of making a decent sitcom. It's just that "Scrubs" doesn't have much to offer anymore - if it ever did. Maybe I need my funny bone examined, but I think it's not enough for a sitcom to be unconventional; it helps if it's actually funny as well. So I'll just bide my time while "Scrubs" passes and wait for the next generation of TV comedy to arrive, overdue as it may be.