HEALARIOUS

Ten years ago today, the TV series Scrubs debuted on NBC. I’m not suggesting that there should be some National Day of Remembrance for this august anniversary, but I do want to take a moment to appreciate Scrubs. Its ubiquity in reruns may make it easy to take for granted, but it’s a great sitcom.

Indeed, I think there’s a solid case that Scrubs, which ran for nine seasons over two networks & so heavily in syndication that it seems almost unavoidable when channel-surfing, can take its place with the best sitcoms of all time. For all its obvious success, I’m not sure the show has ever quite gotten its due. It very deservedly won a Peabody Award, but it had only a handful of Emmy nominations, & only a couple of technical-category wins—the excellence of the show’s writing &, especially, its acting were largely ignored.

For the uninitiated: Scrubs, created by Bill Lawrence, followed the career & personal life of Dr. John “J.D.” Dorian (Zach Braff), a young intern at Sacred Heart Hospital, in an unnamed city. A gushy, overenthusiastic innocent, J.D. shares his struggles with his inseparable best friend & roommate Christopher Turk (Donald Faison), a surgical intern, with Elliot Reid (Sarah Chalke), a sweet but brittle fellow intern who becomes J.D.’s on-again/off-again romantic interest, & with veteran nurse Carla Espinosa (Judy Reyes), who in the course of the series marries Turk.

J.D., who narrates the episodes, is obsessively driven to achieve a father-son bond with his boss & role model, Dr. Perry Cox (the magnificent John C. McGinley). This sneering misanthrope has a penchant for spewing complex arias of sarcastic abuse on everyone, but especially on his adoring, & undaunted, young disciple, to whom he refers either by various female names, or simply as “Newbie.”

Among the show’s many secondary characters are the curmudgeonly Chief of Medicine Dr. Kelso (Ken Jenkins), the depressive hospital counsel Ted Buckland (Sam Lloyd), Cox’s mocking ex-wife Jordan (Christa Miller), & the hospital’s janitor, known simply as Janitor (Neil Flynn). He's given to bizarre non-sequitur verbal flights, & also makes it his mission to torment J.D.

It occurs to me that to someone who has never watched the show, the description above would likely make Scrubs sound like ordinary sitcom fare, a bit more ambitious than usual in terms of number of characters but otherwise almost boilerplate. The show’s originality isn’t in its format. The laughs arise from the depiction of J.D.’s fantasy life—again & again, he casts his eyes upward at an angle & we see one of his preposterous, often surreal daydreams, inventively staged. This was perhaps the first live-action series to attempt the speedy inserted-gag vignettes developed by animated shows like The Simpsons & The Family Guy.

But the program’s real distinction is its honesty about the inner life of the American male, particularly the movie-&-TV-fed all-American white boy embodied by J.D., & played so fearlessly by Braff. Speaking as a specimen of the same, I wish I could report that the narcissism & infantilism of J.D.’s megalomaniacal-yet-mawkish hero fantasies is exaggerated, but I can’t.

I’ve often wondered if this embarrassing candor isn’t the secret both of the show’s staying power with audiences & of its lack of critical acclaim. What Scrubs says to the audience is: you’re not cool. You may be a nice person, you may be a competent person, you may even cure the sick & comfort the afflicted. But for all that you walk around every day fantasizing about being cool, you aren’t. You’ll never be like your hero Dr. Cox—indeed, over the course of the seasons we gradually come to see that Cox himself is a self-loathing emotional wreck & a poseur.

Like many shows that feature single protagonists, Scrubs bogged down a little when it focused on J.D.’s love life—his interminable dithering over whether he really loved Elliot or whichever gorgeous guest star it was became tiresome at times. Other than that occasional minor annoyance, Scrubs was a near-perfect half-hour, year in and year out, delivering silly laughs & rich characterization, expertly balanced. Even its “Jump the Shark” ninth season, which moved the action to a medical school & introduced a new set of characters, was pretty good—it featured, among other merits, riotous & utterly overlooked work by Dave Franco (too-little-known brother of James).

Finally, while Scrubs was never pretentious, it also was quite capable—unlike, say, the equally brilliant & funny but somehow emotionally aloof 30 Rock—of startling moments of seriousness. Maybe because of the mortality inherent in the medical setting, it had a dramatic gravity underpinning the broad shtick.