We’re much farther along with this blog than I expected to be, and then again I’ve not done quite as much as I’d hoped as we come to the end of the month. I’m taking a break from Earthsea tonight to revisit an old television friend.
The new season of Scrubs started tonight, and I think overall I was pleasantly surprised. As a teenager, I was a sitcom fanatic. I watched countless hours of M*A*S*H, Golden Girls, Cheers, Frasier, I Love Lucy, All in the Family, and from across the Atlantic Are You Being Served?, Keeping Up Appearances, As Time Goes By, The Vicar of Dibley, Waiting for God, and To the Manor Born.
And of course there was Scrubs. I never had much interest in Friends, that was the thing my parents watched when I’d rather watch cartoons, and by the time my friends were talking about How I Met Your Mother, my interest in sitcoms was mostly focused on what had been done before, not what was current. Scrubs was my sweet spot and the thing that almost tricked me into medicine despite being a squeamish kid with a tendency to zone out in biology classes.
I’ve seen bits and pieces of a lot of the revivals, but on the whole I think they’ve been bad ideas reliant, nostalgia vampires trying to suck a few more pints of attention out of audiences that have left TV behind. The Roseanne return can’t have been all that bad for it to have run as long as it did, but it was never for me. I think Frasier was ill-advised, and I refused to watch Fuller House (I never liked Full House.)
Scrubs was the one show I felt compelled to watch upon its return, the one I had some hope could find its footing 16 years after its last outing. This is not a review, just a reflection, so I’m not filing it under Analysis & Review or trying to pick it apart just yet, but after the first two episodes, my hope feels validated.
The first few minutes of the pilot gave me pause, but beyond that, it felt like the actors had slipped back into their characters pretty easily and the writing had aged them in a way that felt neither pathetic nor over auspicious. I believed it all, I suppose, and I think it can achieve the tone of the original series.
I had a conversation with a friend recently. I think you could have kept M*A*S*H running forever if you could keep the alchemy of the cast working. I think the same thing is true of Scrubs, doubly so because it’s not constrained by the backdrop of a war that ended after three years or by a lead character who would never believably assume command.
We’ll always need doctors, and they’ll always be intersecting our lives in uncountable scenarios. So long as you keep the doctors and their relationships fresh and developing, Sacred Heart could keep its doors open indefinitely.
That’s it for tonight. We’ll get back to Earthsea tomorrow. Until next time.
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