All entries for Monday 07 December 2009

Scrubs Med Review

The show was meant to be called Scrubs Med. It was meant to be a spin-off show. But instead the network insisted it be called Scrubs Season 9. This is your fault. If you don’t believe me, put your hand up if you would have watched an eleventh series of Friends. Now keep them up if you persisted with Joey for more than ten minutes. Exactly. The metaphor falls down, however, as Joey was gut-wrenchingly awful while Scrubs Med is actually alright. (Don’t even get me started on Stargate Command).

The one concession to sanity is a little logo under the Scrubs one in the title sequence that says “Med School” on it, other than that the show does everything it can to suggest that it’s business as normal. It opens with JD, Elliot and a joke about boobs, Braff is still doing the narration and all the regular cast crop up with the exception of Carla, even if only briefly to explain why they’re not going to be in the rest of the series.

Still, something is odd. The sets are new while the characters stay the same. Except with three new ones. One interesting thing to note is that two of our three new characters are stunningly hot. Lucy and Drew, Kerry Bishe and Michael Moseley, are your typical beautiful Hollywood actors. It’s only on seeing them you realise how the original cast were shockingly normal-looking for a prime-time network sitcom. Zach Braff is possibly one of the oddest looking TV stars out there, it’s practically a running joke on the show that Donald Faison gets about halfway to Denzel Washington then bottles it, and Sarah Chalke is lovely but brings that sort of geekish girl-next-door appeal meaning she never appears quite so intimidatingly hot as our two new stars. The fact that they both appear topless in the first two episodes (alas, only from the rear in Bishe’s case, this isn’t HBO) is hardly co-incidental.

But still, that doesn’t matter as long as it’s funny. And it mostly is. We get shared narration between JD and Lucy, and it works well, though Lucy’s fantasy sequence was a bit of a disaster, here’s hoping she develops the range to play the more over-the-top crazy daydream sequences Scrubs lives on.

The tricky thing is that Braff’s character is very much at the forefront of these two first episodes, his antics with Turk being a major part of the show, as per usual. But unless they really start bringing the new characters to the fore in future episodes, it’s going to feel really awkward when JD vanishes after six episodes. Have to admit, would rather they’d been a little braver and let Lucy take the narration from the start, using JD as a background character. It would have certainly helped the show find it’s own tone a lot more easily. Despite what they might want you to think with the name, it’s never going to be the same as the old show and I can’t help but think it would have been more beneficial to let it strike out in its own direction right away, rather than attempt this strange transition from one show to another. It’s kind of like deciding to have a break-up by only seeing each other once a week for a bit – you don’t really have what you used to have but you can’t get on with the rest of your life either.

So with that said, I can’t wait to see what happens after these first six transitionary episodes. Here’s the other reason it’s not like Joey: hand’s up if your favourite Friends character was Joey. Now hands up if your favourite Scrubs character was Dr. Cox. If you’re going to spin off a show, may as well keep the characters with the best lines.

Dean Love : 07 Dec 2009 23:14 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem