Welcome to the weekly TV thread.
The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Jan Stevens’s Scrubs end title theme, which Stevens modeled after Lazlo Bane’s “Superman,” the 2000 song that became the show’s opening theme after Zach Braff recommended it to Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence.
I watched on Hulu the first three episodes of showrunner Aseem Batra’s Scrubs revival—it’s a sequel series and not a reboot (a few sources list the new season as Season 10, while others list it as Season 1)—and I was surprised by how good the episodes were, both comedically and dramatically.
Most revivals of old shows tend to suck. This revival is the opposite and has gotten off to a good start.
The first three episodes have their own threads here and here. What I want to talk about is the revival’s interesting choice—which Braff, Donald Faison, and Sarah Chalke discussed in an interview with Parade—to retcon the ninth season (the divisive “Med School” season) out of existence.
That 2009-10 season wasn’t as awful as most Scrubs fans make it out to be. (You know what was awful? Some of the episodes that were written by Eric Weinberg. He was fired from Scrubs for misconduct and was later charged with multiple sex crimes. Those Weinberg episodes aged like milk.) But Season 9 wasn’t exactly a stellar season either. After J.D.’s departure from Sacred Heart Hospital, Denise—Eliza Coupe’s cynical character and the best addition to the cast in the eighth season—should have replaced J.D. as the narrator.
Placing a female J.D.—Kerry Bishé as Lucy—in the narrator role made Scrubs feel repetitive. When the original Law & Order wrote the ethical Ben Stone out of the show’s prosecutor half, it didn’t replace him with another Ben Stone. It wisely replaced him with the unethical Jack McCoy. I thought Scrubs should have done the same thing.
I’m okay with Season 9 no longer being canon. Retcons are nothing new in network TV. Sometimes they don’t work. Dallas famously annoyed its fans when Bobby—who was killed off a year before after his sister-in-law hit him with her car—stepped out of the shower, and his death turned out to have been a year-long dream in Pam’s head.
Other times, they cause you to say, “Eh, the retcon’s fine, but it doesn’t really help this sluggish reunion project.” When future 24 co-creator Joel Surnow and director James Whitmore Jr. brought back CBS’s Wiseguy (where future Scrubs regular Ken Jenkins happened to have a recurring role as OCB Director Paul Beckstead) as an ABC TV-movie of the same name in 1996, Surnow ignored Wiseguy co-creator Stephen J. Cannell and Wiseguy showrunner Peter Lance’s decision to leave the fate of Vinnie Terranova, Ken Wahl’s character, up in the air after Wahl’s fourth-season departure.
At the start of the fourth season, a Salvadoran death squad that was being investigated by Vinnie kidnapped the undercover OCB agent off-screen and possibly executed him. Frank McPike, Vinnie’s handler, gave up on his search for him and tearfully revealed Vinnie’s cover to the public at a memorial service for him. But in Surnow and Whitmore’s TV-movie, Wahl reprised his role, and Vinnie was back in the OCB as if his abduction by the death squad never happened. The retcon didn’t bother me. I was more bothered by a couple of problems with the movie: One of them was the fact that Wahl was in immense, neck-related physical pain during the filming of the movie (which ended up being his final screen project), so a lot of the fire Wahl brought to Vinnie during Wiseguy’s CBS years was gone, and that contributed to the sluggishness of Wiseguy ’96.
Braff, Chalke, Robert Maschio, and John C. McGinley may look older (while Judy Reyes, who currently plays the boss on High Potential, and Faison look like they haven’t aged since 2010), but the surprisingly solid Scrubs revival is anything but sluggish. The only thing that’s sluggish is J.D. and Turk’s attempt to imitate an eagle together like they used to always do.
Today’s prompt is only for Scrubs fans: Though Scrubs is full of hilarious moments of slapstick (like when Ted, Sacred Heart’s hapless lawyer, perspired so much during a deposition that his sweaty hand caused him to slip and hit his head on the table) and zany fantasy sequences, it has a dramatic side as well, so what’s your favorite non-comedic moment from Scrubs?
Dr. Cox’s loss of his best friend (nicely played by Brendan Fraser) to leukemia and Dr. Cox’s unluckiest day at Sacred Heart were great non-comedic moments, but neither of them are my favorite. I was always a fan of the much quieter scene where Dan Dorian, a bartender and J.D.’s unlikable and immature big brother, confronted Dr. Cox because his cynicism about medicine is rubbing off on an increasingly disillusioned J.D., and the scene didn’t end in the way I expected it to. Now that’s my favorite non-comedic Scrubs scene. Both Tom Cavanagh (not Cavanaugh—a frequent typo people make in the comments section of this site) and McGinley, who portrayed a multitude of emotions—he knows Dan is right, he hates that Dan is right, and a small part of him now has a newfound respect for him—were magnificent.
