“My Chief” is the first Scrubs episode that was written by Mike Royce, a huge get for this show this season because he created TNT’s Men of a Certain Age, a great (and surprisingly funny) hour-long drama where Ray Romano, Andre Braugher, and Scott Bakula were all brought out of their comfort zones to play the types of characters we never saw them play before. (Veteran Scrubs writer Mark Stegemann, who has come back for the Scrubs revival, also wrote for Men of a Certain Age.)
Royce also co-showran Netflix’s One Day at a Time reboot. Men of a Certain Age and the Latinx One Day at a Time had one thing in common, besides the fact that they were both set in L.A.: They revolved around middle-aged characters who thought they had everything figured out and weren’t quite prepared for the midlife (or in the case of Braugher’s car salesman character, professional) challenges that blindsided them. That also happens to be one of the themes of the Scrubs revival, so that makes Royce a perfect addition to the writers’ room.
Neil Flynn is back again as the Janitor, and so is Darcy Michael as Maintenance Guy, a new character who was revealed to be the Janitor’s son at the end of last season and is now known as Nepo Janitor. I don’t know what else to say about Royce’s first Scrubs episode. It’s solid. The scene where J.D. and Turk reconcile and play a sloppy game of catch is straight out of Men of a Certain Age.
A few days before the airing of “My Chief,” I rewatched an old Scrubs episode, 2003’s “My Drama Queen”—but not on Hulu or on my copy of Touchstone’s Scrubs Season 2 DVD box set. I have the original show’s first five seasons on DVD, and the only parts of those DVDs I’ve watched are the blooper reels—the bloopers where Zach Braff can’t stop giggling because of Flynn’s visual description of his character’s “wife” and her lack of fingers happen to be from “My Drama Queen”—and the Braff/Donald Faison/Bill Lawrence audio commentary for “My Overkill.” When I found out the music was changed on some of the DVD versions of the episodes, that kept me from wanting to watch the rest of the DVDs. Apparently, the music removal problem is much worse in the streaming version of the original show.
This is all a long way of saying that the best way to watch old Scrubs episodes as I remember them from when they first aired on NBC is neither DVDs nor Hulu. The best way is Internet Archive. I’ve sung the praises of Internet Archive before.
I somehow stumbled into the entirety of the original airing of “My Drama Queen” on an Internet Archive account’s digitized file of a 2003 VHS recording of both 24 and Scrubs. “My Drama Queen” is the one where Cox, in the episode’s best storyline, reluctantly teaches a seminar about how to avoid malpractice lawsuits and then tosses away what the hospital prepared for him to say at the seminar (“Patients are stupid—and they are really scared. And some of them need you to hold their hands”), while Carla loses her mom and wants to rush Turk into marriage.
“My Drama Queen” has mostly aged well. It was fun to hear James Brown’s “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” untouched during J.D.’s fantasies about Fred Berry doing the Rerun Dance in the Sacred Heart halls (likewise with Simple Minds’s “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” when Ted channeled the end of The Breakfast Club and threw his fist into the air). I’d hate to find out which generic library music cue was chosen to replace “Sex Machine.”
The commercial breaks were not cut out of the recording of the original airing of “My Drama Queen.” Instead of fast-forwarding the ads like I used to always do if they were part of a VHS or DVR recording, I watched every single one on Internet Archive because I completely forgot about the ads in between “My Drama Queen.”
Damn, “My Drama Queen” is so old…
… that there’s a TV spot for a Jack Nicholson movie.
“My Drama Queen” is so old that Carrie Preston isn’t playing Elsbeth Tascioni yet.
“My Drama Queen” is so old that it ends with one of NBC’s annoying “Will Ed finally get with Carol?” promos for Ed, a show that was a lot more fun and irreverent than what NBC’s sappy-ass promos misled audiences to believe.
I’ve talked about Ed before in a Couch Avocados header.
You might be asking, “Izzat Dan Dorian, J.D.’s brother?” Yep, Tom Cavanagh (not Cavanaugh) had his own show, a small-town lawyer show, and like with Scrubs, the cases (or the bowling alley hijinks—especially when Eli Goggins, Daryl Mitchell’s character, was the manager of Stuckeybowl—and the $10 bets between Ed and Mike) were more entertaining than what Cox would have referred to as “that sweet Aryan sex that you love so much.”