This week’s new Scrubs episode, “My Emergency,” was co-written by Christopher Eddins and Brianna Porter and helmed by Adam Bernstein. He directed 12 prior Scrubs episodes—including 2005’s “My Life in Four Cameras,” Scrubs’s homage to the healing power of multi-cam sitcoms—as well as my favorite Beastie Boys video from the Paul’s Boutique era, the video for “Hey Ladies.”
Bernstein’s “Hey Ladies” video wowed junior-high me because, as I wrote in Metro Silicon Valley in 2001, “there was nothing else like it on MTV. It was funny, but in an understated way, not in the cheesy, hackneyed and Monkees-inspired manner that was popular with ’80s rappers (like the Fat Boys and even the Beasties themselves) whenever they wanted to resort to a comedic tone.”
Speaking of experimentation, last week’s Scrubs episode, “My Story,” experimented with a pair of fantasy sequences that aren’t intended to make us laugh. They are simultaneously about J.D.’s gentleness towards an elderly patient in the throes of dementia and a recurring theme this season, the difficulty of maintaining a work/life balance—which turns out to be the biggest reason why J.D. and Elliot’s marriage collapsed.
I said in last week’s comments section that the cleverly shot sequence in which J.D. is sucked back into Sacred Heart Hospital appeared to be influenced by the visual effects from director Spike Jonze’s 2018 HomePod ad, which starred FKA twigs as a miserable office worker who goes home and unwinds to Anderson .Paak’s “’Til It’s Over” while the walls in her apartment magically recede and expand. I first watched that ad back in July in the comments section for Scott D’Agostino’s Director Profile entry on Jonze.
The day after I pointed out the sequence’s resemblance to Jonze’s remarkable-looking ad, “My Story” episode director Michael Spiller said to Zach Braff, Donald Faison, and Joelle Monique on Fake Doctors, Real Friends with Zach and Donald that, yep, that ad did indeed influence him when he shot the visual of J.D. being dragged away from Ollie and Elliot. (I never noticed it until now: The name of J.D. and Elliot’s son is an anagram for Elliot, minus the T.) This was Spiller’s way of paying tribute to Jonze, whom he worked with as a cinematographer during the 1992 video Jonze directed for Sonic Youth’s “100%.”
Spiller’s punch-in-the-gut fantasy sequence is one of the dramatic highlights of a season that is already near the end and is way too short.