For reasons unknown, I recently undertook a re-watch of the first eight seasons of Scrubs. The ninth season which will be airing on ABC sometime during this season of network broadcasting will retain a few original cast members but according to all reports will be a new show in the same universe as the original. Perhaps its this (supposed as yet unverified) distinct dichotomy between the first eight seasons and whatever subsequent seasons are left in the workhorse comedy that made me go back to the beginning and reevaluate the show.

I finished it a couple days ago and coincidentally the ‘Zach Braff is Dead’ rumour had just started popping up online, so I thought I’d talk about both in one post. First off, because it dovetails nicely into the discussion of the rumours and subsequent refutations by Braff, is my reevaluation of the show.

If you follow me on twitter, you’ll know I’ve been expressing my disapproval of Scrubs there for a few weeks so you might think my final decision on Scrubs is going to be decidedly negative, but in the end I still love the show. Growing up with Scrubs was a fantastic experience for me, I related to JD like no other character on television at the time; he was funny, quirky, romantic, and was a whole bunch of me wrapped up in a grown-up (but not too grown-up) shell. Still, going back to the show, the biggest problem I had with it was the seemingly nonexistent growth for JD over the first six seasons.

Every episode had at its core a lesson for JD to learn, whether it was being more accepting of people’s flaws, more attentive to your friends, less selfish, more professional, or even being willing to relax and have fun on occasion, the show always had a message. Those consistent messages were what made Scrubs something more than just a screwball medical comedy — an interesting enough subgenre as it is — those morals gave the show real gravitas, a weight against which the antics on-screen were contrasted making the ultimate message that much more stark and demanding of attention.

But there are exactly two problems at the core of Scrubs, problems the show couldn’t eliminate until the seventh and eighth seasons when the show was coming to an end. If you want the show to last, and you want the message of the week style that made the show something special, you need to essentially hit the reboot button at the end of every episode. Some plot might carry through, and JD will be ostensibly ‘improved’ for as much as a few episodes; but ultimately that lesson needs to be recycled and he’s right back in the thick of his previously conquered faults.

While the middle (and middling) seasons of Scrubs are often criticised by fans they are usually criticised for the increasingly screwball antics the show resorted to for laughs, so finding this shocking lack of character growth during my re-watch impacted me with great force at first. In retrospect, it seems like that flaw is only noticed in these sorts of high frequency viewing spurts, something someone watching as the seasons aired wouldn’t notice easily.

Still, characters relapsing into their old habits despite a struggle to grow, is not inherently a bad thing; in fact, it’s ripe for drama and a very human reaction. Just because you know what’s wrong with you doesn’t mean you’ll be able to magically fix it. Being better means vigilance, it means never forgetting where you are and who you want to be. So it’s easy for complacency to lead to backsliding. But this leads us to the show’s second core problem: it’s a comedy.

What I described above is more akin to a drama and while Scrubs incorporated dramatic elements it was fundamentally a comedy. What’s more, it was a comedy with frequent fantasy sequences, many which seemed to leak into the ‘real world’ resulting in an increasingly screwball ‘real world’ and therefore greater abuses of original character quirks. Now, being a comedy isn’t a flaw in the show per se, but it develops into a flaw when the show becomes long-running and maintains its desire to deftly interweave comedic and dramatic elements. So the relapses in behaviour were frequently either ignored, because the relapse was necessary to make a joke work, or referenced in a humourous way, belying the drama of the relapse. Both of these approaches led to funny scenes but made the characters, JD especially, seem like aloof douches who never tried to improve themselves.

Which brings me to the ‘Zach Braff is Dead’ rumours. I heard about the rumours and found debunkings of them less than a minute later so it didn’t prey on my mind for long. What I have thought about in some detail were the videos Zach Braff posted online responding to the hoax. In those videos he’s an affable guy, clearly very funny, but on the edge of all that there’s an tinge of douchery. It comes as no surprise to me that Zach Braff is a douche, I’ve been hearing reports from all around of his douchiness for years. Still, he can clearly be a friendly and overall ‘nice guy’ when he wants to as evidenced by those videos. In this respect, he reminds me of JD. They’re both, at a very low level, arrogant douches but they can put on the mask of friendliness and quirky appeal when they need to. Not really a critique, just an observation.

But, you know, even with this reevaluation, I still hold Scrubs and JD and even Zach Braff to something resembling high regard. Sure they’ve got their flaws, but who doesn’t? Scrubs is still a very funny show with a talented cast and funny writers and I certainly don’t regret the first viewing or the recent re-watch. I might not consider the show as weighty as I once did, but the laughs are still there, and the memories from the years of watching it remain.

So is Scrubs worth it? Well, I don’t know. It’s certainly funny enough to be worth watching, but I can’t promise you the stasis the characters suffer through over the years won’t bother those of you looking for some life lessons thrown into the mix. So here’s a cop out if there ever was one: is it worth it? Watch it and find out for yourself.

I’ve been rewatching Scrubs recently. So far the thing I’ve noticed the most is that JD is a huge dick, and he never really improves despite every episode being about confronting one of his (many many many) flaws and weaknesses.

In the episode that marks his brother’s first appearance on the show, the moral of the story is that his brother is a pathetic person and JD’s being ashamed of him is a good thing.

He treats women like shit — the most egregious case being his treatment of Elliot at the end of the third season, when he fought to get her back from Sean only to cast her aside literally the second she comes back to him.

He’s incredibly selfish. I mean, that’s obvious given that the premise of the show has JD narrating his own life. But even still, everything about the show is him him him. People will be going through real problems while his petty bullshit that has no real significance is exaggerated. Sometimes that contrast is used to make a point. But really, you can only make that point so many times before your character should just grow the fuck up.

Here’s the thing. I like the show. Scrubs is very funny. And on occasion it has a serious story that isn’t offensive and/or shockingly obvious. But most of the dramatic conflicts come from characters overreacting or some other contrived mechanism. Oh and JD is a dick.

I know some of you are going to be scoff at my remarks and tell me that Scrubs is only a comedy. But when I watched this show as it aired, I loved it for its realistic characterizations, romantic subplots, comedic wit, and the way the show brought that all together like no other show at the time. But going through the series again with a more mature eye, I see most of that falling apart.

And another group of you will surely reply telling me that its JD’s flaws that make him a realistic character. That’s true to a point. But it’s only true to the point at which any realistic person would start to look at these flaws and grow beyond them (for more than an episode), something JD never does, at least not until the last season when he magically grew the hell up. Its JD’s inability to grow and change that make him not a character but a caricature. And a dickish one at that.

Thoughts? Rebuttals? Overly aggressive attacks on my sexuality? Bueller?

P.S. In case you need something else to hate about me, I thought the Musical episode was lame (even though I love musicals and was very excited about a Scrubs musical) and I remember thinking at the time that the Princess Bride parody episode was possibly the worst episode the show ever did.

P.P.S. This was originally written on the IMDB forums, but I’ve been meaning to write something about Scrubs here for a while so here it is. I also changed some sentences from the IMDB version for clarity. And I de-beeped the curse words. WTF IMDB?