Saturday, May 09, 2009

Praising Scrubs

The only sitcom still worth watching in the last few years, the screening of the (likely) last episode of Scrubs has attracted a lot of comment in the States this week.

Slate had an article praising it, not for its comedic value, but for being "the most accurate portrayal of the medical profession on TV." (Bet you didn't see that coming.) Allegedly:
...if you talk to doctors, they'll often sing the praises of one medical show in particular, which they say captures the training process, the profession, and the dynamics of a hospital with remarkable accuracy. No, it's not House, the tale of a misanthrope who happens to be a doctor. It's not Grey's Anatomy, a torrid romance novel disguised as a medical show. It's not even the recently departed ER, which broke television ground with its realistic gore. It's Scrubs.
The article makes out its case reasonably credibly.

But of course, no one watches it for that reason. The show apparently is made by people with sufficient generosity that they allow a huge number of segments to remain posted on Youtube. It seems that with a little effort, you can find nearly any clip from the 8 seasons which you found particularly funny.

In Australia, the show has never has a decent chance to build a following on commercial TV due to the hopeless way (common to nearly every sitcom shown in the last 5 years) that the programmers have chopped and changed the schedule. Currently, I have been watching Season 6 which has had a rare continuous run on Comedy Channel (but even that has a hopeless way of jumbling seasons and episodes, so that still the only way to get a complete story cycle here is to rent the DVDs.)

Anyhoo, I recently saw the popular all-singing episode ("My Musical") from 2007. (It was probably shown here starting at 10.42pm one night of the summer holidays on Channel 7 in 2008.) The highlight was surely "Guy Love", which is good enough to embed:



(A clarification: the women in bed is featured because she has an aneurysm causing her to have musical hallucinations, a storyline evidently based on this true life report.)

I can't help it, I want to embed two other short clips that are particular favourites:

Janitor, the greatest comedic deadpan evil character ever created:



And Dr Kelso has his greatest moment here (although, bizarrely, the person who posted this clip gives away the joke in the heading - don't read it!):



Brilliant. When will there be another sitcom that makes me laugh out loud?

5 comments:

Caz said...

Yep, a big fan of Scrubs, and continually appalled by Channel 7 for prolonged, almost sadistic, programming practices with this show.

Oh, and wouldn't it be nice if any of our networks figured out that a lot of half hour shows do, in fact, have cohesive and on-going narratives, which makes showing them out of order (WTF is it with that????) is so dumb that it should be a crime to pay people to make those dumb-arsed decisions.

BTW - one of the best aspects of Scrubs has always been the bro-love story at its centre!

Steve said...

Well, I'm glad to hear you like it too.

On the topic of TV scheduling, it drives me crazy when some shows gain a large following in repeats (years after they were first shown) when the channel finally puts them in a accessible and certain time slot. That happened with Frasier, for example.

Can't they recognise quality first time 'round?

Caz said...

I was never a fan of Cheers, but Frasier is one of my all time favorite comedy series Steve. Brilliant scripts, such consistent quality. Nile's wife remains the most well drawn unseen character ever presented in any medium. Ah, how I miss the pith of Frasier!

Occasionally, and Frasier is a case in point, the Oz audience really doesn't "get" it, and the stations pull the shows off air so quickly, or throw them into the midnight run, that there's no chance for an audience to develop. Sometimes it is the audience rejecting the higher quality shows.

Look at the West Wing for goodness sake - the last two series were shown on the ABC! Channel 7 put it on later and later, didn't bother to advertise, and then lost interest entirely. Was it the station's fault, or an audience unprepared and unexcited by such a high standard of television?

I don't really understand. It's not as though it's overly challenging to sit in front of the telly and watch quality programs. It takes the same energy as watching garbage, doesn't it?

Steve said...

Did you like the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Caz? As I have said here before, I regard it as the best long running sitcom of all time.

Caz said...

While I suddenly have it in my head: 30 Rock, which is not (to my mind) the 'best ever', but definitely worth the entry for Alec Baldwin alone, continues to "struggle in the ratings" even in the US. On our shores it has only ever been programmed in the dead of night, so has no opportunity to find ratings worth speaking of. Great show, albeit, inconsistent, something different, but no one watches. Go figure.

MTMS - I certainly remember the show and the tune, and goodness knows I think everyone watched it, but I was too young at the time to retain a critical memory of it. That is, don't have the recall to rank it in relative terms. Odd, not a show that gets repeated, yet I'm sure I'd enjoy seeing it over.

I remember "All in the Family" (?) a little better, mostly because I thought it was pretty awful, with a few notes of alleged humour played over and over ad nausea. Apart from the characters being so predictable, it just wasn't to my taste.