When people are bantering about the best sitcoms of all time – the groundbreakers, the epoch-shifters – they might talk about Seinfeld or Cheers or All in the Family, Golden Age greats such as I Love Lucy or even new classics like Parks and Recreation. But Scrubs, the seminal hospital-set dramedy that originally ran from 2001-2010, has well and truly earned its place in the pantheon. Since the good doctors of Sacred Heart clocked off for their final double, seemingly every sitcom to come along has drawn inspiration from Scrubs.
Like Brooklyn Nine Nine (and, long before it, M*A*S*H*), it’s a workplace comedy that uses its high-pressure setting to serve up pathos as well as laughs. Created by Ted Lasso’s Bill Lawrence, Scrubs follows young doctor JD Dorian (Zach Braff, who will forever be known for the role) and his fellow freshly-minted medicos as they navigate the professional and personal minefield that is Sacred Heart Hospital under the watchful eyes of senior doctor Perry Cox (a career-best John C. McGinley) and Head of Medicine Bob Kelso (Jen Jenkins), a penny-pinching tyrant who always puts the welfare of the hospital ahead of the patients. For a blisteringly funny show, Scrubs frequently trucks in matters of life and death, medical ethics, and the personal cost of being an ER doctor.
J.D. (Zach Braff) and Oscar the Grouch in 'Scrubs'. Credit: Danny Feld / American Broadcasting Companies
And while Scrubs doesn’t shy away from really tugging at the heart strings when it has a mind to, the medical melodrama is balanced by a cheerfully surreal approach and a barrage-fire approach to gags. A handful of episodes aside, the entire series is told from JD’s point of voice, with Braff narrating, and we see his silly pop-culture-laden fantasies play out as cutaway gags ala Family Guy. As the series progresses, the line between JD’s fantasies and the real world gets blurrier, presaging the anything-for-a-laugh weirdness of 30 Rock.
It also helps that Scrubs boasts one of the all-time great comedy ensembles, including Donald Faison as jock surgeon, Turk; Sarah Chalke as the ambitious, frazzled Elliot; Judy Reyes as pragmatic nurse, Carla; and especially Neil Flynn as the vindictive, possibly psychotic Janitor, who was meant to be a one-joke character in the pilot episode but stuck around to torment JD for the entire series.
Neil Flynn as 'The Janitor'. Credit: Danny Feld / American Broadcasting Companies
The Janitor, whose true name and motives remain mysterious, straddled the line between main character and supporting player for the first few seasons, a gateway between the main cast and the deep bench of recurring minor characters that flesh out Sacred Heart. In Todd Maschio’s cheerfully randy Todd; Sam Lloyd’s suicidally depressed lawyer, Ted; and Christa Miller’s acid-tongued board member (and Dr Cox’s ex-wife!) Jordan; all the way down to various near-nameless recurring orderlies, nurses, and functionaries, we get a sense of Sacred Heart as a real place with its own social dynamics, much as Parks and Recreation and Community would do with their own sprawling ensembles. Like those series, Scrubs also attracted some stellar guest stars, with Michael J. Fox, Colin Farrell, Brendan Fraser, Heather Graham, and more showing up throughout the series.
John C. McGinley as Dr. Perry Cox and Brendan Fraser as Ben Sullivan in season 3. Credit: Carin Baer
Now, of course, most sitcoms are shot single camera style as opposed to using a multi-camera set-up in front of a live studio audience, to the point where if a series departs from the style, as in the recent Frasier revival, it can be jarring. Scrubs wasn’t the first series to employ a more cinematic shooting style and ditch the then-endemic laugh track, but it made a virtue of it more than most. A more conventionally shot Scrubs would feel like an endless string of Very Special Episodes (something the series lampooned in the season four episode, “My Life in Four Cameras”); instead, the drama exists comfortably alongside the comedy, and the show and change up moods on a dime. Howling with laughter and sobbing with tears in the same episode – for a prime example, check out Brendan Fraser’s three guest appearances.
Scrubs is a lightning-in-a-bottle show, really. It’s so incredibly of its moment, an experimental heart-on-its-sleeve dramedy that eschewed cynicism and irony to mine a more resonant vein of comedy and tragedy – thus heralding the wave of “kind comedy” seen in The Good Place and Bill Lawrence’s own Ted Lasso. If it is sometimes easy to overlook, perhaps it's because it makes the whole thing look so effortless.
All 9 seasons of Scrubs are streaming now at SBS On Demand.
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Scrubs
