It's harder to remember now, but there was a time when Zach Braff wasn't just the guy who went to the Kickstarter well to fund his second film as director and came up with the same brand of schmaltz he put out a decade earlier. Back in those days, Braff was nothing but a compellingly nebbish comedic lead in an ensemble full of gifted jokesters who could make an audience well up with just the right emotional punch. Back then, when Scrubs debuted back in 2001, it didn't have big names or a ton of promotional magic going for it, but it did have a distinctive pilot that told the story of the lowest rung on the medical ladder: interns.
Sure, Braff's John Dorian is annoying, and the voiceover is an outdated and distracting narrative device. But somehow, mixed into the ensemble at Sacred Heart Hospital, it all works, in a warm fuzzy sort of way. It's Zach Braff at his zany best, and it's paired with Donald Faison as his best friend Chris Turk—a comedic chemistry that led to a lifelong friendship. Sarah Chalke plays fiercely neurotic Elliot, a sometimes bumbling but eventually sharp and energetic private practice physician. Judy Reyes is the veteran nurse who falls for Turk and looks after all the other baby interns running around like deer in the headlights. John C. McGinley is the brash mentor who butts heads with the head of the hospital, Bob Kelso (played by admirably cantankerous Ken Jenkins). And Neil Flynn, who has since gone on to play the lovable patriarch on The Middle, will always be the mysterious, mischievous, anonymous Janitor, J.D.'s constant nemesis for no other reason than a penny stuck in a door.
The show also brought in some heavy-hitting guest stars for its time, from Heathers Graham and Locklear to Michael J. Fox and Colin Farrell. This was probably the last great NBC sitcom before The Office changed everything for the network, leading to shows like 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, and Community, so looking at it now is like taking a trip back a few development cycles in television history. So sit back and relax with a turn-of-the-new-century comedy that offers a silly take on an oft-lionized profession, with fantastical cutaways and elaborate sight gags, which also had the capacity to sneak in a heaping dose of Message and give audiences more than a few dramatic highs, too. Here's how to take it all in.
Number of Seasons: 9 (182 episodes)
Time Requirements: At nearly 200 episodes, Scrubs is a huge commitment for a sitcom. It's not quite Friends, but it's still more than 66 hours of television, so there's no comfortable way to binge the whole thing in a short amount of time. Here's the doctor's prescription: Take this one in three-episode doses on a daily basis. At that rate it'll take you around two months to get through the entire show.
Where to Get Your Fix: Netflix. Though you should beware that many of the original music cues aren't available with the streaming episodes, which is a shame since Scrubs showed great taste in the pre-OC world before music supervisors rose to prominence.
Best Character to Follow:
Scrubs is an ensemble show, but it's rooted in the perspective of Braff's John Dorian. He narrates all but eight episodes in the first eight seasons, and because of that, his journey from intern to resident to co-chief resident and beyond forms the backbone of the series. Still, what's more important than his personal ascendance as a doctor is the formation of a lasting relationship with his coworkers, particularly McGinley's Dr. Perry Cox. The gruff mentor who acts like he doesn't want to be a mentor routine wears thin at times, but the parallels between the two characters, as talented doctors rising through the ranks and as people figuring out how to have positive personal relationships without sabotaging them, forms the most interesting arc of the series.
Seasons/Episodes You Can Skip:
The first and second seasons are essential. While there's some comedic material that hasn't aged well—like many sitcoms that debuted over a decade ago—the arc of all the major characters tracks smoothly for the first two years. After that, however, Scrubs got a little rickety, hitting a major lull that lasted for a few years until, faced with the prospect of cancellation, it found its mojo again to end on a high note. Having said that, here are the big moments to skip.
Season 3: Episode 16, "My Butterfly" This episode wasn't written by anyone on staff at the time—it was a spec by Justin Spitzer (The Office, Mulaney) that was good enough to actually get produced. But though the Butterfly Effect premise is clever, if a bit too literal, the season timeline gets thrown off-kilter because Spitzer had no way of knowing where the show would go emotionally when he was writing the episode.
Season 3: Episode 20, "My Fault" The most annoying thing about Scrubs is how consistently it leans on the opposite side of the will they/won't they seesaw for J.D. and Elliot whenever there's a lack of dramatic tension. Getting them together in the first season as a rocky young relationship worked, but a second trip to the well as "sex buddies" in the second season didn't. This third go-round, as J.D. blows up Elliot's relationship only to realize he was coveting what he couldn't have, is even more troublesome.
Season 6: Episode 12, "My Fishbowl" Pretty much all of Seasons 6 and 7 (shortened by the writers' strike) are skippable, but this episode, a rather shameless clip show, is emblematic of the repetition and time-wasting the show did for about all of those two seasons.
Seasons/Episodes You Can't Skip:
Season 1: Episode 1, "My First Day" The pilot establishes everything you need to know about Scrubs and its mission statement for the first two years. It's essentially a telling of how various medical school graduates—roughly divided into medical interns, who diagnose patients and treat diseases without surgery, and surgical interns who work in the operating rooms—are tossed around in the medical industrial complex. There's a lot of hospital hierarchical work at play here, as well as a feeling that new doctors are adrift in a job that requires them to save lives without helping them cope with the stress. (This is one of the reasons why my father, an anesthesiologist for nearly four decades, concedes that Scrubs is one of the most emotionally accurate pieces of entertainment about the medical profession.)
Season 1: Episode 4, "My Old Lady" A strong contender for the best episode of the series, "My Old Lady" earned its beloved reputation on the strength of Kathryn Joosten's guest performance as an elderly woman who tells J.D. that she doesn't want to go onto dialysis to prolong her life, instead choosing to die more peacefully of her own volition. It's a powerful lesson that lasts all the way through to the finale, when Joosten reappears in a dream sequence.
Season 1: Episode 15, "My Bed Banter & Beyond" The J.D. and Elliot pairing pays off for the first time here, with a structurally ambitious episode that bounces between their long day in bed—with a pizza acting as a clock—and the quick breakdown of the incubating relationship over the next few weeks. It's incredible that this burst of joy hangs over the entire series, but there's an undeniable chemistry between Braff and Chalke that made it easy for the writers to bring them back into each other's lives as potential romantic partners.
Season 1: Episodes 22 and 23, "My Occurrence (Part 1)" and "My Hero (Part 2)" Uncontroversial Statement: Brendan Fraser's role as Jordan's (Christa Miller) brother and Dr. Cox's best friend Ben is the best of his career. The gambit at play in the first part of this storyline, as J.D. searches for a mistaken diagnosis he really hopes is an actual mistake and not just epically bad news, sets up another narrative punch in the gut seasons down the line. McGinley and Fraser have great chemistry—hell, Fraser has chemistry with everyone in the cast, and it's a wonder nobody has thought to try and lure the guy into a regular gig on a television comedy since.
Season 2: Episode 14, "My Brother, My Keeper" Because J.D. is the central character on the show, his relationships with everyone else sometimes have to wait their turn to get a chance to shine. But his best friend Turk has his own life story throughout the show. Taking place just after Turk has proposed to nurse Carla Espinosa (Judy Reyes), but before she accepts, it brings in his older brother (D.L. Hughley) for a visit and solidifies Turk's family goals. Most of the family-dynamic credit goes to Tom Cavanagh, who played J.D.'s wayward older brother, but Hughley is impressive here in his one-time guest spot.
Season 3: Episode 7, "My Fifteen Seconds" Whenever Scrubs got away from depicting romantic arcs or sitcom silliness and instead took on little issues about being a professional physician, it often came up with a surprising bit of insight. This episode, in which J.D. and Dr. Cox fail to notice the warning signs of suicide with serial patient Jill Tracy (*MadTV'*s Nicole Sullivan) because they spend too little time with her, is an honest check on how anyone in any job dealing with people can get too wrapped up in their own world to notice red flags.
Season 3: Episode 13, "My Porcelain God" Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence was a writer on Spin City when Michael J. Fox had to leave the show after his Parkinson's diagnosis—but Fox's return to show business in the years since has always paid dividends wherever he shows up. As Dr. Kevin Casey, Fox is a fiercely gifted physician who everyone at Sacred Heart either admires or despises. That puts pressure on the J.D./Dr. Cox mentorship, but this episode is more notable for the way that Casey helps Elliot. It's also notable as an episode featuring an Epiphany Toilet installed by Neil Flynn's Janitor—a precursor to Bob’s Burgers' excellent parody of E.T. about a toilet over a decade later.
Season 3: Episodes 14-15, "My Screw Up" and "My Tormented Mentor" Brendan Fraser's return. Joshua Radin's heartbreaking song "Winter." John C. McGinley's first unraveling. It's all here in this two-parter that features the death of the show's most beloved recurring guest star. It draws Perry and Jordan closer together, and it's a professional step forward for J.D. to hear that it's not his fault. There's really not much more to say than to note that this is the emotional peak of the series. It never reached this kind of perfection ever again, though it came close on multiple occasions.
Season 4: Episode 6, "My Cake" For a show that is so focused on comedy, Scrubs sure knew how to deal with death better than most of television. In the aftermath of John Ritter's death, Lawrence and his staff decided not to recast J.D.'s father, but to instead write that passing into the story, as Tom Cavanagh visits again to inform his little brother of the bad news. Perry is always a paternal figure to J.D., but here he serves to help J.D. feel like he still has a family, watching sports and drinking beer with him and his brother while they talk about their father's death.
Season 4: Episode 13, "My Ocardial Infarction" The conflict between J.D. and Elliot never got more severe than it does here, as J.D. becomes a petulant jerk when Elliot begins to surpass him as a doctor. But in terms of comedy, this is a notable episode for featuring The Blanks, the a cappella group made up of timid lawyer Ted and his buddies, facing off against Hibbleton, the Janitor's hastily assembled group that manages to shock with a rendition of The Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann."
Season 5: Episode 21, "My Fallen Idol" In the back half of the show's run, it was dependable for one big emotional peak each season. In this one, right after Jill Tracy dies suddenly, Dr. Cox gives her organs to three patients, who then all die when it's discovered Tracy had rabies. It is Dr. Cox at his most professionally reckless. Everyone else rallies around to try and lift Perry's spirits, but J.D. stays away, so utterly betrayed by his mentor's actions that it makes the reconciliation in the last third all the more powerful. In retrospect it's not pleasant to recall that throughout the entire series Dr. Cox calls J.D. by girls' names as an insult—but it makes the moment he uses J.D.’s actual name for the first time at the end of this episode all the sweeter.
Season 6: Episode 15, "My Long Goodbye" OK, OK, we know we're picking all the death episodes, but they're really the best ones! It's tough to pick episodes for Carla that aren't rooted in how she functions in relation to J.D., who she helps during his early years, or falling for Turk, or growing to be friends with Elliot, or being an honest check to Dr. Cox's ego and Kelso's Scrooge-like tendencies. But here, as she says goodbye to Laverne Roberts—left unresponsive in a coma after an accident—allows Reyes a featured moment to herself where she carries the dramatic weight.
Season 8: Episode 4, "My Happy Place" The final season with the entire regular cast shifted to ABC, which was already producing the show for NBC, to give it a big send-off. And in tying up a bunch of loose ends, the biggest question mark to deal with was always going to be J.D. and Elliot's relationship. At this point, J.D. has a child with a guest star played by Elizabeth Banks in Seasons 6 and 7—but he and Elliot have settled into an intimate friendship. Their frank conversation about the trials and tribulations of years on the romantic rollercoaster finds a way to acknowledge their youthful mistakes—especially J.D.'s callous, unthinking rejection—while also forging a path for the two of them to believably end up together. For an inevitable ending, it's somewhat astounding how much the show manages to earn it as the right one in the span of a final season.
Season 8: Episodes 18-19, "My Finale" Scrubs is by no means a perfect show, but it got exactly the finale it deserved. (Yes, there was a ninth season, but that was different and this is still the finale.) It's full of fan-service send-offs, a delightful final prank on Dr. Cox, and one of the most satisfying tearjerker montages we've ever seen, set to Peter Gabriel's cover of the Magnetic Fields' lovely "The Book Of Love." After a couple dozens and dozens of episodes, it'll reduce anyone to a puddle.
Why You Should Binge:
Medical comedies are so rare, and few of them last into syndication like Scrubs. Take one look at the new pilots for next season and you'll find Chicago Med, Code Black, and the depressing Mad Lib of ballbusting genius sleuths that is Heartbreaker. Scrubs is the last time this genre felt at all fun—the same way Brooklyn Nine-Nine now feels like the only way anyone could possibly laugh at a show about police.
Best Scene—Brendan Fraser's Last Appearance:
It's tempting to pick one of the more quotable moments in the series, like one of Dr. Cox's rants, Elliot's "Told You So" dance, or the unbelievable case of "Front Butt."
But we're going with the two most heartbreaking moments in the show, because Scrubs curried so much favor for its characters that the dramatic bits hit the hardest. First, the final scene in "My Lunch," which featuers a catastrophic, powerhouse performance from John C. McGinley as organ recipients die all around him because of a call he mistakenly made. It's one of the best-directed sequences in the show, and all the more heart-wrenching because of everything these characters have seen up to this point.
The second, and still the most indelible image in the history of the show, is the final scene in Brendan Fraser's last episode. It's somewhat sad that the series hit its peak so early in its run, but the Ben storyline combines everything the show was aiming for: Conveying the experience of a young doctor learning how to cope with the extreme emotions inherent in the profession, examining the fragility of life, and interspersing moments of levity into what could become suffocating darkness.
The Takeaway:
Being a medical intern is hard—and funny as hell.
If You Liked Scrubs You'll Love:
It's tough to find another contemporary medical comedy, but there's one big throwback option: M*A*S*H, one of the most successful sitcoms in history, and another one to combine emotional heaviness with sitcom structure in a medical setting—in a war zone, no less. There's also Cougar Town, the terribly named but woefully underrated show that Bill Lawrence developed with Courteney Cox during the final years of Scrubs. If you're a fan of Lawrence's comedic sensibility dating back to his years on Spin City, then you'll find that to be more of the same.
