Scrubs, "Our Thanks": Our final finale, finally?

A quick review of the "Scrubs" finale (which is at least the third time the show has aired an episode that many assumed to be the last one ever) coming up just as soon as I dress as a slutty ninja for Halloween...

As I've been saying for the last bunch of episodes, how you feel about this one depends on if you viewed this as "Scrubs" season 9 or "Scrubs Med School" season 1. The early episodes with Zach Braff didn't work no matter which viewpoint you took, and the rest certainly didn't live up to the best of original "Scrubs." But once JD wrapped up his teaching stint at Sacred Heart 2.0, the season evolved into a promising, albeit uneven debut for a spin-off.

When I talked to Bill Lawrence a couple of months ago, he said, "I loved the ending of 'Scrubs.' I didn't end this." However, he and his team (in this case, writer Sean Russell and director Rick Blue) did come up with a fairly satisfying conclusion to this first season.

Cole finds a new career path (and very belatedly gives Donald Faison something to do now that JD is gone). Denise and Drew finally accept that their relationship is exactly that. And the med students finish working with the corpse of Ben, whom we met in the season (series?) premiere.

If "Our Thanks" wasn't as strong as last week's episode, it was because the episode leaned more heavily on Lucy, who never really clicked as our new main character. (Too JD-like, and only the running gag about her horse obsession ever made me laugh much.) But Turk's attempts to scare Cole off of surgery were all funny (and gave us one more/last scene of Turk dancing), and the Denise/Drew storyline was a nice role reversal on all the earlier shows where she was the one who had to soften up and embrace her feelings, and well-played by Michael Mosley.

Like I said last week, I seriously doubt the show gets yet another reprieve, unless ABC's comedy development is just a complete disaster (or unless the economics somehow make sense to use it again as filler in timeslots where ABC knows it won't compete anyway). The ratings last week were quite a bit below what "The Middle" and the other Wednesday comedies did, and with those three in reruns, I imagine last night's numbers will be even lower.

To me, "Scrubs" ended a year ago, and it ended really, really well. "Scrubs Med School" had a lot of growing pains, but ultimately it became something I enjoyed. I don't expect or need it to return, but if it did? I'd probably keep watching.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Scrubs, "Our Driving Issues": Cole's mole

If you didn't have a DVR season pass set up for "Scrubs," you may not have realized that ABC snuck it back onto the schedule last night, with the final two episodes of the season (if not the series) getting an audition as part of the Wednesday lineup. It continued the show's post-Zach Braff creative upswing, and I'll have a few thoughts coming up just as soon as I take an unintended, decisive nap...

Early on in this season, I had a hard time viewing Cole as anything but a watered-down version of Ed, the Aziz Ansari character from last season. But James Franco's Brother Dave Franco has really won me over with his cheerful obliviousness. Cole preparing alternate rhymes depending on the diagnosis was a great gag leading into the main titles, as was Cole's pride as he declared, "Hear that? I'm a tool, yo!"

The writers wisely put Cole and Bob Kelso in a room together for the emotional climax of both men's stories. Ken Jenkins tends to make everybody better when he shares a scene with them, but the combination of the shallow young man who doesn't know anything and the creepy old man who knows everything has been a winning one every time they've tried it this season.

If the Denise/Drew/Cox stuff felt repetitive of material we've seen elsewhere this season, it's still funny to see the different gradations and styles of sarcasm and misanthropy among the three, and all these years in, the writers can still come up with amusing nicknames for Cox to hang on the young'uns, here with him dubbing Trang "Talking Man-Baby."

I've come around to Bill Lawrence's way of thinking that you have to think of this season as a spin-off in everything but name, and on that score, I think they've done pretty well for themselves once JD packed his bags (and even the last JD episode was good). I don't put the chances of a return next year especially high; given the lack of promotion for this episode, you could just as easily view this as Burn-Off Theatre as an audition(*), and I think the network would have to have a pretty horrible comedy development season for "Scrubs" to come back.

(*) And for those wondering why "Better Off Ted" didn't get this treatment, the answer is simple: ABC owns "Scrubs," and not "Ted." Ownership may not matter with more successful shows, but these two get such marginal ratings that the only reason to keep either around at all is if the company has potential for some back-end money. "Ted"s dead, baby. "Ted" is dead. Alas.

That said, I went into this season wondering why the hell they were continuing, given what a strong and appropriate end to the series we got last season, and the first few episodes of this year only confirmed my fears. But "Scrubs Med School" got much better as it went along, and I'm glad I got to meet characters like Drew and Cole, and to spend a little more time with Cox and Kelso and Denise, even if this is the end. (And Bill said there won't be a proper finale for this season/spin-off, so expect another regular episode next week.) Ultimately, this wasn't "Frasier," but nor was it "AfterM*A*S*H," and it was better than the last year or two on NBC. I'm okay with that.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Scrubs, "Our Dear Leaders": Turk dances (sort of)!

A review of last night's "Scrubs" - the last episode currently scheduled to air, but not necessarily the last one that will air - coming up just as soon as I run out of clean laundry...

Of last night's episode, one of my Twitter followers wrote, "I think that was the 6th time I watched a new scrubs thinking it would be the last ever."

I don't know if the number could actually be that high (it was only the last couple of NBC seasons where the show began to seem like it was living on borrowed time), but I understand the larger feeling. "Scrubs" has been close to ending for what feels like forever, and this isn't even automatically the ending. As Bill Lawrence said at press tour, ABC might air the two episodes left in the can on Wednesdays (if they do, my guess would be during the rerun-heavy March/April period). And because ABC owns the show and therefore (unlike the situation with "Better Off Ted") makes money off the DVDs and other back-end items, there's still a chance (however tiny) that we could see another season.

But since I don't really believe in the renewal scenario, and since Bill told me that the last episode in the can won't be a real finale-style episode like we got last year, I can treat "Our Dear Leaders" as the end of the line, and anything that airs afterwards as a bonus. And in that context, the episode summed up the strengths and weaknesses of "Scrubs Med School."

On the plus side, it made the Cox/Drew parallels even more explicit with Perry's plan to make Drew realize being a leader is a good thing, it had more fun with Denise (as played by a sore-throated Eliza Coupe) learning to accept that she has emotions other than hatred, it gave James Franco's Brother Dave Franco more funny bits of business in the margins (along with similar stuff from The Todd), and it let Donald Faison dance, however briefly. (And on a night when I randomly put on WGN long enough for them to show a "Scrubs" promo featuring Turk's greatest dance ever!)

But the Turk story overall gave us a character who, like JD in the season's earlier episodes, should have grown up more by now. As we saw with last week's lesbian patient story (and as Myles McNutt also observed in his review), in trying to force all the stories to work around a parallel theme, it feels like they've had to regress Turk too much to make his plots match those of the med students. And Lucy's insanity was only funny to a point.

When Lawrence told me back in the summer that the new main character/narrator would be a woman, he called it a "dynamic shift." But Lucy is so tonally similar to JD that the shift never felt that dynamic. In retrospect, I wonder what a Drew-narrated version of this season would have been like. We probably would have had to ditch the fantasy sequences, but we actually haven't had that many from Lucy, and that's an aspect of the show that hasn't been essential for a long time.

Back in the summer, Lawrence said:

"It very well may suck. But don't say it sucks until you see it. And my pledge is that if it sucks, it's not going to suck in a fizzly way. It's going to suck in a giant, 'Oh my god' kind of way, because we're really swinging for the fences and trying to do some big stuff.

In the end (if this is the end), this new incarnation of "Scrubs" only occasionally sucked in an "Oh my god" way, and usually when JD was on screen. But there were enough interesting moments, and good discoveries (Franco, Michael Mosley), that I'm glad they gave it a shot. And if ABC somehow decides to keep "Scrubs" as The Show That Won't Die, then it sounds like (and, based on these more recent episode, seems like) Lawrence and company have a better idea of how to make this version of the show work going forward.

And if we don't get a real finale this time, so what? We already got "My Finale" last spring.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Scrubs, "Our True Lies": Code of silence

Taking a day or two off to recover from press tour, but I thought last night's "Scrubs" worked well in the cheating and Drew/Denise plots, less so with Turk's story (he's been a doctor for how long and still acts like a lesbian patient is a novelty?). What did you guys think? Click here to read the full post

Scrubs: Some thoughts from Bill Lawrence

The hotel's bandwidth is just good enough that I was able to Slingbox tonight's "Scrubs," which I thought continued the show's recent creative upswing - and was the first episode to do so while featuring Zach Braff. (It was also the last Braff episode of the season.) Rather than do a review, though, after the jump I'm going to run some quotes from an interview I did with "Scrubs" creator Bill Lawrence this afternoon at press tour.

Bill said there's still a chance, albeit not a great one, that the show could come back next season. ABC owns it, and it's a known quantity, and there's a chance an episode or two might get to air on Wednesday at 8 (alongside "The Middle," "Modern Family" and Bill's "Cougar Town," all of which were renewed for next season today) before the season is out.

But whether or not the show comes back, he acknowledged there were some creative missteps early this season, specifically in the way that he and his writers handled JD, and in the way the character wound up overshadowing the newbies. I asked if things might have gone differently had they kept JD out of the first few episodes to get more time to establish Drew, Lucy and Cole, but he said that wasn't possible.

"It wasn't a decision that was made creatively," he said. "I think even Zach, in a different world, as a producer with me and a guy who was helping me out a lot, would have approached it differently creatively. I'm not even disagreeing with the business of it. I know ABC's going to sell these episodes as, 'These are Scrubs! They've got Zach Braff in 'em!' My mistake was that I didn't view this as one continual show. I didn't think that people would go, 'Oh, he's regressed! This is so upsetting!' I was really believing my own mindset: 'This is new! This is new! This is new!' The stuff he was doing was the stuff that always made me laugh. But taking a step back, reading what you were saying, I could see, as a viewer it might disappoint me as well. But it didn't disappoint me when the gang from 'Cheers' showed up on 'Frasier' and they were doing old jokes, even though in the finale of 'Cheers' they had moved past their old gags."

And because, in Bill's mind, this was a new show and not a continuation of the series he brought to an end with "My Finale" last spring, some of the creative decisions - like doing multiple storylines where other characters told Denise she needed to soften and open up more to others - were made as if it were season one of "Scrubs Med School" and not season nine of "Scrubs."

"Maybe one of the mistakes of treating this as a new show is that I've always had a belief that in the first year of a new show, you drill home what somebody's about," he said. "You do the pilot over and over. You're not trying to be repetitive, but whether it was 'Scrubs' or 'Spin City' or whatever, you think you have to come out of those first 15 or 20 episodes with people going, 'I know this is the character who is too cold and impersonal. I know this is the character who has burned out before and is fighting to not get in his own way.' Because if people don't, then you can't really start the development. To me, the second year is when you go, 'Now that we know we have a chance to be on for a couple of years, how do we take baby steps?' It's like 'Cougar Town,' now that we've been picked up for next year, how is Bobby the ex-husband - he can't veer off into a dumber and dumber character or he'll be unsalvageable. How do we take steps so he's more of a responsible person without taking away his hillbilly logic that cracks me up so much?"

Whatever you call the series these days, Bill feels - and based on what we've seen the last few weeks, I'm inclined to agree - that "the show gets more and more solid as it goes on. I think if the show did go forward, I can guarantee it would be better, because I know what's working and what has to be fixed. And that's almost the same arc for any show for me. I feel like 'Cougar Town,' we started to find it after five or six episodes. And on the original 'Scrubs,' I felt the same thing. And here I'm finding things I'm starting to enjoy. I really enjoy that Mike Mosley, and I say, 'Hey, even though the show's been on for nine years, we've found a character we haven't done before that we as writers are responding to.' And Eliza Coupe, that's a type of girl I haven't seen a lot of on TV before: not cookie-cutter, but still strong. Once you focus on stuff like that, the people that need to grow and get stronger will."

Finally, I asked him whether, given the low ratings and improbability of another year, he had written a second conclusion for the series, or if he was satisfied with "My Finale."

"No, no, no. This show has no finale. This show to me is a brand-new, 13-episode order of a series that actually got on TV, which puts me ahead of 99 percent of the people. And if it has a chance to move forward, the writers will get together and we'll say, 'We found the things people don't like, and the things they do, so how do we move forward?' At the end of the year, some characters are well-rounded, some need more work. I like Johnny C. and Donald as anchors in the patrician roles, and I like Ken Jenkins floating back through there almost in the way The Janitor used to. I think I could write an interesting show. I don't know if we'll get a shot or not. The only thing that bugs me is when people go, 'Oh, you've killed the legacy of Scrubs!' I don't want to belittle the fact that they loved the show enough to think it had a legacy worth protecting. It's just not the way my personal brain works. I loved the ending of 'Scrubs.' I didn't end this." Click here to read the full post

Scrubs, "Our White Coats" & "Our Couples": (No JD) + Drew = Winner

A review of last night's two "Scrubs" - which, if you gave up on the show earlier this season, were vastly improved - coming up just as soon as I say "fo shizzle" for a week...

I kept speculating during the early episodes of the season that we really couldn't judge the new incarnation of the show until Zach Braff left, because he was dominating so much of the proceedings, and because the writers chose to backslide JD into his irritating season 6 & 7 persona. Braff's been gone for three episodes (though he still has one more to go), and those three have been vastly improved. The low ratings probably won't allow for this, but these latest episodes feel like the foundation of a show I'd be happy to watch for several more seasons.

With JD out of the way, the med students have become much more clearly-defined. Lucy seems more interesting as a mirror of Elliot than JD (her fantasy sequences still aren't really working; like the narration, that device probably should have been retired with JD), I'm starting to enjoy Cole more (even if I keep imagining the character being funnier if Aziz Ansari were still available to play him), and Drew has become very funny no matter what other character he's paired with. There's just enough of Dr. Cox in Michael Mosley's performance to feel like a torch is being passed, but not so much that the character just comes across as a rip-off.

After being consigned to play JD's eagle wingman in the earlier episodes, Turk has come back to life (and we still get some Turk-as-the-black-JD moments, just in small enough doses to be funny rather than frustrating), and it was nice to see the second episode address Turk and Cox finally being peers (even if Cox ultimately outranks Turk). And after it seemed like too many episodes this year were designed to take away the edge that made Denise such a unique and funny character last season, we saw with the second episode's golf cart theft subplot that even if Denise softens a little for Drew, she's still capable of unleashing great evil on the rest of the universe.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Scrubs, "Our New Girl-Bro": Have it all?

I'm taking it easy on New Year's weekend, but I thought last night's "Scrubs" was an improvement on the recent episodes with JD. Elliot made a more interesting (and mature) mentor figure for Lucy, the Turk and Denise friendship has promise, and it was nice to see Cox and Drew team up to deal with Cole.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Scrubs, "Our Mysteries": How can we miss you if you won't leave?

A review of last night's "Scrubs" coming up just as soon as I let all the funk out...

"I don't know, old friend. I've left so many times, I've come back so many times. Even I'm confused." -JD

If the continuation/reinvention of "Scrubs" hasn't damaged the show's overall legacy for me, it's started to make me resent John Dorian a lot. At the very least, it's reminded me of how insufferable he was in the last few NBC seasons before coming back to earth last year. And once again, his presence as irrationally needy man-child - and the apparent need to make him prominent while the show still had him(*) - has made it hard to really gauge how well "Scrubs" Med (or Zombie "Scrubs," or whatever kind of unkind nickname you want to give it) is doing.

(*) This was the fifth episode out of Braff's six-episode commitment, but with JD wrapping up his Sacred Heart teaching gig, I'm assuming - or hoping - his last appearance will be smaller, probably in a personal story involving Turk, or Cox, or even Elliot whenever Sarah Chalke appears next.

The JD portions of the episode continued to be extremely lame - other than the intro of the Interracial Hardy Boys idea, and the scenes at Bob Kelso's shag pad - but I still stubbornly believe the rest of the series still has some promise. The joy in Cox's voice as he talked about opening the "big box of failure" at Christmas, or the terror on Denise and Drew's faces as Sunny asked them on a double date were reminders that there are several very strong comic characters/actors left as regulars. And if Cole still seems like warmed-over Aziz Ansari, Dave Franco plays very well with Ken Jenkins. (But then, who on the show doesn't?)

This season/spin-off has had its early problems, but so many of them have been tied to the decision to bring back JD - and then to the writing staff backsliding in their writing of him - that I really want to see the first post-Braff episode before making a major judgment on things.

Not that it matters in the grand scheme of things, I guess. The ratings have been bad (though not as bad as for "Better Off Ted"), and because "Lost" is coming to Tuesdays before these two comedies will have been on the air for 13 weeks, ABC is going to double-run both for the month of January, and they're also going to air a "Scrubs" and two "Ted"s after the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day.

In other words, we've reached Mid-Season Burn-Off Theatre mode.

It was a surprise that ABC renewed either comedy in the first place, and the ratings have shown why. So enjoy Zombie "Scrubs" (or don't) while it lasts, because this looks like we're finally, actually, really coming to the end of the line soon.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Scrubs, "Our Histories": His last words

A quick review of tonight's "Scrubs" coming up just as soon as I hear Ted and Gooch's song for West Virginia...

Though the show is still struggling to serve too many masters - telling the story of the med students, saying goodbye to characters like Ted and Gooch, keeping JD a prominent part of the picture - when a clean break might have been wiser, "Our Histories" was a definite improvement on last week's episode. (Also Cole with Dr. Cox is a pairing that we must see as much as we can.) I imagine we can't really judge the show till after Zach Braff's gone and the focus narrows, but this one gave me the same feeling as the season-opening double-feature: I didn't love it all but was glad to still be spending time at Sacred Heart.

We got more concentrated time with the med students (even if Aussie Supermodel Doc still doesn't have a defining character trait other than being hot and Australian) and Cole managed to not be a complete tool without taking away from what can make the character funny. By confronting JD's age head-on and making his denial of it the point of the JD/Turk story this week, their antics went over much better than they did in the first three episodes(*). And while Ted's goodbye wasn't really necessary - landing Gooch was essentially Sam Lloyd's farewell last season - I'll never object to some Ted/Kelso time.

(*) Also confronted head-on: the obvious similarities between the Paul Dooley story and last season's incredible "My Last Words." The problem with a show that's on this long is that all the stories get repeated, even if they're being repeated on new characters - even "My Last Words" was designed as a sequel to "My Old Lady" from the first season. This wasn't as effective as either of those, but it ultimately wasn't going for tears as much as it was trying to put these four characters together to see what happened.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Scrubs, "Our Role Models": JD, Drew

A review of last night's "Scrubs" coming up just as soon as I come watch you build a deck...

Early in "Our Role Models" JD tells Lucy he's preparing her to get by in med school after he leaves very soon, just as "Scrubs" will have to survive once Zach Braff finishes up the second half of his six-episode commitment. But watching that scene, and most of this laugh-light episode, I once again felt like the show, if not Lucy, would be much better off if JD were gone already.

I think there's potential there with the new characters, Drew in particular. But so long as Braff is around, we have to spend so much time on tired JD jokes that no one else is getting a chance to really establish him or herself as a source of humor. Even Turk is still largely being defined by his relationship to JD, and as I watched him yelling at the incompetent suck-up, I wished we were getting more of that and less of Turk rolling his eyes at JD's misunderstanding of sports(*).

(*) Though I can't hate too much on a scene in which Turk admits he cries at the end of "Rudy," can I?

With Lucy feeling too much like a female JD, and with Cole still a fairly two-dimensional character, it's weird to see the show being carried by three characters (Cox, Denise and Drew) who are sarcastic misanthropes, but they're also the three best-defined, funniest characters we have right now. (John C. McGinley's weary delivery of "No Candy Perry!" was the episode's one big laugh for me.) It feels like the writers are aware of the sarcasm build-up and are trying to compensate by softening Denise, as two of the three episodes so far have been about her opening her heart a little to other people. I think that'll work in small doses, but I don't want to lose the essence of the great character Eliza Coupe and the writers created last year. The solution isn't to change Denise too much, but to do a better job with Lucy and Cole, Aussie Supermodel Doc and maybe even Ugly Don Cheadle. (Though I suspect he's going to be a Snoop Dogg Attending or Colonel Doctor-esque extra who rarely, if ever, speaks.)

I still enjoyed the first two episodes enough that I don't regret the show having come back. Again, even if the show were awful all season, it still wouldn't take away from what I loved of the series, any more than the last couple of NBC seasons did. But these episodes are making me retroactively dislike JD a little. He was a great character for a long time, but if he's not going to grow up and/or work more in support of the newbies, I'd rather he not be here. I guess we'll find out after three more episodes if a completely JD-less "Scrubs Med School" works. Right now, though, the show's not quite there.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Scrubs, "Our First Day of School" & "Our Drunk Friend": Scrubs: The New Class

Spoilers for the first two episodes of the new season/version of "Scrubs" coming up just as soon as I do the Dikembe Mutombo finger wag (and then remind you of Dikembe's greatest gift to the comedy gods)...

I talked a lot about my feelings about this new season of the show - and whether it should, in fact, be considered a new series - in yesterday's column, so go read that if you didn't already, and then we'll go straight to the bullet points with some additional thoughts on these two episodes:

• We learn early on that a year has passed since "My Finale," which gives the writers license to do lots of things: relocate the hospital (a practical move done to put it on the studio lot with "Cougar Town" so Bill Lawrence can run both shows), say goodbye to The Janitor, have Kelso finish his time with Locum Tenens (and bump off his oft-discussed, never-seen wife), make Denise a third-year resident with a bit more authority over the med students, make it seem like JD didn't immediately come back to his old stomping grounds, and make Elliot pregnant. And speaking of which...

• When I interviewed Bill Lawrence about the new season back in August, he mentioned Sarah Chalke's pregnancy so casually that I assumed it was a piece of news that was already out there in the world. (I pay very little attention to the personal lives of celebrities.) So I included that quote as part of the interview transcript - at which point one of the commenters pointed out that this was the first public mention of said pregnancy. Mortified at having accidentally become That Guy, I quickly deleted that portion of the transcript and the comments referring to it, but nothing's ever really gone from the Internet, and within a few days, Chalke's PR team had announced the pregnancy themselves. I'm hoping that was the timetable all along, but if I somehow played a role in that, I feel bad. To anyone in the Chalke camp who may be reading this, I'm sorry. I didn't know! It's all Bill's fault!

• As I said in the column, I could have done without continuing the voiceover tradition with a new character, but I do like Kerry Bishe as Lucy, since she makes a nice professional foil for both Dr. Cox and JD, and Michael Mosley as Drew, since he makes a nice romantic foil for Denise, while also seeming very much like a young Perry Cox. As Cole, Dave Franco seems a little one-note so far, and I can't decide whether I want them to do the inevitable episode revealing that he has hidden depths, or to avoid that trope, leave him as a complete tool, and then send him off wherever Ed went after Cox fired him last season.

• Expanding on my issues with bringing JD back, I think it might have worked if they had committed to the growth we saw over that final season - if, having heard Cox's speech about him to Sunny in "My Finale," he stopped being so needy for the guy's affection and could more comfortably treat him as an equal. John C. McGinley has plenty of opportunities to do slow burns in response to the med students without needing JD being a pain on top of that. The JD moments that worked best were either JD mentoring Lucy, JD cracking jokes with Turk (notably the song about Denise in "Our Drunk Friend"), and the moment in "Our First Day of School" where we realize that Cox and JD are only pretending to not understand the Aussie supermodel type because it amuses them to do so. I would have been fine with Braff's part-time return if he were allowed to play a JD who seems like an adult, who can finally treat Perry Cox as a colleague and not be so smarmy with the students, but still has his silly jokes with Turk. That would have been a nice transition for the newbies. Instead, we're just going back over old ground, and even the reprise of "Guy Love" didn't make me smile as much I as thought it would.

• Not all Turk/JD running gags feel played-out, however. I never tire of glimpses of them in college with their various awful hairstyles, this time riding a tandem bike in the middle of an otherwise raunchy party.

• I thought the revamped theme song (by WAZ, who's also the composer for "Cougar Town") and opening titles worked, though I wonder if they shot an alternate version for the episodes that won't be featuring Braff.

• Note that the affiliated college/med school is named after Lawrence's longtime producing sidekick Randall Winston, who played the hook-handed security guard on the show, and who has previously lent his name to the mayor on "Spin City" and the Janitor's crotch-punching little sidekick.

• Of all the brief appearances from old friends, my favorite may have been the moment where we're reminded of The Todd's psychic powers when it comes to people having sex in and around the hospital. But I don't want to give short shrift to Ken Jenkins, still a master at jarring shifts between vicious comedy and real pathos. Of course Bob Kelso would feel bad about Enid's death, even as he'd be back at work two days later. And of course Bob Kelso would be prepared to hit that with Cole's mom "like a big rig with no brakes."

• Like Turk, I would also watch a show about Fonzie and a Gremlin.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Reviewing the revamped 'Scrubs' - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I look at the new season of "Scrubs":

You can look at the new season of "Scrubs" either as a continuation of the series that aired its alleged finale last spring, or as a spin-off with the same name and many of the same faces.

I prefer the latter view, and not just because creator Bill Lawrence lost a fight with ABC to rename the show "Scrubs Med" to clearly delineate between the two. If we treat the new season - which relocates Sacred Heart Hospital to its nearby medical school campus - as a separate show, then we don't have to take anything away from the resurgent final season, or from the funny and poignant finale. Nor do we have to worry about the new incarnation threatening the legacy of the original show, any more than "AfterM*A*S*H" or "The Golden Palace" sullied the reputations of "M*A*S*H" and "Golden Girls."

Which isn't to say that "Scrubs Med" (whether ABC calls it that or not) is an abomination on the level of either of those shows. It's a solid little comedy, in which "Scrubs" fans can recognize the spirit of the show they loved, even if it's not "Scrubs" at its best.

You can read the full "Scrubs" review here. I'll have a post tomorrow night on the first two episodes. Click here to read the full post

Good news about 'Chuck,' 'Scrubs' and 'Better Off Ted'

Courtesy of my friend Joe, two bits of very good news (one surprising, one not) about shows of interest here on the blog:

• NBC is going to order six extra episodes of "Chuck," on top of the 13 already ordered (thanks in part to the passion of all the Subway-eating fans).

• "Scrubs" will be back on Dec. 1 at 9 with back-to-back episodes, and "Better Off Ted" will follow at 9:30 on Dec. 8. (I talked about the revamped version of "Scrubs" with Bill Lawrence a couple of months ago.)

We knew that ABC was going to bring those two comedies back in that hour, in between seasons of "Dancing with the Stars," so it was just a question of specifics.

The "Chuck" news, on the other hand, is as unexpected as it is cool, and I'll have some more thoughts on that after the jump...

None of this is official as yet, but coupled with the news that NBC won't give "Trauma" a back-nine order, it sure sounds like the plan is to pair "Chuck" with "Heroes" again ("Chuck" at 8, "Heroes" at 9), and probably to bring "Chuck" back in January so a bunch of episodes can air before the Olympics, as opposed to keeping the show off the air until March. (The alternative, which Joe suggests, would be to stick with the March launch and then run the show into the summer, but that seems less likely, given the network business model.)

While the Monday at 8 pile-up is still not ideal for the show, at least "Big Bang Theory" (which has by far the biggest audience overlap of any show in that timeslot last year) has moved. And between the failure of "Trauma," the delays on "Parenthood" (which at least has Lauren Graham to replace Maura Tierney) and the network's decision not to air "Southland" at all, there are holes to fill, even with Leno taking up five hours a week. "Chuck" is a known quantity for NBC, albeit a relatively low-rated one, so it can help fill those holes. And getting it on the air in January, if that's the plan, seems a good compromise between March (Olympic promotion, but way too long off the air) and rushing it on the air to replace either "Trauma" or "Southland" with no promotion. Now they can plug it for a while, at least during football and the Thursday comedies.

My one question is how the writers are going to handle the shift from 13 to 19 episodes. "Chuck" writer Ali Adler tweeted yesterday that they had just finished filming episode 8, and writing tends to be several episodes ahead of production, so they're not far from the end. So Fedak, Schwartz and company have two options:

1)Do the first 13 as planned, then continue the story with six more episodes after that.

2)End the season as planned, only in the 19th episode, and try to wedge in a bunch of additional stories (some self-contained, some not) in episodes 13-18.

Each option has its potential downside. "Felicity" tried Option 1 when the WB unexpectedly ordered some extra episodes at the end of their final season, which led to a weird time-travel storyline. "The Sopranos" went with Option 2 when its final season was split into two parts, which led to Gay Vito's trip to New Hampshire.

But one of my concerns about the 13-episode order (after I got over the joy and relief that the show would come back at all) was that the tight schedule meant we wouldn't get a chance to have some self-contained episodes that had nothing to do with the main arc, like "Chuck vs. Tom Sawyer" or "Chuck vs. the Best Friend". The extension may give the writers an opportunity to do a few more of those, though the timing may be awkward if they all come in a clump right after, say, The Ring has kidnapped Ellie and burned down the Buy More.

But it's six more hours of "Chuck" than I thought we'd be getting this year, on top of the 13 hours of "Chuck" I wasn't so sure we'd be getting, so I ain't complaining. Click here to read the full post

'Scrubs' creator previews next season - Sepinwall on TV

"Early Edition" time: because I'm going to have a whole bunch of long posts tomorrow morning (including the latest "Wire" rewind and an interview with Jon Hamm), I'm posting tomorrow's column -- in which "Scrubs" creator Bill Lawrence talks about the changes to the show for next season, and defends the decision to keep going after such a satisfying finale -- today.

And, for the "Scrubs" die-hards, after the jump is the transcript of the "Scrubs" portion of the interview I did with Bill at press tour. (We also talked "Cougar Town," but I'll save that for closer to that show's premiere; I wanted to get the "Scrubs" material out there because he's still casting the new leads, so some of what we talked about would be outdated within a few weeks.)

Both story and transcript feature what some might consider mild spoilers for the new season, both about the new characters and what's happening with a few of the old ones. But since Lawrence is treating this as a spin-off that retains a couple of characters, it feels more like I'm giving you information about the premise of a new show. But read on at your own risk.

(As always with my interview transcripts, the stuff in bold & italics are my questions; plain type are the answers.)

How happy were you with the finale?

Oh, it was awesome. Not like I'm self-aggrandizing, but we'd had the ending of the show amped up forever. We'd always known that, since we had a main character who had all these fantasies, that we could do the emotional wrap-up of the show without doing what every show had done before. It isn't, "Hey, everyone ends up happy!" It's just what he hopes it would be. And the show was over for him, and to finally write that thing that we had outlined three years earlier was really cool.

So the transition is, what do I feel like now that it's going forward?

Yeah.

Here's what I feel: I was listening to Stephen (McPherson) there saying it's not going to have a new title, which is true. But it is a new show. I tried to ask him to let me title it "Scrubs Med." He talked about the teaching aspect of it, but he wants to keep the brand, which I understand. Seventy percent of the cast and the setting, where the stories take place, is all different. We're on a (studio) lot now, we've built a huge college campus, and it's like UCLA where there's a teaching hospital attached. We tell the same tonal stories, but it's going to succeed or fail based on the new cast members. The only one returning is Eliza Coupe (as Denise/Jo), plus three new ones who are testing in about a week.

Well, if you were going to bring one of the young ones (from last season) back, it was her.

Oh, she is so talented. Even on a show with seven regulars, she was really talented with a one-line, one-note character. You don't have time to go, "Hey, it's the eighth year. We're going to put them aside and develop you." But she still made it interesting.

Is there going to be voiceover?

Yeah, new character.

So not Turk, not Cox.

Turk and Cox will take the emissary roles. Cox will be as Dr. Kelso was to the old show, and Turk will be this show's Dr. Cox. They're the holdovers. I think what we did that was crafty, if we can make it work, is that I hate when spin-offs don't have any continuity. "Frasier" was smart and they made him move. How are we going to attack this, knowing that I don't want to say that suddenly, Turk's wife is dead and Elliot's moved away? So the way the show's set up is Sacred Heart's been revamped and put on campus, and we actually have these buildings over at Culver Studios. And when the kids are working at the hospital, all the familiar faces will be passing by. I'm booking Sarah (Chalke), Judy (reyes), Ken Jenkins, Sam Lloyd, (Robert) Mascio. So what we're implying is that the hospital is still moving forward and existing, and you'll never notice it. Turk will be in most of the stories, and then one day, very casually, he'll run into his wife at a nurse's station, and it'll be as if she's been working there the whole time. The only thing hampering that for us at all is that Judy and Sarah are pregnant in real life. So they've got a short window of working.

Neil (Flynn) said this morning that he's coming back for at least one episode.

He's doing the first one. We'll leave an open door. In the best situation, he'll never be able to come back because his show will be a big hit. In the slightly not as (good) situation, he'll be back on the show.

Getting back to Judy and Sarah being pregnant, and the fantasy that JD watched in the finale -- the cool thing was, you could interpret it as either what he wishes happens, or what actually happened. So you could certainly do a story where Elliot's pregnant.

And we will. Because to us, it'll be nice that the show hasn't been on for a year. When we come in after "Dancing with the Stars," we'll imply that a year went by, and that JD is off working. It works for us. I'm way too nerdy about this show, you know, I love "Scrubs," and I couldn't just imply that JD left his wallet back there, or I'd be such a whore. But the one thing we always fudged, and that real doctors always gave us a hard time about, is that when you work in a teaching hospital, you have to actually teach. And we used to fudge it on the show with little classroom sets we'd build.

But now, that's the only shift. I've described it as like "Paper Chase." The main set we built, besides the new hospital, is a huge auditorium lecture hall where John McGinley lectures the new students. And he starts out saying he thinks of them all as tiny assassins who wander around the hospital killing people. And it's really funny. And these kids are going to be so young, man. I'd forgotten how young Zach and Sarah and Donald looked like when they started, but they were 24, 25, as interns, and these students are going to be 21, 22, and they look like infants. So that's the show.

So you won't be filming at the old hospital anymore?

No, we moved the whole thing to Culver Studios. The only piece of pipe we're implying is that the old hospital was such a piece of (garbage) that it got ripped down, and they put the new one up on campus. It has all the Sacred Heart logos on it, but it's the corporate building at Culver Studios. We built a brand-new set, but the idea is that they ran out of money because of the economy, so there's doors that go to nowhere and half-finished operating rooms and stuff.

Okay, I'm going to play devil's advocate here.

Go for it.

The last season was really strong. You got to bring the show back, got to do a great ending...

I know what you're going to say. Let me jump ahead. Here's how I rationalize it: I feel so good about what the show was that, if the worst-case scenario is that the show comes on for one year, doesn't find any audience and people feel that creatively it's not strong, as long as I know we tried, I can live with that. I won't get hung up on, "Did we ruin the legacy of eight years?" The high side was too high. I don't stand to make money on this particular year of the show. The syndication thing has run out, and it wasn't a huge hit its last year. For me, there wasn't a huge financial incentive to keep it going -- although in the best world, it'll catch a new audience and have a new life -- but what it came down to for me was talking to the people involved, many of whom I've worked with for eight years, and they were all, like, "Keep it going." For me, as long as I know we gave it a shot, I'll live with it. And we're really busting our hump with stories, and being interesting, and characters we haven't seen.

And keeping these people employed is more important to you than what happens (to the legacy)?

Sure, because to me, even a s--t-bomb year can't taint what was a great experience. That would be like me saying -- and this is a bad example, because I liked Charlie Sheen -- going, "Oh, I wish we had never done another year of 'Spin City' with Charlie." Who cares? It would be different if it was a mail-it-in, who gives a s--t?, and the quality was so bad. But we're going to try. The one thing I've said to everybody, and it's a quote I'm living by: It very well may suck. But don't say it sucks until you see it. And my pledge is that if it sucks, it's not going to suck in a fizzly way. It's going to suck in a giant, "Oh my god" kind of way, because we're really swinging for the fences and trying to do some big stuff.

So the new main character hasn't been cast yet, but he's going to do the voiceover...

It's a she, actually.

A she?

Dynamic shift.

Now, I was never a big fan of the "His Story"/"Her Story" episodes (narrated by other characters).

I felt in those stories that you had already established on the show that there was an inherent lead, so when we did those stories and he was gone, it was like, "Where's the lead?" In our first episode back, you'll know who the lead of the show is. The most interesting dynamic of the first six that Zach are in will be to see if audiences are savvy enough to follow the fact that, for his group of episodes, there's two people where you'll occasionally hear their thoughts. It helps us; it's almost a passing of the torch that we'll get to hear JD's thoughts.

But for me, it wasn't just that the lead wasn't narrating those episodes, but that JD had a specific worldview that made sense for us to be inside his head so much.

Without a doubt. And that's why the show is going to succeed or fail based on the strength of new characters.

So what can you tell me about them?

Eliza, I just like as an actress. We're just rounding her out more. Her main dynamic will be with Donald, because he's lost his best friend, essentially. We're trying to see what we haven't explored on the show, and we haven't done the guy and girl best friends. We thought that if Turk would be friends with any chick, it'd be with a chick who's like a guy.

The new male lead is somebody that we loosely based on the real JD again. The real JD didn't go to med school till he was 28, because he went to college as a math major, bounced around for a long time. So to have a med student who is 30, with a bunch of 21-year-olds, who is romantically involved with Eliza, who is two years his superior in here, and yet he's still the one adult among these kids, is really funny. That's going to be the hardest piece of casting. We're trying to find a laconic Bill Murray type of guy who can stand up to Dr. Cox. One of the early threads of the season is that we have a med student who's 30 and has some confidence behind him, and is only coming to it now because he flamed out at 21 and took a while to bounce back -- that's a guy that Dr. Cox would see as his new protege type, but in a way that JD never got. That's a guy Cox would respect and give an arm. So for JD on day one to see a med student getting that: "Are you f---ing kidding me?"

The female lead, her name is Lucy. She is very intentionally as young as a kid could possibly look. She is a sweet-faced young girl. She is based on somebody that Josh Bycel, our new head writer, knows. She is her family's big hope. First one in her family to go to college from a family of blue collar folks, pressure's on her, not even sure she wants to be there, she is from the smallest town, never seen anyone who talks so fast -- exact opposite of Sarah. The way that JD's fantasy life was dreamy and full of unicorns, hers is more fear-based. The fantasies you'll see at first are of a girl who thinks she's not just over her head, but a hundred feet deep.

And I can talk about this till I'm blue in the face. But none of this will work until we get to see the people. I got to do tryouts last year. You probably could've told me before I told you which one of them won. Zach called it "Scrubs Idol." Eliza won, and the girl Sonal (Shah), who I thought was adorable, will be back as a recurring character. What's harder is testing and trying to catch lightning in a bottle. It's either going to work or not work based on that. The writing will be solid, but you'll go, "The girl doesn't have that," and if it's not there, it's not going to work.

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com Click here to read the full post

Scrubs, "My Finale": Sacred Heart, unbroken

Spoilers for the "Scrubs" finale -- be it season or series -- coming up just as soon as I take the reins...

"I'm real sorry there, newbie. But this is not a special day for me. It's just a day." -Dr. Cox

"Endings are never easy. I always build them up so much in my head, they can't possibly live up to my expectations, and I just end up disappointed. I'm not even sure why it matters to me so much ow things end here. I guess it's because that we all want to believe that what we do is very important: that people hang on to our every word, that people care what we think. The truth is, you should consider yourself lucky if you even occasionally get to make someone, anyone, feel a little better. After that, it's all about the people you let into your life." -J.D.

"My Finale" made me happy. And it made me sad. Seems about right for the ending of a show that so often expertly balanced comedy and tragedy.

For that matter, "My Finale" did a nice job of being both a definitive ending for J.D. (and for Kelso) and just another day in the life for Cox, Turk, Carla and all the others are staying behind. Whether or not the show continues with a reconfigured cast, I like endings that acknowledge that the characters' lives continue, even though we won't get to see any of it.

Written and directed, as it should have been, by Bill Lawrence, "My Finale" hit all the necessary points. It gave us all those flashbacks to J.D. in the pilot, to show how far he's come -- and, for that matter, to show how much the characters around him grew and changed with him. (He humanized Cox, and Cox in turn humanized Kelso, more than either man would like to admit.) It featured a bunch of "Scrubs" Greatest Hits, whether it was Cox reciting the final lines of his greatest rant ever, or Turk giving J.D. his biggest and best "EEEEEAGLE!" It gave us a payoff to the debate about whether J.D. put a penny in the door -- and in doing so, brilliantly and permanently changed my impression of the J.D./Janitor rivalry -- and it gave us The Janitor's real name (Glenn Matthews), then immediately pulled the rug out from under the idea by having someone else walk by and call him "Tony." (And in so doing, it gave fans everywhere license to keep calling the guy whatever they want. He could really be Glenn, or Tony, or Jan I. Tor, or Neil Flynn, or Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate. It's all up to you to decide.)

It gave us that sweet J.D./Carla moment where they thought back on how he used to be "Bambi." It gave us one Turk/J.D. hug after another (along with the guys' delight at Carla and Elliot's mock girl-on-girl hug). It gave us a reminder that J.D. and Jordan slept together once upon a time, and it gave us that wonderful line-up of guest stars and minor characters from over the years, including, but not limited to: J.D.'s brother Dan, The Todd, Tasty Coma Wife, crazy Jill, Laverne, Rex, Ted's band, Dr. Wen, Colin Hay (who did appear on camera a few times), Lady, Keith Dudemeister, Dr. Mickhead, both the character Randall Winston (the little person custodian) and the producer Randall Winston (as the hook-handed security guard), the studly gynecologist, Mrs. Tanner (repeating the advice she gave J.D. at the end of "My Old Lady"), Colonel Doctor, Snoop Dogg Attending, and Hooch (now in a straightjacket, because Hooch is crazy!).

It was every bit the trip down memory lane I would have liked, without actually closing down the hospital or killing off anybody else major.

And then the show that always used music so brilliantly did it three more times at the end, first with Peter Gabriel's "The Book of Love" playing over J.D.'s imagined home movies of life after Sacred Heart (and, as with Janitor's name, it was presented in a way that allowed the audience to accept it as what would really happen, or not), followed by the guitar part of Lazlo Bane's "Superman" over J.D. driving out of the parking lot one last time, followed with the closing credits behind-the-scenes reel being accompanied by The Blanks singing their own version of "Superman."

Nice. Very, very nice. And that's not even mentioning maybe the best, most serio-comic moment in the whole hour: Cox delivering a heartfelt speech to Sunny about how much J.D. really means to him, with J.D. sneaking up behind him halfway through. (Like The Janitor, he staged a little play to get what he wanted, and I loved Sunny's horror at realizing the long-term implications of her involvement in it.)

I could go on for a while about the other moments in the finale (including Christa Millers' hilarious delivery of "I want to touch it but I don't!" as Jordan studied the blotch on Ted's skin), but "My Finale" deliberately put me in such a nostalgic mood that what I'd really like to do is let you waste some of your evening the same way I wasted much of this afternoon: by looking back at some classic moments from the eight-season run of this wonderful series. The YouTube links below are by no means complete, both for time and because not everything I wanted was posted (copyright issues prevent the "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" sequence from "My Last Words" from playing with sound, for instance), but here's some quality ones (in addition to the ones already linked to above, and feel free to post more of your own in the comments:

• Ben's funeral

• "Waiting For My Real Life to Begin" from "My Philosophy"

• "Guy Love"

• JD tries to comfort Dr. Cox in "My Lunch"

• Turk dances to "Poison"

• Turk rewrites the "Sanford & Son" theme

• Dr. Cox's back problem

• The best of Ted's band

• Dr. Cox gets payback on JD

• J.D. tells Janitor a riddle

• The complete saga of "Dr. Acula"

And before I go, I want to post an excerpt from a column I wrote at the start of the show's last season on NBC, when it looked like the show was limping to the finish line, instead of this wonderful, unexpected victory lap on ABC:

At a time when the traditional sitcom was beginning its death rattle, "Scrubs" proved that a little imagination and a lot of gusto could create a new kind of comedy that was funny without a laugh track. In the brilliant John C. McGinley's Dr. Cox (a kind of proto-House -- and, frankly, a more interesting dramatic character than House, though Hugh Laurie gets better jokes these days) and Ken Jennings' venomous chief of medicine Dr. Kelso, the show gave us two hilarious updates to the old TV cliche of the crusty but benign boss.

Before "The O.C." and "Grey's Anatomy" made it de riguer to close episodes with montages scored to cool indie rock songs, "Scrubs" was regularly making beautiful use of off-the-beaten-path music. The show also had a knack for doing its own ingenious musical numbers without making a big deal about it, like suicidal hospital lawyer Ted (Sam Lloyd) commenting on episodes with the help of his a cappella "band," or Turk celebrating the chance to remove J.D.'s appendix with a funky song and dance called "I Get To Cut You Open."

Because it debuted in the waning days of NBC's comedy empire (even briefly airing after "Friends," but so irregularly that it didn't help build an audience), overlapped with several other laugh track-free comedies that got bigger ratings and/or more award show love ("Malcolm in the Middle," "Arrested Development"), and comes to the end of its run with so many other shows having cribbed from it, "Scrubs" never got and probably never will get the credit it deserves. But at its best, it was as funny as any other comedy on television, as moving as any drama.

And with that, I bid farewell to "Scrubs" -- at least to this version of it. Whether or not the show comes back next year, regardless of what it's called, who's in it, and whether it's any good at all, we'll always have these eight seasons, and they'll always make me smile.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

'Scrubs' finale review - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I review the "Scrubs" series finale -- if, in fact, that's what it is -- and muse a little more on the wisdom of trying to keep the show going without Zach Braff and anyone else who can't/won't come back if the show gets picked up.

The finale's really good. I'll have a spoiler review up tonight as soon as it ends. Click here to read the full post

Scrubs, "My Chief Concern": A surgeon and a doc, above it all

Spoilers for the penultimate episode of "Scrubs" coming up just as soon as I stop for blueberries...

"I want you to stop changing your lives, okay? We've been conditioned to think that change is good and exciting, but what if it's not? What if it's actually very bad and very dangerous?" -Janitor

"My Chief Concern," which was bumped from its regularly-scheduled timeslot last week in classic "Scrubs" fashion, almost plays like an alternate, preliminary version of the series finale. It's written by Bill Lawrence's longtime lieutenants Neil Goldman and Garrett Donovan and directed by Zach Braff himself, and it focuses primarily on saying goodbye to the series' most important relationship: the undying bromance between J.D. and Turk. There's some more J.D./Turk farewell stuff in tomorrow's actual series finale, but considering how key this duo was to so much of the show's classic comedy (including the musical number that inspired this post's title), it felt right that they'd get an additional spotlight before the end.

When "My Cuz" aired a couple of weeks ago, we all wondered what the big deal was about a 37-minute commute, and "My Chief Concern" does a better job explaining why J.D. might feel compelled to take a job closer to his new apartment -- and why it would be a big deal in his friendship with Turk. They're not unattached 20somethings anymore. They have families and responsibility -- Turk especially, with a wife, one kid here and one on the way, and now the huge job of Chief of Surgery -- and if they're not working in the same place, the amount of time they'll see each other in a given week (or month, or year) plummets. Guys I used to work with, who I hung out with all the time, and who don't live that much further from me, now have to be scheduled in around playdates, bedtimes, family get-togethers, etc., etc., etc. And as Turk points out, it's only a 37-minute drive under optimal circumstances, and even then twice as long round trip for one or the other. It felt real -- not a great tragedy, but simply the way life moves on. The exact kind of change the Janitor fears is what happens to all of us if we're living our lives without our heads in the sand.

And even as J.D. and Turk's story was getting poignant, the rest of the episode brought plenty of marvelous comic moments, whether it was Elliot's disturbing sex fantasy ("but then it takes a left turn and I go on a killing spree"), Janitor playing father figure ("keep that anger growing, like an anger baby"), Kelso's own son becoming a full-fledged man whore, Ted horrifying everyone (including himself) with the mental image of him having sex(*), Turk's multiple ID badge photos, and Jimmy the Overly Touchy Orderly joining the Brain Trust and meeting his soul mate in The Todd.

(*) And, of course, the return of Gooch!, a character whom I feel needs an exclamation point next to her name, ala Jeffster!

Couple that with Elizabeth Banks getting to do something funny for the first time in forever as Kim, our first Denise sighting in a while(**), another fine musical montage choice in "Winter Song" by Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson, and the set up for Kelso's exit (he'll be traveling the country as a doctor with Locum Tenens), and you have a fine lead-in to the finale, which I liked a lot.

(**) Though I was confused about Cox needing to more or less introduce himself to Denise, as I can think of a few occasions where he led intern rounds and had conversations with her.

Tomorrow's Star-Ledger column will be a preview of the finale, including some more thoughts about whether I think the idea of continuing the show without Braff and others is a good idea, and I should have my finale blog review ready to post as soon as it ends.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Good news/bad news for 'Scrubs'

In a fashion sadly, amusingly reminiscent of the show's entire run on NBC, the penultimate episode of "Scrubs" this season is being bumped this Wednesday (along with the "Better Off Ted" season finale) by President Obama's latest primetime press conference. Both that "Scrubs" episode and the "Ted" finale will now air a week from tonight at 8, the night before the "Scrubs" season finale.

And, yes, there now appears to be a decent chance that it will just be a season finale and not a series finale. The Hollywood Reporter says ABC and Bill Lawrence are seriously discussing how to make a ninth season work, and that tracks with what I've heard in the last couple of days. Thoughts on this coming up after the jump...

Zach Braff's definitely going to be gone (though he might come back on occasion), and none of the other actors have contracts, with some of them (including Donald Faison, John C. McGinley, Neil Flynn and even Eliza Coupe, who I'm assuming would be one of the main characters of any "Scrubs: the Next Generation"-type series) already cast in other pilots that at the moment would have first position, contractually. But most pilots don't get picked up, and I imagine there's some combination of old and new castmembers (and producers, since Bill will theoretically be busy with his own pilot, "Cougar Town") that could be assembled to make it work.

So here's my question, which I've been asking on occasion in my "Scrubs" episode reviews this season: do you want the show to continue? While this season has benefited from a back-to-basics approach, it's also benefited (as other comedies like "Cheers" and "Frasier" and "Everybody Loves Raymond" did) from the production team's knowledge that the end was in sight, and their desire to use up all their best ideas while they still could. As good as some of the new interns have been -- with Coupe's surly Denise at the head of that class -- I wonder if the same energy level will be there a year from now.

On the other hand, if it means there's a chance of more Turk dancing, or more Cox rants, or more of Denise threatening to punch old men... well, I'm sure willing to give it a shot.

What do you think? More "Scrubs" a good idea, or would diminishing returns set in again? Click here to read the full post

Scrubs, "My Cuz": Sam he am

Quick spoilers for last night's "Scrubs" coming up just as soon as I make myself a TV critic hat...

It's a pre-requisite of these kinds of victory lap seasons to bring back as many memorable guest stars as possible, so it makes sense that we would see Kim and Sean again, and it's even kind of amusing that JD's baby mama and one of Elliot's two long-term boyfriends would wind up together. That said, Kim is a character the writers struggled to make funny (despite Elizabeth Banks being an actress capable of being very funny) outside of her first appearance and the episode where she gave birth, and while Sean was a more amusing character throughout his run (Scott Foley's equally good at light comedy and "Unit"-style ass-kicking), he didn't really seem like the guy I remember from the early seasons. So other than the introduction of the idea of Wiener Cousins (and the revelation that there are so many Cousins at the hospital), the comedy felt strained. I'm glad to get some closure on those characters, and this presumably sets up JD's exit from the hospital(*), but it could have been better.

(*) Is a 37-minute commute really so terrible? I used to work with a guy who commuted two hours from Bucks County, PA so he could spend time with his son, and he stayed in the job for years.

The Turk/Cox storyline, and Kelso's first dealings with the interns(**) were better, even though there's no way Turk (who's only a year or two out of his surgical residency) would be considered for such a position, even in a hospital as small as Sacred Heart. Cox's disdain for Turk, and Turk's refusal to take no for an answer, are two character traits the show has always used to good comic effect, and it was great to see Bob back in the hospital proper and not just lurking in Coffee Bucks.

(**) Has he met Denise yet? I know Denise has threatened to beat up an old man before, but I can't remember if Bob was the specific old man. Those two would be kindred spirits; if they haven't already had a scene together, I really hope they do before the end.

Only two episodes left, with the May 6 finale running an hour. It's been fun, hasn't it?

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Scrubs, "My Soul on Fire, Pt. 2": Hey Ya!

Spoilers for tonight's "Scrubs" coming up just as soon as I enjoy some ranch dressing...

I want to start off by kneeling at the altar of the musical god that is Sam Lloyd. We're eight years into the run of "Scrubs," a show that has made extensive and memorable use of music -- both pre-recorded tunes and a cappella reinterpretations by Ted's "band" -- and yet I would have to already place his slowed-down, acoustic rendition of "Hey Ya!" as one of my favorite "Scrubs" songs ever. I don't know if that was a pre-existing arrangment (the song's old enough, and was ubiquitous enough for a while, that I wouldn't be surprised if someone had done something similar before) or if this is something Lloyd came up with on his own, but it was beautiful, it gave me a new appreciation of a song I had long since grown sick of, and it seemed the perfect accompaniment to the reconciliation scenes for our three main couples.

So what I'm saying, I think, is that Sam Lloyd should be your next American Idol.

Having proved the point (as far as I was concerned, at least) that they could produce a funny episode filmed at a remote location with part one of "My Soul on Fire," Bill Lawrence and company (specifically, Bill Callahan, who wrote both parts) seemed content to move into more emotional territory for part two, as Cox forced Jordan to let go (as much as she could) of the fiction that they dislike each other, Carla realized that sometimes it's okay to be a wife first and a mother second (and Judy Reyes got her own chance to strut in a swimsuit), Janitor said something relatively heartfelt (and only slightly deranged) in his vows to Lady, and JD finally figured out the most romantic thing he could possibly say to Elliot:

"Elliot, I love you more than Turk."

Nice work all around by the entire cast, and the silliness with the imitation "Brady Bunch" tiki necklaces paid off well in a more dramatic context, which is the kind of thing "Scrubs" does so well when it's at its best.

And there was just enough comedy -- Kelso parking himself at the bar for the entire trip, Ted's ongoing sunscreen problems, Todd loudly high-fiving over the announcement of Janitor's name -- that it didn't feel like a complete 180 turn from the first part. Also, Lawrence -- who's always been very funny and charming at press events for the show -- acquitted himself just fine as justice of the peace Van, particularly his delivery of, "I am not a strong public speaker, nor am I that familiar with the Bible..."

What did everybody else think? And has Donald Faison ever done the George Jefferson walk before the way he did as Turk followed Carla into the ocean? Click here to read the full post