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?

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?

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?

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?

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."

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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.