Scrubs: Season 9

Over a year ago, I lamented the existence of a ninth season of Scrubs in my review of Season 8. I drew parallels between the series and Brett Favre, and I'll point out some erie irony about that later. Anyway, apparently ABC was just as skeptical as I was about a ninth season, as they burned off the shortened order of 13 episodes in the months of December and January, hastily ending the "should have been a full-blown spin-off" experiment without really giving it a chance to succeed. Fine. Scrubs veterans should recognize (from the DVD cover above) J.D., Dr. Cox, and Turk without a problem. So I'll just spend a few sentences on each of the remaining (new) main character depicted above. Starting from the upper left, we have Denise, the only "new" character who we've seen before (in Season 8). I liked her a lot but they kind of messed up her "cold as ice" hot-looking tomboy gimmick by writing in way too many issues and insecurities. Even though she was just an intern last year, she's treated like a full-blown doctor on par with the other three surgeon-masked main characters this time around. I thought Season 8 gave us a lot of great interns (most notably Aziz Ansari's awesome slacker character) and I figured Season 9 would turn those guys into the main characters. Instead, we have a lot of new ones. Just below Denise is her boyfriend Drew, who also happens to be Dr. Cox's new protege. Drew, in a word, is boring. He's on his second go-round of med school after falling on some tough times back in his first stint in the '90s. Because he's been there before, he's kind of like a veteran role model for a lot of the other students, much like Joel McHale does in Community. In fact, he even looks and acts like a poor man's Joel McHale. Below him on the cover is new main character Lucy, who, come to think of it, kind of looks like a poor woman's Amy Poehler on the DVD cover. The Lucy character just kind of spends the thirteen-episode season getting down on herself and then being inspired to keep doing med school. That actress was going to have a tough time replacing J.D. as the show's main character, sure, but I still think it at the end of the day either she or the writers could have done a better job making the character more likable and less hopeless and cliched. Finally, to her right is Cole. If you think Cole looks like a poor man's James Franco, you'd be on the right track - the actor is Franco's younger brother. How about that? Anyway, Cole definitely had the most growth over the season, starting out as a loathsome and unlikable hotshot before the writers toned him down into a general twenty-something idiot with a frat mentality. By season's end he may have been the character I enjoyed the most. So, kudos to Franco and the writers for making him work. Now, as far as the season in general was concerned, I don't think it worked. If you want to look at it as the last season of Scrubs then it was an utter failure, having stripped the main cast from Seasons 1-8 down to two regulars and three recurring members. If you want to look at it as a spin-off then it fails once again, as its not different enough from Scrubs to feel new in any way. At the end of the day, I think, as I've always thought, that this season never should have happened. But that doesn't mean I didn't have my fair share of laughs along the way. (It's still Scrubs, after all, and for any comedy to last nine years on TV it must be pretty decent.) Now, let me get back to the Brett Favre analogy I've been making for years now. Like Scrubs as a TV comedy, Brett Favre has lasted a hell of a long time as an NFL quarterback. But Scrubs kind of petered out with a shortened and forgettable season instead of going away on a high note. And on this exact day, Brett Favre may lose the starting job on the Vikings, also petering out after a shortened and forgettable season instead of going away on a high note (the NFC championship game). And I'm going to see the game live in person in like an hour or two. Will I really be going to see the end of that era on the same day that I saw the end of the Scrubs era on DVD after I've been comparing the athlete and the show for years? That's just downright erie. I suppose such a coincidence would only happen on Halloween.