When Good Things Happen To Good Television
There are a lot of jokes in Hollywood about suits and their ability to kill a good idea (see: cute kid character added to bring about the demise of a once-good show). And there are a lot of stories about networks killing shows before they can find an audience (never mind that one week is insufficient time to build viewership). But there aren’t many stories about survival despite the odds.
Friends (you know who you are) have been recommending Scrubs for some time. While I’m admittedly, oh, five seasons behind, I’m thinking it’s time I gave this show a chance. My original hesitation was well-founded: when it debuted, NBC was in the throes of its “Must See TV” blitz; I found I didn’t wanna see anything they though I must. Naturally, I assumed Scrubs was of the same ilk, and had the network execs prevailed, it would have been.
Sometimes it’s good to be wrong. The next I push one of my three permitted buttons on the remote control, I’m going to add a Season Pass to Scrubs.
It turns out that this single-camera show without a laugh track has always been a little strange. I like that. And it turns out that sometime last season, Bill Lawrence, the creator and executive producer, gave up. He stopped audience-building and learned to love the show.
The result is that “Scrubs,” always a schizophrenic mix of cartoonish jokes, surrealist fantasy sequences and genuinely poignant life-or-death moments, has become even weirder, thick with inside jokes, psychotic monologues, a cappella singing in the elevator, bizarre secondary characters like the High-Fiving Surgeon, the Sweaty Lawyer and the Absent-Minded Morgue Attendant, and the continuing adventures of a megalomaniacal maintenance man who has crowned himself the King of Janitoria. There have been ravens and ostriches and a front deck built on a lot with no house. Pumpkins are raised as children. Alzheimer’s patients go on tackling binges. Also, and this can be the tricky part, people get cancer and die.
Also, increasing in popularity with viewers, thanks in no small part to embracing new media as well. This means I’ll be adding the show to my forthcoming NBC/new media case study.
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2 Comment(s) so far
1. Medialoper » The Weekly ‘Loper - April 16, 2006 wrote on April 16th, 2006 at 11:22 am
[...] When Good Things Happen To Good Television - Kassia discovers Scrubs. The rest of us (especially the ones who discovered it last year) wonder what took so long. [...]
2. Medialoper » How The Pilot That Nobody Watched Got Itself See By Everybody wrote on July 5th, 2006 at 7:16 am
[...] This is why the story of the probably-about-to-be-resurrected Nobody’s Watching is both a beacon of hope and a cautionary tale. The pilot, championed by NBC executives (though deemed not right for that network’s slate), failed to make the cut for, wait for it, the WB’s prime time schedule. Yeah, you hit rock bottom and then fail? Bill Lawrence, who has spent years hearing about the failure that is Scrubs, created Nobody’s Watching, created the show, your basic parody of the entertainment industry, and then watched it fall by the wayside. You’d think that the networks would have caught a clue from their experience with Scrubs and even Family Guy (staff of which is also involved in Nobody’s Watching). [...]