Scrubs Review

Bill Lawrence shoots in a decommissioned hospital, drops the laugh track, and lets his lead narrate the whole thing from inside a daydream, and the result is the comedy doctors keep naming as the most accurate show about their job. The daydreams are the format, a cutaway every ninety seconds fired fast enough that the misses do not matter. Critics liked it on arrival and liked it more once it proved it could turn.

My Screw Up and My Lunch are half hours that begin as farce and end in grief, and they land because the series has spent years earning the right to stop joking. John C. McGinley is the engine, delivering Cox's monologues at a clip that would collapse a lesser actor, and Zach Braff, Sarah Chalke, Donald Faison and Judy Reyes make a hospital feel like a group of friends rather than a cast.

Neil Flynn's janitor is largely invented on the spot and is better for it. The problems are real. Sentimentality is the house vice, and the closing voiceover lesson goes from a grace note to a formula somewhere in the fourth season. The romantic plotting spins in place for years. Visually it is bright, flat network coverage built to stay out of the way of a gag. And then there is the ninth season, an ill judged medical school reboot that keeps the title and almost nothing else, and which nearly everyone involved has since agreed should not carry the name.