Scrubs - The Complete Fourth Season

Review By: Stephen Snart
StephenSnart@TheCinemaSource.com

Scrubs has been a personal favorite of mine ever since the first episode aired on NBC in early October of 2001. The show instantly won me over with its quirky mix of wacky surrealism and earnest sentimentality. While the shift from the absurdist to the heartfelt sounds jarring, Scrubs has always juggled the two emotions with ease. Four years before Grey’s Anatomy was conquering the Nielson ratings with its take on inter-Hospital love affairs and relations, Scrubs was prescribing the same formula and in my opinion (but evidently not the Nation’s), much more palatably than the soapy melodramatic world of Meredith Grey.

The show’s wonderfully off-beat tone has been cultivated by the directing, writing and performance in a number of specific ways. Scrubs is shot in single-camera style as opposed to four-camera simultaneous (as is the standard for sitcoms), and refrains from incorporating a laugh track. Even though this style has developed into the all-the-rage of network sitcoms nowadays, their sophisticated use of camerawork was still a rather underutilized approach to the format when Scrubs debuted. The writers are also to be credited for managing to sculpt every episode into a parable of sorts. For a show as silly in style as Scrubs, the writers consistently manage to incorporate some very grim and downbeat material, endowing the show with a poignancy absent from your average sitcom. This penchant for sentimentality would quickly prove trite if it wasn’t for the charming ensemble of skilled actors. In particular, Zach Braff, as the show’s loopy figurehead JD, endears his character with an intimate display of chronic self-deprecation.

Unlike Grey’s Anatomy, ER and Nip/Tuck, Scrubs takes a squeaky-clean approach to portraying the medical side of its subject material. While the cases are filled with believable jargon and interesting maladies, the nitty gritty elements are mostly left off-screen. The patients are transient beings and medical cases rarely overlap from episode to episode. It’s the relationships between the main characters that predominantly drive the series forward.

Season four welcomes newcomers with open arms as JD quickly fills in viewers on what happened at the end of season three via his omnipresent voiceover. JD’s best friend Turk (Donald Faison) has finally married Nurse Carla (Judy Reyes) and JD has effectively broken the heart of fellow doctor and perennially on-again/off-again girlfriend, Elliot (Sarah Chalke). This opening narration effectively charts the course for season four’s two predominant plot lines: Turk and Carla’s uneasy adjustments to married life and JD and Elliot’s quests to find new romance.

There’s an undeniable affability to the show’s characters and their sense of humor grounds the show in reality. Running jokes about JD accidentally introducing himself as “Johnny” to an attractive co-worker and having it stick in her head or Turk and JD rearranging the on-call schedules so that Doctors Turner and Hooch are repeatedly paired together are the kinds of small, humanistic touches that make Scrubs so relatable.

Another one of the show’s strong ...