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It was just about the worst-kept secret in Hollywood, but ABC made it official today, announcing it will scoop up the Sacred Heart crew for an eighth season, ending the red-headed stepchild treatment the show had gotten for so long at NBC. We gotta give the Peacock credit, though, for sticking with it through season after season of so-so ratings, and not cramming another hour of “Biggest Loser” down our throats.

One of the biggest hurdles “Scrubs” has faced has been its carousel of time slots. None other than “The Simpsons” made reference to the problem on last week’s episode, with Homer saying that his mother — who comes in and out of his life without warning — is “just like that show ‘Scrubs.’ ” Of course, his mother died later that episode. Kind of a bad sign.

Speaking of “Scrubs”/”Simpsons” mash-ups, check this out.

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So, if this is the way NBC is going to continue to treat this show, then I say good riddance. After seven years, the finale we get is a middling “Princess Bride” homage that is stingy with laughs and generally low on energy. The laughs part is on the writers, of course, and maybe the direction of Zach Braff, who helmed this episode, but did NBC aired this episode — which is Episode 709 — out of order. Last week’s show was Episode 711. This begs the question, did they purposefully pick a weak episode to leave a bad taste in viewers’ mouths so they won’t make the presumed leap to ABC that’s coming this fall?

Then again, there is precedence for the out-of-order airing. Remember a couple seasons ago, when Carla all of a sudden was using a cane to walk around, and it wasn’t explained until a few episodes later — during which she started using the cane — why she needed it. Then there was Cox showing up with a shaved head one episode, out of the blue, then proceeding to shave his head the very next week. [Read more →]

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Or, you could call it, “My Penultimate Episode on NBC.” It’s all but a given that the Sacred Heart gang is moving to ABC for its unforeseen eighth season — the cast and crew have reportedly already begun production — so there’s a strange bit of purgatory hanging over these last few eps. Usually a season builds momentum to a big finale, sprinkling story points along the way that will end in some resolution before trotting out another cliffhanger. But Bill Lawrence & co. don’t seem interested in that, plus, you throw in the writers strike that ate up a couple months’ worth of shows and it’s made for a very jagged run.

That being said, the episodes themselves have been pretty good. After Kelso’s satisfying departure last week (sorry for the no-blogsies, I was out feeding my inner film geek), Dr. Cox has been put in charge. The comic possibilities here are massive, and things start off the right way, with the inevitable correcting of anyone who forgets to address him as “Chief Dr. Cox,” but I was surprised how Perry was pretty much sitting on his duff this whole episode. After seeing Elliot’s inordinate excitement over his promotion, he prescribes her a chill pill, then pretty much shuts down. The obvious arc would be for him to discover how hard Kelso really had it, and how much his evil persona was really a method of coping and sometimes even maintaining the peace. Or he’ll become drunk with power, which would be more fun. The preview for next week shows Kelso back in uniform, though, so who knows what is in store? The only time we saw him this week was laughing hysterically after being asked to take care of some paperwork that pertained to his tenure. He wasn’t living it up on the beach somewhere, but standing on a sidewalk somewhere not too exotic. Hmmm … [Read more →]

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Male breast cancer, lost testicles, sensitive man-hugs and, of course, banana hammocks are all in the mix as the Sacred Heart gang struggles with issues of masculinity. Well, the dudes do. Carla and Elliot simply wonder how men can be so shallow (seemingly forgetting all their own stupid fights).

After a dressing-down from Cox over his penchant for snapping his fingers during West Side Story (it’s happened before), and a beat-down from Turk in an old-fashioned bout of Remote Wrestling, J.D. worries he’s not the best male role model for baby Sam. On the bright side, the kid gets the most screen time in his young life, assuring for one more week he won’t fall victim to neglectful sitcom parenting.

J.D. notices Turk seems to be unleashing his inner alpha lately but doesn’t bother to ask why. Undeterred, he challenges Turk to a rematch and accidentally comes out on top after an inadvertent elbow to the face knocks C. Bear out cold. J.D. shows off for the audience, but knows Turk will want some payback. Before the throwdown, though, J.D. finds out Turk recently had a testicle removed thanks to an errant kick from his daughter. They eventually decide to stage a Rocky III-style freeze-frame photo of them about to punch each other, and each can make themselves the victor in front of captive audiences.

Elliot and Carla treat a macho dude who finds out he has breast cancer but doesn’t want to tell his brohams. This really is a means to an end, for it allows Elliot to realize that when she earlier eavesdropped on Kelso talking about his upcoming mandatory retirement, he was really reaching out for her help. I don’t think the cancer dude ever got mentioned again. Elliot recruits Carla and the whole hospital (save Cox) to pleads Kelso’s case to the board.

It’s good to see that after seven seasons, we can still learn something about the characters and not just rely on the same-old near-kisses and Cox-gets-serious moments to pull us through. Especially nice this episode was the joining together of Janitor, Murphy, the Todd and Ted (as the invisible investigative reporter!) to produce a thrice-daily newsletter called The Janitorial. It led to some funny gags and offered a creative solution to how to get more screen time to the “Scrubs” day players.

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Undeterred by a three-month long break brought on by the writers strike, the gang at Sacred Heart returned with a pretty funny episode that introduced two notable terms into the “Scrubs” lexicon — “Amigoville,” a fantasyland J.D. conjures up where Mexican day laborers take white people who are nice enough to learn Spanish (they have guacamole lakes and HUGE churros there); and “brinner,” Turk’s idea of nirvana in which you eat breakfast food at dinner (wine with pancakes is his preferred combo).

While J.D. still narrates and helps a burn victim attend his high school graduation, the episode belongs to Turk. He and Carla are celebrating an anniversary (six years since their first date), so as his present to he he is going to reveal that he has learned Spanish. Problem is, after listening in on a few phone conversations that Carla conducts in Spanish, he decides the gift might have better uses. For himself. He eventually is conflicted about it, despite Cox and Kelso telling him that spying on their wives is the key to marital happiness — Cox reads Jordan’s diary to know her hopes and dreams, making it easier to crush them. Sorry, can’t remember what Bobbo said, if anything. He was more memorable for what went into his mouth than what came out of it, but more on that later.

[Read more →]

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Bob Kelso isn’t letting a little impending forced retirement keep him down. In fact, last week’s big development is given nary a mention as the doctors become obsessed with the diabolical administrator’s latest maneuver. During downtime between chapters of the final “Harry Potter” book, Bobbo has linked Sacred Heart to a website that lets patients rate doctors, and the ratings become just the latest way for alpha males Turk and Cox to compete, while J.D. tries to act like he doesn’t care. That is, until he finds out he’s the top doc. Take that, Chocolate Bear!

Plot B follows Janitor and his new lady friend, the oddly named Lady. Funny, she seemed like just a punchline to a throwaway joke in a recent episode, but here she is, with lines and everything. Apparently Janitor has gotten in her good graces by pretending to be a regular person. That means wearing cardigans and keeping the stuffed-squirrel-army talk to a minimum. But Carla sees trouble ahead, and tells Janitor he better start being himself if he wants the relationship to last. When he finally decides to come clean, he forgets the fine art of moderation, spilling his guts at a furious pace and freaking out poor Lady. Carla steps in, says Janitor is just kidding, then tells him privately that he can’t let all his “crazy” out at once. This is all fine and good, but I’m still waiting for Neil Flynn to break into a ripping solo of the old Styx song “Lady” that, per his comedic stylings this season, goes on long after it’s stopped being funny.

J.D.’s joy in being No. 1 — the only other time he can remember being a winner was during a game of “Nerd Toss” during high school, with him as the nerd — is short-lived. Turk and Cox persuade the Todd, who is also busy promoting his website thetoddtime.com to anyone and everyone, to tell all his patients that he’s Dr. John Dorian. This, naturally, leads to a precipitous drop in J.D.’s ranking. J.D. lays on the guilt to Turk, who asks what he can do to make amends. Cue up an extended fantasy sequence of Turk trying to pass various horses off to J.D. as unicorns, only to find that the horn keeps coming off and that sorry, J.D., unicorns don’t exist.

There actually was a serious plot in here somewhere. Elliot makes friends with an ALS patient, who despite her good humor about the situation, is trying to kill herself by overdosing on her meds. Should Elliot stay quiet and be a good friend, or be a good doctor and alert the patient’s nurse to the situation? This is a thorny issue that surprisingly hadn’t been handled on the show before. Elliot’s decision to keep mum isn’t all that surprising, despite her hard-core Republican leanings, cuz really, were they going to show the ALS patient come back in a few weeks, immobile, near-death and hating on Elliot?

As far as series-ending momentum goes, nothing happening here. Strictly a placeholder episode, unless we’re building to a Lady-Janitor commitment ceremony, which seems unlikely. But it’s always nice to see that J.D. mullet.

Comic highlight: Turk and Cox square off in a contest to see who can withstand the stench emanating from a patient’s fungal infection the longest. Turk wins, by a nose.

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What has two thumbs and has to retire? Bob Kelso. Turns out the administrator/devil in a white coat has been acting weirdly juvenile this season (“Hells, yeah!”) for reasons that have nothing to do with his newfound bachelorhood. He’s 65, mandatory retirement age at the hospital, and the search for his replacement is on. My prediction: It will be revealed that throughout his time at Sacred Heart, Janitor has acted as an undercover monitor in order to find out what’s wrong at the hospital he one day will run. His true identity is that of a brilliant neurosurgeon named — wait for it — Dr. Jan Itor!

Age and maturity themes run through this episode, which isn’t quite successful at the blending of wacky comedy and poignancy that is a Scrubs staple. Turk and J.D. desperately try to find time amid their lives as new dads for games like “World’s Largest Black Doctor” until a scolding from Cox shames J.D. into putting away childish things. Pity poor Turk, standing alone in his extra-large doctor’s coat and stethoscope. This isn’t a bad issue for J.D. to deal with, but since when have harsh words from Cox ever changed J.D.’s behavior? Turk made a much more compelling argument to grow up just a couple episodes back, which seems to be a recurring theme this season. We had Carla repeating advice to Elliot “two weeks” later, and J.D. mentions that “two weeks ago” Turk was telling J.D. to grow up, and now Turk is trying to revive his friend’s immaturity. What is it with the “two weeks” thing? And hey, acknowledging lazy writing does not excuse lazy writing. Remind me to tell you again in two weeks.

Cox delivers that scolding because he’s in a bad mood over some parents who won’t tell their 9-year-old son he has leukemia. Perry takes it upon himself to tell the boy, which infuriates not only the parents, but also Carla, who believes Cox has taken the boy’s childhood from him. My counter would be that it was the blood cancer that did that, but whatever. Carla drives her point home saying that the kid was doing so much Internet research on leukemia and mortality rates that she had to give him one of Turk’s basketballs (which she didn’t realize was autographed by Michael Jordan) to get his mind off it. “Baby, you’re going to get my basketball back from that cancer kid” was my favorite line of the night.

Cox isn’t limiting his sourpuss-ness to his patients. When his son Jack wants to hear Daddy make the funny voice that helps him go to sleep, Cox refuses, saying 4 years old is too old for funny voices. Even for Cox, this is pretty harsh. Upon hearing Carla’s plea for extended childhoods, however, he reconsiders and makes with the goo goo gaa gaa.

When Elliot and Janitor find out it’s Kelso’s birthday, they decide to throw him a party. Ted at first refuses to be recruited to help the man who makes his life a living hell, to which Elliot nods understandingly. What can Ted do except fold like the cheap suits he wears and agree to pretty much set up the whole thing? Something’s fishy, though. Kelso keeps telling everyone he’s 58, but people seem to remember him saying that several years in a row. A little digging through the personnel files shows that his true age is 65. After stomaching the party — which Ted festooned with Hanukkah decorations that were on sale — Kelso gets the news that he has to leave. He asks the board member to keep it quiet, although J.D. apparently knows about it, given his narration. Hmmm …

Not a bad effort, but other than the Kelso stuff, it seems like everyone’s just treading water. And where was the Todd?

Some highlights:

– One of the games Turk uses to try to lure J.D. back into adolescenthood is the old favorite, Find the Saltine.

– “Hooch is crazy!”

– Apparently there is a fifth (or in this case, third) Beatle in J.D. and Turk’s band of merry men. On only their second day of knowing each other, the Latino man they called “Caramel Bear” (possibly played by the guy who was Pedro in “Napoleon Dynamite”) — to complement Chocolate Bear and Vanilla Bear — bravely volunteered to pull a prank that involved him putting a bag of you-know-what on someone’s doorstep. Problem is, the owner of the house — the kind of burly, bearded man they warn new prison inmates about — was waiting. He opened the door, pounced on Caramel Bear and pulled him into the house. He was never heard from again.

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I’ll start off by saying one of my pet peeves about TV shows is when a character has a child, then said child is trotted out only when it’s convenient for the plot. NBC has had its share of offenders in recent years, with Frasier Crane and Ross Geller being perhaps the most absentee fathers in the history of the boob tube. J.D. is nowhere near that point yet — Sammy is just a couple episodes old, after all — but the poor tyke has already suffered his first snub. He’s nowhere to be seen in this week’s show.

That said, this is the first effort of the season that has felt like vintage “Scrubs.” The plotting is tight, the themes consistent and, best of all, everyone acts in character. Beyond that, they’ve finally expanded Carla’s role beyond pep talk duty.

In fact, we forgo the usual J.D. narration opening, and start right off with Carla and Turk messing around in bed. A patient’s bed. When Turk starts to strap her down, she purrs with excitement. But things take a dark turn when J.D. shows up. Turk has invited him there to kill Carla, so the two “guy love” sillies can go live together and give baby Isabella to Elliot, who conspires in the scheme by dialing the electric resuscitators up to the “Kill Carla” setting. Cut to a screaming Carla, waking up in bed at home, realizing it was all a nightmare. But it wasn’t the killing and baby kidnapping that Carla found truly disturbing. It was that the dream came to her in English — which helped the viewing audience tremendously but made Carla fear she was losing touch with her Latin identity, and thus will hamper her from passing it on to her daughter.

Turk consoles her in his usual sensitive way. “Baby, you’re from Chicago! Just get her a deep-dish pizza.” [Read more →]

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J.D. became a father in last week’s show, but you’d never know it through most of this week’s episode. That’s kind of the point, I guess, as the through-line ends up being, “J.D., you need to grow up.”

This initially comes from the unlikeliest of sources — J.D.’s ne’er-do-well older brother, Dan, played as always by Tom Cavanaugh. Man, these guys really look like brothers. It should be required in any project that if one of them has a sibling (male or female), the other gets a call. Uncanny!

Despite an immature, hilarious introduction — in which Dan poses as a mutilated corpse on an operating table, only to scare the bejesus out of J.D. with the help of a compliant Turk — Dan finally seems to have his act together. He’s gotten out of the bartending business (and his mom’s attic) and now flips real estate, buying fixer-uppers and selling them for profit. It fits him, he says, because it involves lying and doublespeak. He is doing so well, in fact, that he is able to buy J.D. a new car. A hybrid, no less. It’s the perfect gift, Dan says, because it ensures that J.D. will not have to travel 40 minutes on a scooter to see his son. Sorry, Sasha. It appears your work here is done. [Read more →]

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Following a so-so debut, Season 7 suddenly shows much more promise after putting to rest any fears that the show would end its run with a wacky episode detailing the birth of J.D.’s baby. In my worst nightmares, I could see Robin Williams guest-starring as that zany OB he played in “Nine Months.” Or, even more horrifying, as Patch Adams.

But evidently, that’s not what the producers had in mind. The theme song hasn’t even kicked in when J.D. gets the call that Kim has gone into labor. This prompts him to guilt Turk and Carla into a three-person celebratory jump hug, which they’d warned him would be cheesy. But he insists. After a few hops and giggles, J.D. agrees that he “shoulda listened,” and looks down in shame. There’s a nice payoff later on, when Elliot offers to partake in a jump hug, and J.D. refuses, citing the aforementioned cheesiness. “Please,” Elliot says, “you probably loved it, but just were too embarrassed to admit it.” To which J.D.’s inner monologue replies, “Damn. She knows me.”

While the main drama comes from J.D. and Kim sorting out their relationship during childbirth, there’s still plenty for everyone else to do. Turk has become addicted to a violent video game, but it may be less about bloodlust than it is about the escape it provides from constant parenting. He sneaks his Xbox 360 off to the hospital to finish the game while supposedly being there for his “Nilla wafer” friend. Problem is: he needs a partner. Bob Kelso’s refusal reveals a lot about his personal life. “I would, Turkleton, but I only play Pac-Man and that carjacking game. There’s nothing like scoring a Caddy and mowing down some street hoes.” We also learn that his wife, Enid, has kicked him out after catching him putting the moves on her speech therapist. And he seems to be going through some kind of delayed midlife crisis, having moved into the hospital and living like a college student. Kelso tells people he has to leave, because he has a ‘za coming. And, as Janitor explains after an elaborate high-five with him, “We’re friends at night.” [Read more →]

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