‘Scrubs’: How a sitcom perfected the sentimental noughties needle drop
Earlier this month, the long-awaited reboot of the 2000s US sitcom Scrubs was officially announced, leading to much rejoicing among nostalgic Millennials who came of age with the inseparable duo of Dr Dorian and Dr Turk, played by Zach Braff and Donald Faison, respectively, alongside Sarah Chalke’s Dr Reid, and the rest of the gang at Sacred Heart Hospital.
With those three stars already supposedly committed to reprise their roles, the hope is that everything will magically pick up right where it left off in 2010—or better yet, where it was around 2007 before things started going downhill. When it’s all about nostalgia points anyway, what does continuity really matter?
Scrubs originally aired from 2001 to 2010, but thanks to the once-mighty proliferation of DVD boxsets, followed by the emergence of the streaming era, the show has enjoyed something of a Friends-like constancy. Fans can seamlessly jump into any random episode from any season without much concern for any ongoing plot points.
The show was created somewhat in the mould of Friends and originally aired on the same US network, NBC, but its methods for exploring the interpersonal relationships of a group of 20-somethings were a bit more imaginative, utilising magical realism and a heavy emphasis on big musical cues to take considerably bigger swings than your average American sitcom. Sometimes, it could venture into heavy-handed sentimentality, particularly as sensitive medical intern Dr John ‘JD’ Dorian would narrate his valuable life lesson of the week, usually backed by a cloying, on-the-nose pop song like The Fray’s ‘How to Save a Life’ or Coldplay’s ‘Everything’s Not Lost’.
Considering that Scrubs pre-dated the similarly needle-drop oriented hospital show Grey’s Anatomy by several years, it deserves some credit for setting a real precedent when it came to using pop songs and voiceover life lesson summations as key components of virtually every episode. Showrunner Bill Lawrence, along with Braff himself, were focused on the importance of those needle-drop selections from right off the bat in season one, and despite the presumably budget-inflating consequences, they continued to emphasise extended musical sequences throughout the show’s run, often bringing new mainstream attention to bands that might not otherwise have found it.
It included everyone from ‘90s indie heroes like Guided by Voices and Fountains of Wayne to up-and-coming artists of the 2000s (Joseph Arthur, The Decemberists, Paolo Nutini, The Coral, and more). The Shins’ song ‘New Slang’ even appeared in a season one episode two years before Braff made it a key plot point in his own film, 2004’s Garden State.
In the past few years, many commentators have credited the hit show The Bear with choosing to feature a consistent diet of remarkably un-obscure “dad rock” as its major needle drops, leaning away from the usual hipster highbrow instincts of prestige TV. Scrubs carved out that MOR path a long time ago, though, as a good 75% of its music leaned toward the vanilla; the saccharine, or what JD would have called “sensie” music.
Artists like Keane, Joshua Radin, Sister Hazel, Howie Day, Lifehouse, and Five For Fighting made the sort of songs that a 12-year-old might choose as the closing track on a mixtape, and that same effect works just as well for closing out an episode of a comedy show. The viewer is never startled out of their comfy nest of sitcom safety, even when Scrubs sometimes ventures into challenging issues like heartbreak, addiction, mental health, and death.
Perhaps nobody benefited more from Scrubs’ celebration of uncool music than former Men at Work frontman Colin Hay, who made a number of cameos in the show as a possible figment of JD’s imagination, popping up with an acoustic guitar to sing a song that captures whatever his state of mind is at that moment. Hay was so good in the role that he managed to pick up an entirely new fan base and boost his solo career in the process. Zach Braff is probably hoping that a return to Sacred Heart does something similar for his own career, which has never quite matched the heights of his Scrubs/Garden State heyday 20 years ago.
