Hell motherfuckin yeah, I thought. Scrubs is back!
We half-watched Earl, thoroughly enjoyed The Office and then settled in for a post-dinner treat – the season premiere of our favorite hospital-based comedy! JD, Turk, Dr. Cox and all the rest had been patiently waiting for prime time to welcome them back into the fold. And here we were in the onset of the blustery winter all set and looking forward to the warm, welcome confines of Sacred Heart and the laughs and poignant moments we’ve come to expect.
Someone tell me when we can expect those good times to return, tonight’s premiere episode really fell flat. I’m the first to admit to being a Scrubs fanatic. I love me some Scrubs and have for a long time. Yet as I sat watching I found myself intentionally laughing at things I wouldn’t normally find funny, trying to jump start the episode across the ether. The damn engine just wouldn’t turn over.
We were brought up to speed on our characters with the pregnancy storylines encircling the three main characters Perry Cox, JD and Turk/Carla. Perry and his ex-wife Jordan were expecting their second, Turk and Carla expecting their first delivery of twins and JD just having found out he knocked up a co-worker, Kim on a one night stand.

Dr. Cox (and his craptacular new jeri curl hairdo) is in his usual fine form of being antagonistic and sardonic toward Jordan while trying to be an on-again, off-again good father toward their son Jack. Jack, in turn, is being a kid and making Perry’s life a living hell. Perry loses his cool and dumps some spaghetti on Jack and in any other sitcom I’d try and remember that for later but this is Scrubs – it’s just funny and meaningless, right? Not so as Jordan mentions it later, taking some of the spontaneous slapstick humor out of this normally good show.

JD is freaking out over the news from Kim. He ends up drinking himself stupid on his porch (still a flocking spot for gay seniors) and ends up passing out after mentioning he’d be better off gay. This leads to a quick montage where he’s dragged out to Vegas and almost marries a dude, making a last minute escape culminating in a cameo by The Blue Man Group. Something blue, all right. This episode.
Sarah Chalke apparently had nothing better to do in the premier episode so she was given a stereotypical storyline of wishing she was having a baby to fit in with everyone else. Because apparently all the work done by the writers in the 5 previous seasons hasn’t done anything toward fleshing her out to be more than a common, baby-wisting chick all knee-jerking and sighing. I just refuse to believe Elliot had nothing more to contribute to the episode than that and I hope they more with her next week.

Turk and Carla were also not featured prominently. Sure they’ve having twins but let’s focus on a trilogy of subplots dealing with Cox, JD and the Janitor all wondering if there’s more to life than what their shortsightedness allows them to see. I think that was supposed to serve as the usual fix of emotional relevance but it seemed not only forced but amateur with the use of the same actors in latex makeup as alternate characters confronting their younger versions to serve as some sort of example of what not to do. Oooh Cox’s dies of anger, the Janitor’s of regret over obsession … blah blah blah.

Give me My Day At The Races from last season where JD faces turning 30 and panics, trying to run a decathalon and ending up almost failing, only to be helped to the finish line by Elliot where Turk and Carla are waiting for him. It has pretexts of despair, mortality, friendship and a million facets of regret and dreams that this season premiere completely lacked. I felt nothing for it while even thinking about that episode from last year gives me goosebumps. That was good television. This was not.

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