When I first saw Scrubs, I thought it was a stupid show. It seemed to be a bunch stupid characters incapable of making an intelligent decision, the kind of show that makes me cringe and shout at the TV, “It is inhumanly impossible to be that stupid!” Those kinds of show annoy me more than they make me laugh.
In fact, it reminded me a lot of Three’s Company. Now, Three’s Company probably had the stupidest, fakest, and shallowest characters ever known to man. It would be wrong to call Jack, Janet, and Chrissy one-dimensional caricatures; that would be an insult to one-dimensional caricatures. No, Jack, Janet, and Chrissy (and her replacements) completely lacked any dimension at all. They had no capacity to change or learn or grow. They were inhuman. They were (poorly) preprogrammed androids hopped up on speed, unable to adapt to anything.
The thing that made Three’s Company successful was that it consistently kept the laughs coming, in spite of the shallow characters. To be sure, you were laughing at them, not with them. You didn’t care much about the characters, because you knew that no matter what happened, nothing would ever change. But laughing at them still counts for something, and on that show, you laughed at them an awful lot. It almost made the cringing worth it. Almost.
Back to Scrubs. When I first saw Scrubs, I got the same impression as I got from Three’s Company: these were stupid characters incapable of making an intelligent decision. Only Scrubs was a lot less funny. And if I can hardly sit through Three’s Company, I’m certainly not going to sit through something much less funny. Thus, Scrubs went into my “not interested” bin pretty quickly.
Over the past few months, however, I couldn’t realistically avoid watching the show without avoiding the telly altogether. These days, it’s syndicated on about 50 different channels at any given time of the day. Plus, the blonde on it (Sarah Chalke) is oddly cute. Inevitably, I ended up watching it a few times.
That’s when I saw that the stupidity of the characters was all an act. The Scrubs gang really does have a lot of depth; their outward shallowness is only something they project as a defense against a stressful work place. In fact, the way their true character manifests itself is very interesting, and goes a long way toward building sympathy and making the characters believable.
So when someone on Scrubs does something stupid, we don’t have to roll our eyes or cringe; they’re not acting that way because they’re manifestly compelled to always do the absolute stupidest thing possible. We understand why they did it (somewhat). And when something funny happens, the joke is more heartfelt and enjoyable because we can sympathize with the characters.
Needless to say, I am converted. Sure, it’s cliched and relies on stereotypes too much (that’ll probably date it a few years down the road). But overall, it’s really a good show. Although it doesn’t hold a candle to some of the great sitcoms of the 70s and early 80s (All in the Family, Good Times), it’s probably the consistently funniest non-animated show that’s been on TV for at least ten years.
