Every year or so, I suddenly get the urge to watch Scrubs. When and why this happens is unexplainable, but in any case I’ve been watching a lot of it the last couple of days. And, as I’ve been skipping around from season to season to episodes that I don’t remember that well, I realized how much I wish I could watch the entire series over again for the first time. When it originally aired on television, I would watch an episode here or there, or I may even have tuned in for a couple of weeks running. But my Scrubs watching was sporadic to say the least. Even when I started to watch it through on DVD, I inevitably ran into a patch of episodes I had seen, got bored, and stopped.
Looking back on it, Scrubs deserved better from me, a television viewer. Sure, it’s far from the best show in history. The insecurities of Elliot and her annoying boyfriends get boring and may or may not make you nauseas. Jordan has more bad moments than good, Carla get’s a little controlling, and sometimes you just wish that J.D and Turk would spin-off onto a different show. But the series can surprise you. What Scrubs is good at, and which gets perfected in later series (like Community) is showing that sometimes you can’t have comedy without a little bit of tragedy. For example, I will always remember The Fray’s “How To Save a Life” not for the Grey’s Anatomy moment, but for that great scene when Cox almost gives up on medicine. The series finale (that is the real finale. I have chosen to believe that that one season when Sacred Heart was a strange med school didn’t actually happen) was beautiful and poignant for all the right reasons.
The same goes for Alias. I think I missed the majority of the first season, and then expected that if I started the second season I would eventually figure it all out. I kept hoping that this would happen for the rest of the series. Add to this the fact that I think I may have missed quite a few episodes here and there, and that this was in the days before I had a DVR, Netflix, or easy access to the Internet, and you eventually get to a finale that I mostly got but not really. To be fair to me, however, I think that there are more than a couple of problems with the series as a whole and J.J obviously could have used a little Darlton help. Although I believe a show should challenge and surprise, a show should never be a mess of confusing names and impossible mythology that, let‘s just admit it, doesn‘t actually work. I knew enough about the characters to be more than a little disappointed at what they all became by the last season. All this being said, I know my experience with the series would be better if I could go back and watch more of that first season, and I know I would have loved the series instead of just liking it.
As I was running through the before-mentioned clips of Scrubs, I took a break to look at clips of Gillian Anderson, X-Files, and David “I-Never-Look-Ugly-Even-When-I’m-Crying” Duchovny winning Golden Globes, SAGS, and Emmys. Hearing the nominees for each category, I was shocked at how few of these 90’s actresses/actors I knew and also about how many of the nominations were for E.R. Although I think we can all admit that E.R was dead long before it was given a proper funeral, I think that what it became has overshadowed those first seasons when it was actually really good. E.R is another one of those shows that I caught every so often, and I actually have no memory of the first two seasons. But believe it or not, this is where George Clooney really made his first mark on the entertainment business and this is where Julianna Margulies spent all that time before she showed up on The Good Wife. The show quickly went downhill after Clooney, Margulies, Anthony Edwards, and eventually Noah Wyle left the series, but when they all existed all the screen at the same time, there were some incredible episodes. Season six’s two-parter “Be Still My Heart” and “All in the Family,” for example, still ranks up there as some of the greatest episodes of television I’ve ever watched. That, and I still can’t hear “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” without crying.
Lost/Firefly/BattlestarGalactica/Doctor Who/The West Wing. I admit that these are all cheats. I’ve seen every episode, loved all of them* and count them all as my collective favorite television series of all time. It’s not that I regret watching them when I did, but more that I wish that I could have all those moments of shock, awe, horror, surprise, etc. back again. I don’t want to know anything about the Island, want to believe that more episodes of Firefly will eventually happen, agonize over the identity of the Final Five (I swear--it’s the ship.), cry for the entire last portion of “Doomsday,” and smile at the brilliance of Aaron Sorkin. I want the experience of watching these shows for the first time back again.
*Jack goes on vacation, “Black Market,” “Daleks of Manhattan,” and the latter portion of The West Wing being the exception that proves the rule. Firefly, however, is perfect…except for the lack of more episodes.
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