Scrubs: The Complete Eighth Season

Review By: Tom Herrmann
TomHerrmann@TheCinemaSource.com

Season Grade: A-
DVD Features Grade: A
Overall Grade: A

The premise of this show is nothing short of brilliant. Take one of the most serious genres of television shows - hospital dramas, and make an outrageously silly comedy out of it. For those of you who have miraculously avoided the show on its NBC run, ABC run, or its syndicated runs on Comedy Central, Fox, MTV, and whoever else it might be; the show follow J.D. (Zach Braff) through his career at Sacred Heart Hospital. It starts in the first season when he is an intern and goes until his eighth year with this season sadly being his finale.

If this review were for the sixth or seventh season of the show, this review wouldn’t be as upbeat as it is. Even though the show itself is excellent, it has had quite a down period. The first three seasons were nothing short of excellent, and the fourth and fifth followed suit decently well. The problem is that once the show got to the sixth season it tried too hard to top the ridiculousness of the episode before it; resulting in overdevelopment of side characters, overly unlikely situations, and a musical episode.

After these seasons, it was a relief hearing that the seventh season would be the last. That should let you know how exactly how awful it was hearing that they would be keeping the show going on ABC. After Dr. Kelso (Ken Jenkins) left in the final episode of season seven it was just hard to imagine it going on. Well they caught me off guard by keeping him around with his “free muffins for life,” nice job Scrubs. Also it really brought the show down from that high the writers seem to have been on - it’s the only explanation for My Princess.

They really take it back to the basics. The jokes have really calmed down, without calming down too much for those real Scrubs fans out there. They even give us a great new dramatic patient episode. My Last Words takes place on J.D. and Turk’s (Donald Falson) annual steak night when they decide to spend their time with a lonely dying patient. It left with one of the great sentiment over an emotional indie-rock song, just like that of the earlier seasons. It is almost unfair to break out I Will Follow You Into The Dark by Death Cab For Cutie, its just too sad.

The show isn’t exactly like the earlier seasons though. After everything that has happened they couldn’t exactly just turn the whole show around. There are still episodes taking place outside of the hospital and characters like The Janitor (Neil Flynn). They actually tackle both when they have a two-part wedding episode for The Janitor and Lady (Kit Pongetti), which takes place in the Bahamas. Even though these are the changes that seemingly ruined the show in the first place, it manages to make ...