A review of last night's two "Scrubs" - which, if you gave up on the show earlier this season, were vastly improved - coming up just as soon as I say "fo shizzle" for a week... I kept speculating during the early episodes of the season that we really couldn't judge the new incarnation of the show until Zach Braff left, because he was dominating so much of the proceedings, and because the writers chose to backslide JD into his irritating season 6 & 7 persona. Braff's been gone for three episodes (though he still has one more to go), and those three have been vastly improved. The low ratings probably won't allow for this, but these latest episodes feel like the foundation of a show I'd be happy to watch for several more seasons.
With JD out of the way, the med students have become much more clearly-defined. Lucy seems more interesting as a mirror of Elliot than JD (her fantasy sequences still aren't really working; like the narration, that device probably should have been retired with JD), I'm starting to enjoy Cole more (even if I keep imagining the character being funnier if Aziz Ansari were still available to play him), and Drew has become very funny no matter what other character he's paired with. There's just enough of Dr. Cox in Michael Mosley's performance to feel like a torch is being passed, but not so much that the character just comes across as a rip-off.
After being consigned to play JD's eagle wingman in the earlier episodes, Turk has come back to life (and we still get some Turk-as-the-black-JD moments, just in small enough doses to be funny rather than frustrating), and it was nice to see the second episode address Turk and Cox finally being peers (even if Cox ultimately outranks Turk). And after it seemed like too many episodes this year were designed to take away the edge that made Denise such a unique and funny character last season, we saw with the second episode's golf cart theft subplot that even if Denise softens a little for Drew, she's still capable of unleashing great evil on the rest of the universe.
What did everybody else think?
