this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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I watched it for the first time recently and it was good but... Nowhere near as amazing as the internet led me to believe it would be. JD and Elliot's relationship in particular was infuriating and I hated any episodes that were about it. They turned each other into horrible people.
To me they felt more like the generic will-they-or-won't-they pairing that a lot of sitcoms felt the need to include and constantly inject with drama, rather than an actual exploration of a toxic relationship. I honestly preferred them a lot more as friends and felt like their characters had a lot more chemistry together when their relationship was platonic. I was hoping during the stretch of time when they finally broke up for real after being on and off again for a while, and JD didn't have feelings for her anymore supposedly, that things would stay that way. But no, they get back together again eventually. Maybe I'm biased because I'm not generally interested in romance, but I didn't mind the relationship between Dr. Cox and Jordan, or Turk and Carla. It was just JD and Elliot that I disliked. It was honestly my least favourite part of the show.
I'm in complete agreement, the relationship between JD and Elliot was awful. It felt like JD was in a permanent state of puppy love while ignoring a mountain of red flags. The writing always seemed to demand a winner for their disagreements too. There was never any compromise, just one of them deciding to take blame and say sorry while the other accepts the apology. Elliot always seemed to be the winner, even when she was objectively way in the wrong. The worst example I can think of is when ::: spoiler spoiler Elliot cheated on her boyfriend with JD. I think she believed their relationship was over but it wasn't? JD wants to tell so they will break up. Elliot doesn't want him to so they can keep dating. They never bother to think about the boyfriend's feelings. JD "does the nice thing" and doesn't tell so Elliot can continue her relationship built on a lie. Whole episode felt sleazy. :::
Funny enough, Elliot sort of became a heel character for me, I enjoyed it when she got knocked down a peg. From what I understand she's a lot of people's least favorite.
Idk how to spoiler tag so, uh, scrubs spoiler warning:
Oh that boyfriend thing was INFURIATING. It honestly lowered my opinion of her character by a lot. And iirc I think that was the boyfriend that was such a good match for her, like he understood her neurotic hangups and was good at reading her and communicating with her, I think it was that guy at least, but I could be getting them mixed up. I remember thinking she should have stayed with that guy who was so understanding of her issues. It's been a few months since I watched so my memory is a bit spotty on whether that was the same guy or not. But yeah, I honestly almost dropped the show after that episode it pissed me off so much. And it bothered me how when JD was obsessed with her he would lose all his empathy that he would display in other episodes that weren't focused on their relationship and just become a sex obsessed idiot who was desperate to get into her pants.
Oh and don't even get me started on when he finally got together with her and then realized right after that he didn't actually love her, he just wanted something he couldn't have, so once he had it he didn't want it any more. My God did that piss me off. If the writers were so dead set on fucking up Elliot's relationship to get her back with JD the least they could do was fucking commit to it! That really soured my opinion of his character as well. They both came across as just, the worst people ever. It honestly made later episodes when JD was suddenly a good empathetic guy again a bit harder to accept for a while. I mean Elliot was always a bit self absorbed so while it made me like her less, it didn't necessarily go against her character or ruin the believability of what the writers were going for with her (part of her character development was her growing out of her sheltered suppressed sheltered rich girl personality and becoming a more well rounded person. The writing didn't always succeed at writing those types of stories for her but the intent at least still came across, so her being a bad person sometimes wasn't necessarily out of character, even if I had hoped she was at least better than that), but JD's entire shtick from the start was being lovable goofball with hidden depths who may make mistakes but ultimately wants to do the right thing. So if he would do something as awful as trying to sabotage the relationship of someone who was supposedly his friend, and then decide he doesn't even want to be with her after all that, then it becomes a bit harder to believe that he actually cares about his patients, who are basically strangers, when he would act like such a sociopath towards someone he actually knows and supposedly should care about.
Idk, that whole thing just really poisoned a significant portion of the show for a while for me. Any episodes that were focused on romantic relationships or drama between the characters without actually being related to hospital life were probably my least favourite, even the more tolerable ones. The show was at its best when it was actually about the premise of them being in a hospital and how the characters engaged with it rather than devolving into generic interpersonal conflict that you could find in any other sitcom. There were a few exceptions, I know I usually enjoyed the episodes centering on JD and Cox's relationship even if it was outside of the context of the hospital, but those were rare compared to the Romance drama related ones. I could not care less about JD's dating life with or without Elliot, it was always insufferable whenever that was the focus.
To be clear, I DO like Scrubs and think it's a good show overall, but I don't think it's the perfect show the internet treats it as. It has lots of flaws. There was lots of good stuff in it, but some bad stuff too, and when it was at its worst it felt like that dragged it down quite a bit for me. It could have been a lot better, if they'd focused more on that good stuff.
It didn't help that when I watched it with my roommate it was our sitcom replacement for Schitt's Creek which we'd just finished watching, and Schitt's Creek was so good from start to finish and avoided so many of those annoying pitfalls that other sitcoms tend to have, or deconstructed them in an interesting way. Couples actually, gasp, communicated! Imagine that. Even the one technically on again off again relationship in that show (if it can be called that) was done well and in a way that worked really well for the characters' development and didn't feel like it was just drama for the sake of drama, when they split up it made sense why and felt like an important step for the main character in the relationship, and when they got back together again it felt natural because they'd developed so much as characters by that point and were different people than they had been the first time. So coming from that to scrubs which had a lot of my least favourite romance tropes, particularly with JD and Elliot was a bit jarring lol. Turk and Carla were done well, but they couldn't make up for the other two and their dumpster fire.
This turned into a bit of a rant unintentionally lol, I guess I'm still a bit salty over that part of the show. I swear I do still like the show, I just wish it had lived up to the hype.