But first prize for this episode has to go to Chris Turk, for his Air Band prowess and lip-synching finesse. As part of the subplot, the Janitor wanted to enter an Air Band competition for water park tickets and held auditions in the hospital. Turk easily won the lead role after an inspiring audition to Bel Biv Devoe's "Poison" and finished up with a performance of Boston's "More than a Feeling," backed by the full Air Band. There were no emergencies or moral dilemmas in this episode. This was just a great example of Scrubs having a lot of fun.Unlike most of the emotional episodes on this list, in "My Cake," we got the bad news right up front. J.D.'s brother Dan (played by Tom Cavanagh) showed up to announce that their dad had died. (Actor John Ritter, who had played their father, died a year earlier.) Dan then spent the next few days living at his brother's house, sitting in the bathtub and drinking beers while J.D. tried to work through his mourning at the hospital. Meanwhile, Turk learned he had Type II Diabetes, which led to a funny scene where both he and J.D. felt like they'd lost their bad news "thunder" to the other.
This episode had a nice balance of weight and goofiness, a staple of the best episodes from the series. While J.D. and Turk were dealing with life and death, the Janitor pulled a number of pranks on Kelso to make him believe he was losing his mind. He utilized a rented crane and poor Ted (and his Bozo-fro) to pull off the stunts, each one more daring than the last. In the end, Kelso got revenge on the Janitor and Dan, Dr. Cox and J.D. shared beers, sports and an evening on the couch together reminiscing about their dead fathers. There would be other, better episodes that proved Cox's endless complaints about J.D. were just lip service, but this was a good start.This one had a candy-colored shell and a surprisingly dark center. The hospital was facing budget cuts and Dr. Cox was tasked with firing a cafeteria worker. Meanwhile, a former Cheers writer was diagnosed with a serious condition. All of these events led J.D. to imagine his life as a sitcom, where everyone gets healthy at the end and every budget can be fixed in a half-hour. And that's when we heard the words any classic TV fan is familiar with: "J.D.'s sitcom fantasy was filmed before a live studio audience."
J.D.'s extended fantasy turned the dark hallways of the hospital into a brightly lit sitcom set like Everybody Loves Raymond or The King of Queens. And along with his fantasy came every nuance and cliché from that style of show. From the "set-up, set-up, punchline" dialogue and exaggerated costumes to a hokey talent show featuring guest star Clay Aiken, everything was letter perfect. Even the Janitor received applause worthy of Fonzie or Al Bundy upon his entrance. But once J.D. snapped back to reality, he realized life wasn't a sitcom and problems take more than a half-hour to solve. People get fired, patients die, and we were left with another powerful episode that caught us off guard at the end.Early on in its run (the 4th episode to be precise), Scrubs figured out exactly what it wanted to be - a sitcom with depth. Sure, this episode featured its share of silly moments, like a game of wheelchair bowling and a fantasy sequence with J.D. and Death playing Connect Four. But we also saw the flipside, as J.D.'s voiceover informed us that the odds of a patient dying at Sacred Heart were pretty good - about one in three.
J.D. met a patient facing those odds, Mrs. Tanner, whose kidney failure meant certain death unless she went on dialysis. Rather than undergo the lengthy procedure for the rest of her life, she decided her time was up and she was ready to go. (This prompted a classic sight gag as Lloyd delivered a "ton of bricks" to Dr. Dorian.) In the wrong hands, this episode could've become a syrupy mess. However, both the script and Kathryn Joosten's turn as Mrs. Tanner kept everything on point. There have been tons of episodes where J.D. learns a tough lesson about life, but Joosten's honest performance prevented this one from becoming over-sentimental and helped point Scrubs in the direction it's been heading for eight-plus seasons.
At this point in Season 6, the show had been cruising along nicely, so it was time to change things up a bit. A patient (Stephanie D'Abruzzo) was brought to Sacred Heart with a curious condition: all spoken conversation sounded like singing to her. Those weird symptoms (caused by a brain aneurysm) kicked off a half-hour crammed with choreographed dance numbers, medleys and solos.
There was really no middle-ground with this episode. Either it was going to be great or it was going to fail miserably. Fortunately, they nailed it. The tone and spirit of Scrubs was captured in each of the eight songs, from the remorseful, "Gonna Miss You, Carla," to the obvious, "The Rant Song," to the downright juvenile, "Everything Comes Down to Poo." And J.D. and Turk's show-stopping duet, "Guy Love" took the essence of their relationship over five seasons and boiled down to a tight two-and-a-half minutes. Without the added difficulty of trying to force a musical into a half-hour sitcom, this episode would've been solid, but the fact that they actually pulled it off makes it worthy of this top ten list.
Continue on for the Top 5 Scrubs episodes...This was the Wizard of Oz episode. Beginning with J.D. listening to Toto on his iPod and ending with him returning home wearing "ruby" slippers, this episode never missed an opportunity to reference that classic film. Sure, every third movie has the line, "We're not in Kansas anymore," but what set this episode apart was how it went beyond that, weaving multiple storylines together using the plot from the classic film as a catalyst: Elliot needed to rely on her own knowledge of endocrinology, and not cheat sheets, to give a lecture on the subject. Turk needed to convince a father to donate his brain-dead son's heart so he could assist in the transplant operation. Carla needed courage to accept her role as a mother-to-be. And J.D. just wanted to go home, after being paged to answer a simple question on his day off.
Some shows can barely handle two plot threads in an episode – Scrubs always managed multiple threads with ease. This episode was simply an excellent example, made even more impressive when you consider how they legitimately tied everything to one of the most beloved films of all time.Brendan Fraser has never been better than he was during his terrific appearances on Scrubs, playing Ben, Jordan's goofy brother and Dr. Cox's best (and only) friend. In Season 1, Ben showed up to have his wrist bandaged and wound up getting much worse news. Of course, on Scrubs, we'd soon learn things were never that easy.
First, we had to see how happy Cox was while hanging out with his best friend. That would be the knife coming out of its sheath. Next, we had to become attached to Ben and his endearing photography hobby. That would be the blade plunging into our chest. And finally, we had to follow J.D. as he searched for new answers due to a mixed-up chart, only to find it was all a dream – Ben had leukemia. And that would be the twist of the knife.
This episode was immediately followed by "My Hero," which dealt with Ben's denial and Cox's inability to cure his friend's cancer. That episode was good, but for its singular ability to toy with our emotions, "My Occurrence" was better. Scrubs would go on to film plenty of gut-wrenching episodes in the future, but this was the first.Brendan Fraser returned to Scrubs two seasons later and the audience was in for another tearjerker. Once again, this episode proved the show's mastery of blending light-hearted storylines (in this case, the removal of Elliot's ugly bunion) with heavy ones like Ben's fight against leukemia. As we learned from Ben's previous appearances, Scrubs is never cut-and-dry and there's always a surprise when you least expect it.
Ben was in town for Jack's first birthday party and visited Dr. Cox in the hospital. Dr. Cox chided him for not seeing a doctor in the time since his cancer had gone into remission, warning him that the disease has a nasty habit of returning. Minutes later, J.D. informed Dr. Cox that they'd lost a patient and Cox lost it. He took away all of J.D.'s patients and sent him home. Ben told him to lay off the kid, but Cox was a man possessed.
Two days went by and Cox hadn't slept, but no other patients had died either. Plus, hanging out with Ben kept his spirits up. Soon enough, it was the day of the birthday party and we discover we've been duped. Scrubs went all Sixth Sense on us and we realized that for the majority of the episode, Ben was been a ghost only Cox could see. Instead of a birthday party, we were at his funeral. All the signs were right in front of us, but they still managed to sneak up and deliver a powerfully emotional blow.Scrubs had showed it could ride the fine line between comedy and tragedy plenty of times before (as we'd seen with Brendan Fraser's episodes), but the show reached another level with a two-part story in Season 5 that took us to rock bottom and brought us back again.
When J.D. blamed himself for a patient's suicide, Dr. Cox quickly intervened. He told him that kind of thinking was a slippery slope, and he didn't want J.D. feeling guilty for deaths that weren't his fault. He also reminded J.D. that the patient's death meant three other patients would receive organ transplants. Unfortunately, the organs were discovered to be diseased after the transplants took place and the three patients whose lives Dr. Cox had saved were crashing.
This set off an intense montage of Dr. Cox trying desperately to keep the transplant patients going while The Fray's "How to Save a Life" played in the background. Say what you will about that song becoming the overplayed soundtrack of dozens of other TV shows and movies for quite awhile, but at that time and in that scenario, it worked. The results of that episode led to Dr. Cox ignoring his own advice to J.D. and having a complete mental breakdown. And that led to…
We saw dozens of stories about J.D.'s friendship with Turk and his complicated romance with Elliot during Scrubs' run, but when you boil it all down, the core relationship of the show was the love/hate bond J.D. shared with Dr. Cox. And at no point during the show's run was this relationship more honest and open than when J.D. admitted he admired Dr. Cox for getting so upset when things went wrong, even after twenty years of being a doctor. And the air got a little dusty in my house when J.D. told Dr. Cox he was exactly the type of doctor he wanted to become.
The majority of the episode was your typical high-quality blend of goofy sight gags (the Janitor's "knife-wrench"), an appearance by Ted's a cappella group (singing, "Put on a Happy Face") and a revolving door of Sacred Heart employees making trips to Dr. Cox's house to cheer him up. Those elements alone wouldn't make this a top ten episode. But when J.D. told a devastated Dr. Cox how proud he was of him, it shot this one to the top. (And then, before things could get too weepy, J.D. coughed up a glass of scotch onto his lap.) This is the episode that best exemplifies the comedy, the heart, the diverse relationships and the excellent writing of Scrubs. And how, for a sitcom, it could leave you holding onto a box of Kleenex for dear life.
