Review: Scrubs, "My V.I.P." | Season 10, Episode 6

Sitcoms are a narrative contradiction. On the one hand, they’re the shortest form of television (for adults), telling a complete story in just 21 minutes. On the other hand, they are a form built on the passage of time, in terms of tracking the changes to the situation in question. Each episode might only be able to do so much, but the accumulation necessary for the characters to progress means that there is a lot to be done.

This is all to say that the 9-episode revival of Scrubs has a problem. There is only so much you can do in nine episodes, especially when you throw in the expositional burden of returning to these characters alongside developing new ones. And yet as writers, you want to be able to tap into the markers of progress that are a hallmark of the genre, and which Scrubs was able to rely on for stories in the past. You want Elliot to get her first post-divorce boyfriend. You want Asher and Amara to reciprocate their awkward crushes. You want to hear one of J.D.’s thematic intros and feel like the stories converging around it are meaningfully pushing these people toward something bigger than themselves.

But you still have to earn it, and “My V.I.P.” is a stumble for me on this front. There’s just a temporal failure at the core of this episode, extending to wonky seriality that pulled me out of the story they’re trying to tell. If you go by J.D.’s awkward interaction with the harpist, not much time has passed since the previous episode. However, if you go by Elliot’s relationship with Captain Wes—who IMDB just reminded me is played by Cary’s sexually confusing roommate on The Other Two—it would seem that it’s been at least a few weeks; yes, she’s anxious about taking the next step of spending a weekend together, but he’s way too chummy with everyone to have not been around for quite a while. It’s clear evidence the writers wanted to live in the immediate aftermath of J.D.’s situation but also wanted to get further into Elliot’s relationship journey, and so the solution was to just ignore the very premise of time as we know it.