Must See TV

Tonight was the much anticipated musical episode of Scrubs. Would it, I wondered, be as good as the Buffy musical episode? Well, no. In traditional musicals, people just randomly burst into song, and it's the rare instance where people sing for a reason. In the Buffy musical, which was, as everyone knows, the single greatest television event in history, everyone sings because this evil demon has possessed the townspeople, and eventually, they sing and dance themselves to death! And, it's really awesome because not only are the songs really terrific and funny, but they also moved the plot of the entire series along.

The reason there's singing on Scrubs is because this woman has a gigantic aneurysm in her brain and her reality's a bit distorted. Like on Buffy, the songs allowed for some character exploration, as in a tango number between Turk and Carla where she complains about how he doesn't know her middle name and that she's Dominican, not Puerto Rican. But the show wasn't really very musical, despite being written by two composers from Avenue Q, and came off like a high school production (I'm not sure that wasn't the intention, actually.) The only person who seemed to have any real vocal talent was Aneurysm Woman (Stephanie D'Abruzzo, also from Avenue Q), and Sam Lloyd (Ted), who occasionally sings as part of a barbershop quartet.

As most television is getting worse and worse, I applaud shows like Scrubs and My Name is Earl for being some of the few scripted shows worth watching. I'm only mildly disappointed, because the truth is Scrubs has always highlighted musical talent, and they've introduced me to more than one artist that I've really loved. Maybe in the future they should leave the singing to the experts, though.