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Did you know that, in the 2004-05 TV season, NBC will be home to only four (4) sitcoms? The network that has, over the years, been known for such long-running powerhouse series as Cheers, The Facts of Life, Family Ties, The Cosby Show, Night Court, Seinfeld, Frasier, and Friends and yes we realize we're only naming sitcoms that have aired in our lifetimes but we're under thirty-five and we live in the now so just deal with it, will now air but four sitcoms, on two nights. Which means that 25% of the sitcoms on NBC are now Father of the Pride.
Fortunately for NBC, another 25% of their sitcoms is Scrubs. Against all odds, NBC's version of Arrested Development -- smart, weird, single-camera, laugh track-free, critically beloved, stuntcaster of Heather Graham -- is back for its fourth season. Its longevity is kind of miraculous, actually, because it's never gotten spectacular ratings (Good Morning, Miami fared better there, and is now good and dead), and has been shunted around the scedule like a comedy refugee, never allowed to get comfy and grow its audience. But, at least when it was on Tuesdays last season, it had the benefit of Frasier as its lead-in. Now its lead-in is...Father of the Pride. It's just this sort of dicking around that makes us think, now that he's a big shot award-winning auteur, Zach Braff's days on Scrubs are numbered, and the number they are numbered is not large.
Maybe we're wrong. It could very well be that we're giving young Mr. Braff too little credit in suspecting that he may soon start to think his britches are getting too snug for him and shed them, even if they've been a comfortable fit and look really good on him, and it's not as though he had all that many pairs of britches in his closet before these ones happened along.
The analogy having grown rather opaque, let us clarify. Scrubs would be a great gig for any actor. But Braff, alone among its cast, should be very grateful for his luck in getting it, since he is not only the show's star, but the least accomplished actor on staff. Pre-Scrubs, Braff was pretty much a nobody, with roles in several movies we hadn't seen (the Joyce Carol Oates adaptation Getting to Know You, the gay baseball romcom The Broken Hearts Club) and one in a movie we had seen but in which we didn't and still don't remember him (Manhattan Murder Mystery). That an actor of his stature could get cast in a sitcom pilot wasn't especially noteworthy; that he'd land on a winner in his very first try, however, is pretty unusual. (Compare him, for instance, to his AD counterpart Jason Bateman, with the corpses of some eighteen thousand failed sitcoms mouldering in shallow graves in his back yard.)
We had always thought that Braff's portrayal of newbie doctor John "J.D." Dorian was a fortuitous pairing of actor and role, and here is why: J.D. is a big dork. Not in the usual way that people are dorky on TV, where they like comic books but don't own a single article of clothing that didn't come from Urban Outfitters, SETH COHEN, but in a recognizably realistic and hence endearing way. J.D. is inept with women, clumsy and insecure in his job, and very aware of all the aspects of his life in which he is insufficiently cool, since he has a non-dorky best friend in Turk (Donald Faison) to point them out to him. But J.D. is at peace with his dorkiness and generally embraces it, which makes him both familiar and fun to watch. We wouldn't be as charmed by his random flights of fancy if they revolved around Miles Davis instead of the late Fred "Rerun" Berry, or a bass guitar instead of a banjo. We like J.D. because he reminds us of the enthusiastic, unapologetic dork in ourselves (the dork that may have gotten a little too into the parade stylings of a half-assed marching band in a Bensonhurst street fair just a few short days ago). If the actor who played him weren't completely committed to portraying J.D.'s nerdish leanings -- if we ever felt like Braff was winking at us as J.D. geeks out -- we wouldn't believe it when he got excited about the acquisition of cereal-box prizes.
Will Braff be able to portray such a big dork convincingly now that he was too cool for school all over Garden State? Because that movie really made us think Braff wrote, directed, and starred in it all in an effort to demonstrate how much cooler than J.D. he could be. He hand-picked himself a rising, respected indie god (Peter Sarsgaard) to play his best friend. He cast every 21st-century nerd's dream girl (Natalie "Queen Amidala" Portman) to play his love interest. He even chose all the music on the soundtrack, the better to demonstrate that he knows better what the kids are listening to today than are the people at Scrubs with their Colin Hay all the time. Perhaps that's why we weren't so crazy about Garden State -- not just because we find tales of mid-twenties angst kind of tiresome (just quit smoking pot, get a decent job, and tell your crappy parents to fuck off already) or because Natalie Portman stank it up (though she was JUST AWFUL), but because it felt like one big show-offy spectacle from our beloved J.D., trying too hard to prove he could hang with the cool kids. Well, we weren't nearly as moved by his standing on top of a bulldozer screaming into a CG canyon as we were by his getting clotheslined in the hallway by The Janitor. The latter was certainly much less self-conscious.
But we are apparently in the minority; Sundance loved Garden State, and it may yet clean up come awards season. Meanwhile, Scrubs doesn't get nearly the awards consideration it should (Emmy nominations for casting? Bah!), so it's not so inconceivable that he'll quit the show after this year, fail upward for a time, and then slink back to TV in a vastly inferior vehicle.
Surely, Braff has an agent and a manager who are busily telling him now how much more famous and important he is than his co-stars and how much better he could do than Scrubs. But before Braff makes any decisions he will later regret, we have two words for him: Tom Cavanaugh. It's a name that should already be familiar to him, since Cavanaugh has played J.D.'s screw-up of an older brother on the show. Once, Cavanaugh was NBC's comedy It Boy. Then his show got cancelled and he sank out of public view, wishing he still had a Blue Light campaign to fall back on. (Because, you guys, if he'd wanted water, he would have asked for water.) Tom Cavanaugh is Zach Braff's cautionary tale -- his Jacob Marley, ominously shaking his chains from the afterfame.
Zach Braff, do you know the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? Probably not. Not to mention that no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused! Don't start believing your own hype, Braff. You're not that famous (though you could still get more famous yet), and projects as good as Scrubs aren't really as thick on the ground as you may think.
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