A knack for selecting pop and rock music that serves several functions at once: enhancing the emotional tone of a scene, appealing to the kids today, and affirming your hipness and with-it-ness.

A gift for montage sequences that serve as the emotional highpoint of an episode.

A production company with a cute name, preferably named after your childhood self or your actual child, whose first words are used as the audio sign off.

Your wife. She will have major recurring role without stepping back and letting the new discoveries lead the series.

SCRUBS, created by Bill Lawrence, fits the bill in all these categories.

SCRUBS: THE COMPLETE SECOND SEASON (Buena Vista Home Video, 2002-2003, $39.95, Tuesday, November 15, 2005) is the one that takes place during the main characters' first year of residency, in the same hospital, Sacred Heart, where they al interned for a year (is this likely?). It's also the season in which destined-lovebirds J. D. Dorian (Zach Braff) and Elliot Reid (Sarah Chalke) date others (after another momentary fling). Dorian takes up first with the gift store clerk and then with Tasty Coma Wife, or Jamie Moyer (Amy Smart), a woman who has been visiting her comatose spouse twice a week for two years. Eliot, on the other hand, starts dating a fellow Sacred Heart employee (Rick Schroeder) who turns out, to her chagrin, to be only a nurse. Neither relationship lasts (at least as far as season two goes). Meanwhile, Dr. Perry Cox (John C. McGinley) gets back together with his ex-wife, Jordan (Christa Miller, spouse of creator Lawrence), when she (like the actress) becomes pregnant. Duke and Carla get engaged. Guest stars include Jay Mohr, Dick Van Dyke, Tom Cavanagh, and Heather Locklear.

I've noticed a phenomenon about television shows, especially Fox programs. They tend to be all build up with very quick resolutions. KILLER INSTINCT, for example, a series for which I have a weakness, builds and builds and then resolves itself rapidly. It's as if the filmmakers started out making or writing a 80 minute story and then learned to their chagrin that it was just a 40 minute time slot, and had to wrap it up quickly. Yet they never learn their lesson, as the same thing happens the following week. BONES has this same problem, and INSIDE had it, too, though the more polished medical crime shows over at CBS don't have the problem, nor does HOUSE.

SCRUBS suffers from a slightly different but related problem, born of its weekly appetite for story, story, story. This one is that no one ever learns anything. Maybe that's an accurate reflection of life, in which we keep making the same mistakes with our lives and relationships over and over, but in a show it can be stultifying.

In any typical SCRUBS episode, a character will tell themselves out loud, or J. D. will tell himself in voice over, not to do or say something, and then instantly say or do it (J. D. inwardly warns himself off calling burn victim Dr. Kelso "Splotchy" and does so anyway). Or a character will know that he or she is not supposed to reveal a confidence, and then go ahead and spill their guts anyway. This particular plot device happens at least three times in season two (when J. D. practices kissing on a stuffed dog, and when Turk has a sex dream about Eliot,). Dorian is constantly counseling himself to say something noble, or hold his peace, and invariably fails to follow his own orders. It becomes a one trick pony, a deadening repetition, especially when you're watching 20 episodes in a row.

That being said, SCRUBS is hilarious and is emotionally affecting. SCRUBS hit the ground running, as they say, and the second season isn't so much an "improvement" over the first as a continuation of its high standards. It chooses, however, to emphasize the private or sex lives of the cast, over the trials of an immersion into medical science. Deviations from the template include McGinley as Cox taking over the narration for the episode "His Story," and a new, longer credit sequence for the first handful of episodes, with a different portion of the theme song, before reverting back to the original opening credits.

The best parts of SCRUBS remain the DREAM ON style fantasy sequences, the MARS-esque narration as counterpoint, the musical cameos (Men At Work's Colin Hay does an "unplugged" version of "Overkill" in the season premiere), and the carefully crafted tirades by John C. McGinley's Dr. Cox. A few examples include, "Gosh, I'm sorry, nervous guy, but I just can't do your work for you. But, what do you say you head on down to the library and look it up in the New England Journal of Who Gives a Rat's Ass? You've got to leave this instant — this second — this moment. Just go." and "Do you know how I know that this is yours, Farrah? 'Cause when I paged you earlier, someone found it next to a can of Fresca and a dog-eared copy of TEEN PEOPLE magazine. Anyway — long story, short: The whole incident gave me a bang-up idea; because, you see, I've got tomorrow off. So I'm gonna be on my couch, sipping on some scotch and paging you every 20 seconds. And if you don't answer every damn last one of 'em, I'm gonna shove this thing so far down your throat it's gonna make you take a tinkle every time it goes off. Big fun, right?"

BV releases SCRUBS in excellent full frame transfers, and DD 5.1, and with tons of extras. Disc one has the first seven eps, plus "A Rare Condition," a tribute to McGinley's tirades in "Johnny C. Keeps Talking," and commentaries to the season opener with Lawrence, Braff and Donald Faison, and to "My First Step" with Lawrence Faison. This first disc also has trailers for THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, THE GOLDEN GIRLS: THE COMPLETE 3RD SEASON, HOME IMPROVEMENT: THE COMPLETE THIRD SEASON, SCRUBS: THIRD SEASON, and DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES: FIRST SEASON.

Disc two has eight eps, with a commentary accompanying "My T.C.W," with Lawrence and actor Judy Reyes. plus "Alternate Lines, a Second Opinion," and "Stunt Casting," which are about what they sound like they are, and commentaries to "My Sex Buddy" with Lawrence Chalke, and to "His Story" with Lawrence McGinley. Disc three has the last seven eps, plus "Musical Stylings," about the show's music, "Secrets and Lies," which has crew members telling tales out of school, and deleted scenes from eight episodes in "Scrubbed Out: Deleted Scenes," among them snippets from a sbplot in which J. D. imagines Dr. Cox as Superman, that had to be scraped when the producers couldn't get the rights to the SUPERMAN theme song. Also on hand are "Practice, Practice, Malpractice," "JD's Mojo," and "Imagination Gone Wild."

Letters

From Theron Neel:

"Believe it or not, I have a big soft spot for AIRPORT 1975. I saw it in the theater as a kid when it was first released, and I even got the official AIRPORT 1975 program that was sold in the lobby. True, it's a bad movie, but it perfectly encapsulates '70s movie making. It mixes old guard Hollywood with (at the time) newcomers. Any movie that has Charlton Heston, George Kennedy, Gloria Swanson and Efram Zimbalist Jr. clashing with Karen Black, Linda Blair, Helen Reddy, Susan Clark and Erik Estrada can't be all bad, eh?"

And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.

Not only that, I've got a new book coming out in November (fingers crossed) on an aspect of film noir I call film soleil, titled simply FILM SOLEIL. It is sure to alter film criticism as we know it to its very core. Order it now!

And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK along with Dawn Taylor. It's available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, November 23, at 9 AM.

COMING SOON:SAW II, the 3rd Annual DVD Tray of Terror, FLIGHTPLAN and REDEYE, DEAD AND BREAKFAST, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, and more!

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