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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: January 24, 2006
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Scrubs, “My Way Home” [Stream on Netflix]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: The legacy of a show like Scrubs is a complicated one, or at least an unsettled one. In its earliest days, Scrubs was a plucky single-cam show that was different than most of its sitcom brethren, and while it was relatively low-rated, that only made critics champion it more. It was a show that took chances, veering into quiet dramatic moments that fit well with the hospital setting. The longer the show went, the more its cult popularity grew, until eventually it wasn’t even so culty anymore. By the time Zach Braff made Garden State in 2004, Scrubs became a bona fide established comedy. It even started to get Emmy nominations. (The later years of Scrubs are much more complicated, involving cancellation, surprise resurrection, a reboot and a move to ABC, but that’s a whole different story.)
Every once in a while, Scrubs would produce an episode that reminded people who critics were so supportive of it. In the 5th season episode “My Way Home,” the conceit of a Wizard of Oz-themed episode was applied artfully but also cleverly. If you didn’t know what was coming, you could watch the first half of the episode — where Braff’s J.D. is called in on his off day, Turk tries to get a father to sign off on donating his brain-dead son’s heart, Elliott tries to cram for a presentation, and Carla gets stuck babysitting Dr. Cox’s kid — and never realize it was a Wizard of Oz theme. Only at the midpoint does the episode reveal its cards, and from that point the show skillfully maneuvers the show to some well-acted, well-scripted, affecting conclusions.
This episode was cited as a major reason why Scrubs won a Peabody Award in 2006, and it’s almost always remembered as one of the show’s most successful creative ventures.
