During its original run, Scrubs built every single episode to a serious emotional moment. Sometimes it involved the lives of the doctors and nurses (and Janitor) who worked at the show’s Sacred Heart hospital. Sometimes it involved the lives — and deaths — of their patients. Sometimes it was both.
Either way it’s the sort of thing that would normally be death for the show itself. This is a sitcom we’re talking about, a situation comedy. If every situation were Sam Malone falling off the wagon, or Dorothy Zbornak failing to find a diagnosis for her chronic fatigue syndrome, or the Diff’rent Strokes episode with the “funny” bike shop owner, they wouldn’t be comedies anymore, would they?
This never eluded Bill Lawrence, Scrubs’ creator. I can’t speak to the man’s oeuvre since, but back then he knew that for every spoonful of sadness or schmaltz, he needed to include some of the silliest, goofiest, stupidest jokes imaginable. There’s a lot of great character-based work on Scrubs, don’t get me wrong, but if you watched the show I bet you remember The Todd’s banana hammocks or Turk’s dance routine to Bel Biv Devoe’s “Poison” as much as you remember J.D.’s long-running rivalry with his older brother or whatever.
The point is that Scrubs worked hard for its laughs. Jokes, gags, pratfalls, wordplay, cutaway surrealism, workplace humor, slapstick, guys in banana hammocks, you name it — that show tried everything to get you to laugh. And it worked! It isn’t for everyone of course, but it’s one of this century’s few dramedies, as you might broadly define the subgenre, to understand that its drama portion requires comedy ballast.
To put it another way, O.G. Scrubs understood something virtually no dramedy or comedy that gets serious or whatever has understood since: If you’re going to bastardize the sitcom format to tug at the heartstrings enough to make every episode a Very Special Episode, you’d better make me fucking laugh by any means necessary first.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles has never understood this. Sure, it’s an affable show, full of likeable characters doing vaguely amusing things, like professional wrestling, or OnlyFans modeling, or getting married in an Elvis chapel. It’s stacked to the ceiling with actors I like a lot: Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman, Greg Kinnear, Nicole Kidman. (I’ve never been super high on Marcia Gay Harden and her work here is not turning me around, but your mileage may vary favorably.) It’s about important and interesting topics: sex work, single motherhood, the death of the middle class, professional wrestling. (Sorry, I really like professional wrestling.)
But is it funny enough to sustain an episode like this one, in which Margo is put through the stations of the cross by her awful babydaddy, his ghastly mother, her hugely irresponsible and selfish parents, and the iron fist of Child Protective Services. Not on your life, buster.
Tags: decider, margo's got money troubles, TV, TV reviews