Second Look: Scrubs Season 1, Episode 19 – “My Old Man”

Though one of the leading subversive single-camera comedies of its era, there is a lot of traditional multi-camera sitcom DNA baked into Scrubs, from its penchant for physical comedy and willingness to do just about anything for a laugh, to its self-perpetuating obligation to end every episode with a neat, tidy resolution and a satisfying anecdote. Though “My Old Man” is one of the more visually static episodes of the season (and really, the series), it embodies those latter two elements pretty well, utilizing a handful of impressive guest spots/extended cameos and attempting a trio of emotionally resonant storylines incorporating all of the main cast. Unfortunately, a messy, rushed execution of its trio of stories ultimately makes ‘My Old Man” feels like an episode trying to fit a few incongruent stories together, rather than a defining entry of its fledgling first season.

Taken in isolation, each of the stories in “My Old Man” have their own values; however, intertwined and tied together by Cox and J.D.’s conversations, “My Old Man” becomes more than a little messy. When Turk and Elliot get selected to speak based on a paper they wrote together, it becomes a quasi-Parents Weekend at Sacred Heart, leading us directly into a trio of intriguing conflicts: Elliot trying to live up to unattainable expectations, J.D. being disappointed in his disengaged father, and Turk and his Freudian relationship with Carla. All of these stories certainly have merit on their own, as integral vignettes filling in backstory for different characters, while simultaneously informing their decisions in the episode – but the nuances suggested in each of its stories are never really able to surface across such a busy episode, and it leads “My Old Man” to a number of predictable, unsatisfying conclusions when it quickly tries to tidy things up in the third act.

The blueprint is there in each story, though: Elliot and J.D.’s stories in particular provide strong emotional moments for “My Old Man” to anchor itself with, even if the episode feels like it’s forcing its framing device of “accepting who our parents are, and what they’ve offered us” around their stories (along with Turk’s underwhelming tale of loving the women in his life). Elliot and J.D. both have realizations about their parents, moments where their perception of them shifts from parental units to human beings: for Elliot, it’s seeing how her WASP-y parents filtered through to her professional life – and in J.D.’s case, it’s more about how his disaffected, divorced father pushed him into awkward places in his personal life.

Though “leaving the nest” stories are hardly revolutionary (even in Scrubs‘s era), how Scrubs slowly reveals these stories with Elliot is the most effective of the pair, drawing on both the positives and negatives that pushed her to become the neurotic know-it-all with a bright future she is today. With Elliot, the idea of our young protagonists finally seeing their parents through adult eyes works well, especially when Scrubs ties it back to Cox’s defining declaration to J.D. in the middle of the episode, where he tells him “everyone of our parents does some considerable emotional damage – and from what I’ve heard, it just might be the best part of being a parent.”

That realization of one’s evolution (and at the same time, coming to terms with what may never change about us, thanks to our DNA) from their parents is important, especially in drawing empathy for people who spent a decade frustrating us as teenagers. Everyone has to reconcile something with the relationship they have with their parents, and those realizations – and personal reckonings – are powerful. Problem is, “My Old Man” approaches this with such detachment with its main character, it ends up dulling the rest of the episode: though John Ritter is terrific in his few scenes as J.D.’s constantly-farting, sometimes disappointing father, there’s too easy a reconciliation baked into the premise of the episode (J.D. wasn’t selected to speak, so his father’s presence is really just an added, unnecessary element), and Scrubs just doesn’t have time to give resonance to Cox’s words through actions, only doing so through J.D.’s now-predictable voiceovers neatly summarizing the end of each episode.

“My Old Man” also makes the strange choice of giving Turk and Carla a healthy amount of screen time, but cordons them off in their own Freudian world, where Carla bonds with his mother and he realizes they’re more similar than he thought. Let’s be honest, here: there’s really nothing going on in this story, and a clear lack of investment on the part of the series when it comes to Turk’s family, which is disappointing.

Scrubs doesn’t have a lot of time to grasp onto any of its ideas with two hands, which just leaves it spinning a lot of plates for twenty minutes, then scrambling to get to its J.D. voice-over with a few knowing glances. It is absolutely a victim of an episode with its loyalties split in too many directions: had the episode integrated Turk, Carla, and Cox further into J.D. and Elliot’s stories, the underlying connections between its stories – as simplistic as it they may be – would be a lot stronger, making “My Old Man” less of an episode trying to cover every stock parent/child conflict imaginable, and more like an episode of Scrubs exploring (and in the process, informing) how every family unit is screwed up in some way, and how those flaws ultimately help define us as human beings. Unfortunately, that’s not the episode “My Old Man” wants to be – and despite a wildly charming John Ritter appearance, it never has a chance to approach that kind of ambition or focus.

Other thoughts/observations:

• What a collection of guest stars in this episode: Lane Davies and Markie Post play Elliot’s parents, Hattie Winston features as Turk’s mother – and of course, R. Lee Ermey has a glorified cameo as the Janitor’s father, in what is an absolutely perfect piece of bit casting.
  
• “You know what they say about men?” “They love the boobies.”
  
• J.D. proclaims they went with “the black guy and the girl”, which begs a lot of questions about how he’d run a hospital in 2026.
  
• Simon Reed and Dr. Kelso’s cutaway is an all-timer, as is Kelso’s “Bring it on, bitch”.
  
• The “Oh honey, you’d have to ask the nanny” line from Elliot’s mom is the kind of stuff this episode needed a lot more of.
  
• Turk wears blue scrubs for the whole episode, because his mother thinks it looks better on him. It’s a good look, both for him and because it helps further establish the thematic connection between its three leads.
  
• I like Elliot’s realization, that she ended up in the right career for all the wrong reasons, but the lesson translates less as that, and more as a case study in how her specific personality type is formed.
  
• Todd High Five List: not even a whiff of Todd in this episode, which leaves his count at 11, and the season at 13.
  
• Up next: J.D. and Turk have beef in “My Way or the Highway”.