Scrubs remains one of my favorite TV shows of all time and definitely one of my favorite comedies. But just like with many things, Scrubs kind of overstayed their welcome and stretched it out a bit too much and the sort of repeated storylines, while they still have some emotional value and maybe even a life lesson or two, season 9 seems to be the season where I think even the people making the show were aware that their days were numbered.
From the very start of season 9 it becomes apparent pretty quickly that they were interested in phasing out the old stars and replace them with new characters. As the season continues the story starts to focus more and more on the "new class" and sometimes the old main characters are not in the episodes at all.
While this is still funnier than most things that are in sitcoms it just feels wrong. Even though the new crew are good actors, they cannot possibly fill the boots of the people that came before and I think that they started to lose what little remained of their fanbase once each episodes featured fewer and fewer of the characters that fans appreciated this show for over the past 8 years.
The show was occassionally referred to as Scrubs: Med School but that started to get thrown around less and less as time went by and mostly was abandoned. I feel that this was because they realized that almost nobody was going to watch a Scrubs show that didn't have the original stars in it and they had to include enough of the old characters to keep the people hooked but even that didn't really work out all that well.
I kind of feel bad for the new recruits of mostly unknown actors and actresses because this was doomed to fail from the start.
If you look at this picture and don't know who any of those people are, there is a good reason for that since they never really had a chance to establish themselves and only one of them was ever featured in the main show which according to the real writers and producers, concluded after 8 seasons.
The character Lucy Bennett (Kerry Bishé) had the unfortunate task of attempting to take over for John Dorian (Zach Braff) as primary character and narrator, but the fans were already on the defensive as soon as they first heard her voice and I think that they were probably put under pressure to resume JD as the main narrator and ABC and whoever else was at the helm responded...sort of.. by having JD return for about half of the overall episodes.
The "new class" just had boots that were too big to fill and even the addition of James Franco's younger and more talented brother couldn't get people interested.
I think the team behind all of this realized that this was a lost cause and much of this is evidenced by their being 4 separate directors and a dozen writers, many who were reluctantly forced to continue working via ABC's lawyers (i'm just guessing here) because a great deal of the writing seems extremely phoned in. The bromance between JD and Turk just didn't work when they tried to replicate that, and the in-hospital romance between Lucy and Cole also fell completely flat.
The series got "generally positive" reviews but the amount of people what were watching it and were genuinely interested just wasn't big enough and ABC pulled the plug on it after just a single series consisting of just 13 episodes.
This failure was not a surprise to most people that are familiar with out TV show spinoffs work. Think about the grand success of Friends and completely failure of Joey, or how the cult classic Saved by the Bell tried, twice, to reboot the series and failed miserably both times. There aren't really many that come to mind that DID prevail in the end with Better Call Saul and Frasier being the only ones I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more, but there are certainly many more failures than successes.
You may have heard that there is a brand new reboot that is partially available now and while the early consensus is good, I don't think that reviews really mean a whole hell of a lot anymore these days. I'll get around to it once I finish season 9.
Season 9 was the lowest rated season of Scrubs by far and it wasn't surprising when it was announced that there would be no season 10 even though a lot of storylines were left incomplete. I would imagine very few people were disappointed that this was cancelled because honestly, it never should have been planned in the first place.
I do recommend that you watch Scrubs but start it at the beginning or if you don't have a lot of time maybe start at season 2 and just take it from there. I would be really surprised if many people make it as far as season 9 because even though I am a die-hard fan, my own interest was starting to fade towards the end of season 6. Season 9 is a non-issue.