Thursday, September 09, 2004
I've been watching a lot of Scrubs lately, and it rocks. I'm not a huge fan of American TV comedies, but this just rocks. It's just really funny. It has that freeform humour that breaks those "audience" barriers by not taking itself seriously -- Death can walk the hallways of the hospital from time to time, dream sequences and reality intermix, etc -- the sort of thing I really enjoy (see: Shaolin Soccer). It also has a bit of an ongoing story, but not TOO much so that it intrudes on the humour (like with Friends after the first couple of seasons, when Rachel and Chandler got all anorexic and the focus shifted to whiny-boy Ross).
The characters are really cool too, because they're so damned weird and quirky. JD (Zach Braff, who I'm dying to see in Garden State) has the goofy white guy thing down, but not enough that he's total comic relief. Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley, who I first saw playing a TOTALLY DIFFERENT type of character in Identity) is one of the greatest comedic characters ever, and I will not hear otherwise on the subject. Turk (Donald Faison) always gets laughs simply because I'm still picturing him as the boyfriend from Clueless. There are numerous role players who do their thing and do it really well, like the Janitor, Jordan, Dr. Kelso and my personal favourite Ted (Christopher Lloyd's's nephew!). And they have AWESOME guest stars who really do the roles justice, like Dick Van Dyke, Brendan Fraser and... John Ritter. Moment of silence for the late, great John Ritter please.
A well observed moment of silence, thanks.
Anyway, the one REALLY odd character in it is Elliot Reed (Sarah Chalke), the token blonde of the show. She's odd because she seems to take her top off/expose her bra/turn up in seductive outfits an awful lot for no real apparent reason. I mean, she's kinda pretty, but not especially so. And her character isn't really slutty or anything (on the contrary, a neurotic and sheltered rich kid). And it's not like Scrubs is a sex comedy, or that the characters are getting it on that often. But without fail, every three episodes or so she'll be ripping her top off for the most minor of reasons ("I have nowhere to change" being unusually common). It's just weird. I'm taking bets with my sister before each episode whether Elliot will take it off or not. We've been quite accurate so far.
One last, totally unrelated thing... I was hunting down population figures for India and found the official Indian Census website. You know what their slogan is? Take a look at the image culled from their webpage:
Posted at 4:43 AM
