As previously documented on this very site, Scrubs has managed to rescue itself somewhat from comedy purgatory.  After seven turbulent seasons on NBC (including a strike-shortened seventh last year), the show made its debut on ABC last night with a pair of new episodes.  So due to the fact that season 7 was somewhat respectable, and also due to the fact that not many shows have returned yet, I gave the show another chance.

So far so good I have to say.  While I think the gut-busting days of the first five years are long gone, Scrubs can still be entertaining.  On the plus side, the juvenile and somewhat scatological humor from the last few years was gratefully absent.  The writing style and stories reminded me very much of vintage Scrubs.  The cast is largely intact, save for the introduction of Dr. Taylor Maddox (Courteney Cox) as the new chief of medicine.  Dr. Kelso’s still around, though he pretty much sticks to the coffee shop now.

The two episodes (“My Jerks” and “My Last Words”) returned the series’ focus to the main characters of J.D., Turk, Carla, and Elliot.  They both had their share of laughs (I liked the new intern, Ed, as well the Steak Night song and dance routine), but the real winner was “My Last Words”.  It reintroduced an element of real human drama (focusing on a patient who is basically waiting to die) that the show lost as it spun off into the realm of the bizarre in recent years.

In fact, the only real negative I can think of was the brief but scary reappearance of Christa Miller, who looks more and more like one of the Joker’s “living art” projects from the 1989 Batman movie.  If that’s not botched plastic surgery, then we have real evidence of aliens living among us.