Context, Content, Comedy

In our house the television show Scrubs is a favorite. We watch it in reruns, we watch it on DVD, we watch in prime time. For those not familiar, Scrubs is a half-hour situation comedy based in a hospital. After seven years on NBC, it will be moving to ABC this year. In reruns, it has been running on Comedy Central for years and in the NYC area on the local Fox affiliate in the early morning hours.

On Labor Day, Scrubs was added to the TV Land family of shows. This follows the current TV Land philosophy of running more modern shows in prime time, as opposed to old "classics."

As a lifetime rerun watcher, I am always scared of the edits a show goes through to fit a network's commercial sales package.

When the first episode started on Monday, it was in fact the first episode of the series, "My First Day."

Things were going along just fine. Then came a scene well-known to Scrubs fans. John C. McGinley (Dr. Cox) was explaining to Zach Braff (J.D.) the dos and don'ts of hospitals. During the scene, Cox is referring the problems of caring for the elderly in front of an old woman he has been pushing in a wheelchair.

J.D. is shocked at his behavior and finally suggests that the patient might overhear. Cox reassures him by saying the woman was dead. He ends by explaining "If you push around a stiff nobody will ask you to do anything."

He then leaves the room, the scene ends.

If you watched this on TV Land on Monday, you might have been confused and disturbed because this seems just plain wrong.

But that is not how the scene played out in prime time, on DVD or even on Comedy Central. In all the other versions, Cox exits, the woman opens her eyes and says "I'm not dead" to a shocked JD.

And that is the essence of the show. You can almost imagine Cox wheeling this woman down a corridor and saying , "Listen I need to make a point to a new intern, just sit in the chair like you are asleep."

Do editors watch the show they are cutting? How can you cut without seeing the impact on the content, the context or the comedy? For anyone seeing that show for the first time it must have seemed cruel and sick, not what the writers intended.

Syndicators: Please have someone watch and figure out where the extra 30 seconds you need for a commercial can come from. Don't just cut the ends of the scenes; quite often that is where the punch line lives.