"All the patients in the beds will be models and very handsome, very attractive," Lawrence says a few days prior to the shoot, which harkens back to his time working on shows like "Spin City" and "Friends." "All the female doctors will, for some reason, be wearing low-cut scrubs. Everything that a sitcom might do."

The sitcom premise is an extended fantasy sequence by J.D. (Braff), who's treating a man who once wrote for "Cheers" (Ken Lerner, himself a sitcom vet). Lawrence also wants the episode to be a thank-you to the show's audience by inviting some of them to watch the show being made — something that doesn't happen during a normal week, when "Scrubs" is shooting at an abandoned hospital in North Hollywood.

"What we're trying to do in the middle of it, even though we're doing sitcommy stories and sitcommy things, is ultimately have a great experience for the fans," he says. "Which means we're still writing funny jokes. So I hope people will like it on two levels — hopefully they'll watch it and laugh because we took time to write really funny stuff, and on some level be enjoying the fact that we're tweaking the format a little bit."

Lawrence will enlist those of us in the studio audience in that format-tweaking. He asks us for raucous applause when Aiken first appears, and for Kramer-like huzzahs when the Janitor (Neil Flynn) makes his entrance.
Yep, sounds like a typical sitcom to me. Now, I recognize all these conventions because I grew up watching bad sitcoms. I watched TV constantly--to the point that I became pretty fat during fourth and fifth grade, before I lost most of the weight once I started playing basketball. I would watch TV every night and usually that involved sitcoms. I watched Growing Pains, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Blossom, the entire TGIF lineup throughout its many incarnations, Saved by the Bell, Cheers, Roseanne, Married With Children, and a multitude of others that I can't even think of at the moment. A couple of those were actually pretty good shows, but most of them were mediocre at best and all of them were very much sitcoms that generally followed sitcom conventions.

The conventions are ripe for mocking. I suspect Scrubs--which clearly has great writers--will be very successful in making fun of the conventions and I welcome that. This reminds me, though, of that Comedy Central show from Matt Parker and Trey Stone that I mentioned once before, That's My Bush. It was a sitcom about George Bush, started right after he was elected president. The entire point of the show was to act as a satire of shitty sitcoms, but it never found its legs. Parker and Stone greatly succeeded with this concept when they applied it to bad action movies and made Team America, but That's My Bush was a failure. They attempted to mock shitty sitcoms by literally making a shitty sitcom. They did every convention, from pratfalls to bad catch phrases to a live audience that laughed uproariously at the stupidest jokes--and were then accentuated by a laugh track. The only problem is, they mimicked bad sitcoms exactly and, thus, had nothing but a bad sitcom. Sure, they were aware of it, and the audience was aware of it, but that didn't make it funny.