Why Hospital comedies are the best medicine

Medical sitcoms. They sound like a large enough genre until you try counting the programmes on the fingers of one hand. Readers with memories of watching ITV in the late 1960s may recall goofy Robin Nedwell in Doctor in the House (followed by Doctor at Large, Doctor in Charge, Doctor at Sea and Doctor on the Go – each increasingly loosely based on the books by Richard Gordon and the films of Dirk Bogarde). And then there was M*A*S*H, the US sitcom with the Korean War as a metaphor for the Vietnam War, with Alan Alda and Wayne Rogers as Hawkeye and Trapper, the non-conformist US army doctors played by Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould in Robert Altman's source movie. Bloody surgery with a ready quip, death with a laughter track, M*A*S*H ran for more than a decade and signed off in 1984 with a two-hour finale that pulled in America's biggest-ever TV audience.

And if you thought that doctors, like policemen, get younger every year then in the late 1980s you wouldn't have been surprised by Doogie Howser, MD, in which Neil Patrick Harris played a teenage prodigy who lived at home with his parents while rather scarily practising surgery at an LA hospital.

And that was more or less that until this century, and two very different medical sitcoms on different sides of the Atlantic. Channel 4's Green Wing was inspired lunacy bearing as much semblance to actual hospital practice as the Ministry of Silly Walks does to the real civil service. The US med-com Scrubs, on the other hand, strove for naturalism – and then gleefully attacked it with a slapstick sledgehammer. Scrubs crept up like a gawky teenager playing a prank, and ended charming the green operating socks off many of us. But if you'd told me in 2001 that it would still be filming fresh episodes in 2008, then I would have eaten my E4 goodie bag (a real first-aid kit, as I recall). Unlike Friends or Frasier or any of the more feted US sitcoms, Scrubs looked like it had two or three chirpy seasons in it before its network, NBC, pulled the plug. What did it manage to do right?

Advertising itself as "half as long as ER and twice as funny" is fairly typical of the lively cheek of a show created by Bill Lawrence, a comedy writer and producer who scored an earlier hit with the Michael J Fox sitcom Spin City. Based on the experiences of a junior doctor friend of Lawrence's, Scrubs began with a group of young interns at an LA teaching hospital called Sacred Heart. The unlikely-sounding Zach Braff plays John "JD" Dorian, the wimpish newbie who develops a will they/ won't they romantic liaison with neurotic fellow intern Elliot Reid (Sarah Chalke) and close friendship with Dr Christopher Turk (Donald Faison). Braff, Chalke and Faison has proved to be one of those miracles of casting, a trio with unforced charm and immense likeability – people you can root for through all the things this show could throw at them, including the goofy humour, the often sickly sentimentality of "JD"s weekly closing homily and the unerringly sappy music. This is a sitcom that works against the odds.

The casting of the older, more experienced pros has also been inspired. John C McGinley was a scene-stealer from the very first episode, as the seemingly mocking misanthrope, Dr Percival "Perry" Cox – the foil to the naivety and idealism of the young interns. Cox gradually reveals himself to be deeply caring, unlike Dr Bob Kelso (Ken Jenkins), Sacred Heart's heartless chief of medicine – less Sir Lancelot Spratt and more Rip Torn in The Larry Sanders Show. (like the immortal Larry Sanders Show, Scrubs bravely does without canned laughter).

In the end the Writers Guild of America strike probably did for Scrubs, with Lawrence refusing to cross picket lines and only 11 of the 18 episodes being filmed. ABC took over the eighth series from NBC, and Lawrence and Braff declared it would be their last. A new generation of doctors has been mooted, including a stint by Courtney Cox from Friends. Whether they can replicate the chemistry of the original cast seems unlikely. Maybe this one hospital case they should just allow to die.

'Scrubs Series 1-7, the Complete Box Set' will be released on 1 December by Disney