Does Scrubs Point The Way?

Interesting article by Joe Rhodes in Sunday's New York Times about Scrubs.

A few edited excerpts:

"In the beginning we felt a lot of pressure to seek out mass appeal, which was tough," Mr. Lawrence said,...
"This year we decided to stop obsessing about how we can bring new people to the show," he continued. "We decided that this year, we'd just do what we wanted and hoped we would at least be proud of it, even if it never saw the light of day." ... The result is that "Scrubs," always a schizophrenic mix of cartoonish jokes, surrealist fantasy sequences and genuinely poignant life-or-death moments, has become even weirder, thick with inside jokes, psychotic monologues, a cappella singing in the elevator, bizarre secondary characters like the High-Fiving Surgeon, the Sweaty Lawyer and the Absent-Minded Morgue Attendant, and the continuing adventures of a megalomaniacal maintenance man who has crowned himself the King of Janitoria...

"Rather than trying to seek out new viewers, our survival technique was to try and hold on to the old ones," Mr. Lawrence said, acknowledging that the sudden switches from Looney Tunes to pathos can be jarring. "So now we do stuff that we know will make real fans of the show laugh, assuming they can find us. We're like 'The Simpsons' in that every episode has jokes that are only going to be funny to people that have watched at least 20 or 30 episodes of the show. We aren't writing for people that have turned this show on for the first time."

Curiously, this strategy appears to have brought in new viewers. After being held out of the NBC fall lineup (in spite of its four Emmy nominations last year), "Scrubs" returned in January, and in its first weeks had some of its highest ratings, averaging nearly 8 million viewers on Tuesday nights. And now against the daunting challenge of "American Idol," it has managed to maintain numbers comparable to last season.

The article goes on to point out that Scrubs is an anomaly for another reason: since the relaxing of rules about Networks owning part of shows on their own networks, (Another gift from the U.S. government to big media companies... Gee swell, thanks guys) Scrubs is one of the few shows on NBC that NBC doesn't have a stake in: it's made by ABC, which means ABC reaps DVD sales money and NBC only makes money off ads.

Scrubs would probably be canceled except for two things: it does well in 18-49 viewers, and NBC is dead last (which is why they're taking chances on shows like Earl and The Office.)

The continued, unlikely-as-it-is tenacity of Scrubs raises, at least to me, a tantalizing possibility: have we seen the end of the search for the broad-based comedy? Are even Networks like ABC, NBC, and CBS going to start putting up shows that are designed to draw loyal and intense viewers rather than lots of eyeyballs?

Comedy has always been the hardest genre to sell to a wide audience, and these days it's well nigh impossible, because the fractionilaztion and fragmentation of culture means no one is playing with a common cultural mindset anymore.

Meanwhile, in Canada, we're trying (and failing) to capture that big broad-based comedy flag.

The question is -- is it a completely quixotic quest? Are we all seeking out the wrong thing, and chasing a model that no longer exists? Something to chew on, certainly.