lowculture.co.uk

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Music makes the people come together

JAZZ HANDS! Scrubs, E4, 9.00pm

It's a funny thing, because with a few notable exceptions (Bat Boy, The Rocky Horror Show, Chicago and Kiss of the Spider Woman to name a handful) we loathe musicals. Residual issues left over from being snubbed by jazz-hands types at university, don't ask. But we love it when regular TV shows decide to randomly do a musical episode, because more often than not, they're absolutely brilliant.

It doesn't even have to be a whole episode, in fairness. Hollyoaks recently attained new levels of awesomeness by having Amy sing a song to camera to open an episode:

Now it's the turn of Scrubs to bust out the jazz hands with its own musical episode. The viewer reaction has been pretty favourable, from what we've seen, especially for the song 'Guy Love'. Of course, musical episodes generally have to be judged up against the formidable yardstick that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 'Once More, With Feeling', which is really just an excuse for us to watch this again:

But since we're taking a walk through the halls of TV show musical episode history, let's not forget some of the less famous but equally brilliant ones, like the episode of Even Stevens where Ren was in bed with flu and dreamed that everyone was singing, leading to her attempting to present a research project on the moon landing entirely in song when the only fact she knew about it was that it happened in 1969. But as brilliant as that song was, we're not going to use that clip (feel free to google it though), because we like this one better:

So, what have we learned? That musical episodes are ace? Well, yes, but there are exceptions. Generally the ones where the writers are too lazy to come up with their own songs and try to tweak classics to fit their own narrative instead, like this toe-curlingly embarrassing example from one of television's worst shows, 7th Heaven, featuring Thomas Dekker from Heroes, in what we doubt he will look back upon as a golden moment in his career:

Shudder. We apologise for inflicting that on you, but it's important to realise just how very wrong this idea can be when not done properly. Thankfully, we gather that the Sacred Heart team do a fine job with the jazz hands, so we've absolutely nothing to worry about. Phew.