The girl who wasn't there

Cone of Silence is still in place on "Grey's," and I'm two weeks behind on "House," but at least I got to watch the "Scrubs" finale in real time.

Bill Lawrence's publicist randomly e-mailed me yesterday to ask if I wanted to talk to Bill about the renewal. So we got to chatting, and, realizing that whatever I wrote would wind up running after the finale had aired (there'll be a short item at the tail end of tomorrow's column), I asked him if there were any big surprises. So he told me about Jordan being pregnant, and about J.D. knocking up Elizabeth Banks on their second date. The rationale:

"Comedies usually build around some sappy pregnancy thing, and we just hope to have something fucked up and chaotic. It's just another sign of how pathetic J.D.'s luck is; how many guys get a beautiful girl pregnant after they've gone out twice?"

I don't know how well this'll work in the fall, but I'm hopeful Banks will be around for a while. She fit in just as perfectly as the show kept insisting she did (loved the x-ray gag at the end of the credits), and these were the two strongest conescutive episodes since early in the season. Loved Turk and J.D. trading places in the Dr. Acula clip, loved Turk inheriting Cox's pants, loved Cox's speech to Jack about toilet-training, loved Sarah Lancaster's cameo as gift shop girl (though she looked a little too orange), loved Cox and Jordan using Ted's band to torture the guy who botched the vasectomy... loved it all, really. Mid-season's too long to wait for it to come back (according to Lawrence, if NBC had cancelled them, ABC would have picked them up but been forced to hold them for mid-season due to some transfer of ownership issues), but better late than never.

What did everybody else think?