Scrubs: Baby talk

The morning column link: a look at how "Brothers & Sisters" -- this season's Show in Trouble poster girl -- has turned out to be pretty decent.

Meanwhile, spoilers for "Scrubs" coming right up...

Historically, I've been ambivalent about the show's dramatic leanings. Sometimes, the heavy stuff works beautifully ("My Old Lady," Brendan Fraser's episodes), but more often those scenes feel like the writers have just come down from an all-night "Wonder Years" marathon. ("And that was when my life changed, forever... until the next day, when it changed right back.") Where the comedy half of the show was consistently great all those years, you never knew whether the dramatic half would be worth the time.

Even last night, the show only batted .500 on the serious material. Cox's reaction to news of the baby's troubles, and then to learning he would have a girl? Absolutely perfect. Kim pulling a Theresa from "The O.C." and lying to J.D. about a miscarriage? Awful, awful, awful.

In real life, John C. McGinley's son Max has Down syndrome -- a fact he and the mom didn't discover until the day Max was born -- so he didn't have to search very far for his motivation on this one. I'm not ashamed to admit that he and Donald Faison made me cry in that last scene in the break room. Very nicely done.

The Kim twist, meanwhile, was the latest disaster in a storyline that's been nothing but. I remember talking to Bill Lawrence the morning before last season's finale aired, and he could barely get through a description of the knocked-up development without laughing hysterically. I just think he and the writers were so fixated on how humiliating it would be for J.D. to get a girl pregnant on the very first shot that they didn't think through the implications, and a lot of this season has been devoted to cleaning up that mess, while accomodating Elizabeth Banks' movie career. I think if she had genuinely miscarried, it would have been okay, and they could have even found an excuse to bring Kim back if Banks had a hole in her schedule (she was very funny in her first episode), but this was not a good idea, especially if it means we're going to drag this thing out even longer.

And I realize that I've gotten through an entire post without discussing any of the comedy, so I'll mention my favorite bit: J.D. and the Dudemeister wistfully imagining a world where Elliott was sold into white slavery.

What did everybody else think?