It Still Stings: Scrubs Bungled JD and Elliot’s Complicated Romance

Editor’s Note: TV moves on, but we haven’t. In our feature series It Still Stings, we relive emotional TV moments that we just can’t get over. You know the ones, where months, years, or even decades later, it still provokes a reaction? We’re here for you. We rant because we love. Or, once loved. And obviously, when discussing finales in particular, there will be spoilers:

If there was one thing Season 1 of Scrubs made clear, it’s that JD (Zach Braff) and Elliot (Sarah Chalke) were not a good fit together. Whereas Friends and How I Met Your Mother let their main will-they/won’t-they couple stay together for a full season before tearing them apart, Scrubs gave them a single episode, and it wasn’t pretty. 

“My Bed, Banter & Beyond” gave viewers the much-awaited Jelliot relationship we had spent the first 14 episodes anticipating—and immediately made us wonder why we ever wanted it to begin with. JD’s immaturity and Elliot’s neuroticism are not a good fit, and it takes them just a few days before they’re sick of each other’s quirks and engage in one brutal, heart-wrenching argument after another. For the next season and a half, they’re back in the much more comfortable position of being regular friends, to the relief of both themselves and everyone around them. 

If showrunner Bill Lawrence had his way, this would be the stage JD and Elliot stayed in for the rest of the show. “When the show started, we had two attractive single leads,” he said in a 2009 interview, “And so the network was, like, ‘Put ’em together! Maybe they won’t fall in love, but they’ll still kiss!’ Which, y’know, I think that’s good instincts to attach viewers, but for me, I didn’t want to do that.” 

Specifically, he didn’t want a repeat of Friends, where so much of the final seasons revolved around that central romance. The problem, of course, is that as long as JD and Elliot still had some chemistry together (as long as the tiniest possibility of romance was still on the table), there would always be a major section of the audience rooting them on. So in Season 3, Scrubs set out to put an end to any Jelliot endgame expectations once and for all, and it did it in the meanest, sloppiest way possible. 

To quickly recap: Season 3 is the one where Elliot gets back together with her Season 1 fling Sean (Scott Foley). The relationship goes well even after it’s forced to go long distance, which is a problem for JD because he’s suddenly found himself falling for Elliot all over again. But after 17 episodes of torturing JD’s heart, Scrubs finally gives him a win. At the end of “His Story II,” JD and Elliot hook up again, with the inherent promise that this is them starting a serious relationship. But then Sean barges into the apartment. “Something in your voice told me that you needed me,” he tells Elliot, which is why he had suddenly taken a 12-hour plane trip over without any notice.

This plot contrivance would be one thing, but it’s Elliot’s reaction to it that takes the show into truly sloppy territory. She immediately hops back into Sean’s arms, showing zero guilt or anxiety over the messy situation she’s found herself in. It’s a seemingly heartless moment that’s gotten the character a ton of flak from fans, but it’s hard to blame her for it because it feels more like the result of shoddy writing than any reflection on who she is as a person. It’s not completely out of character for Elliot to cheat on a partner with JD, but our Elliot would never be this cool about it. She would be stress-eating her hair and venting to Carla in an increasingly fast, high-pitched voice. Instead, it seemed like the show threw all logic or character development out the window just to stomp on JD even more. 

Luckily for Elliot fans, Scrubs balanced the scales a few episodes later when Elliot breaks up with Sean and gets back together with JD for real. “You finally have me,” she tells JD at the end of “My Fault,” and for a few seconds it seems like all is finally well. But then there’s a comedic record scratch sound effect and JD’s voiceover yells in a sudden, panicked realization, “Oh my god, I don’t want her!”

It’s one of the most agonizing storytelling choices in the whole show, undermining one of the series’ biggest ongoing storylines with a cheap joke about JD not knowing what he wants. Scrubs tells us that JD never really loved Elliot; he just wanted her because someone else had her. It’s an unconvincing explanation, one that makes the final stretch of Season 3 a surprisingly miserable affair. What should be a happy finale about Turk and Carla’s wedding is instead focused on JD and Elliot breaking up yet again, done with the sole intention of exhausting and discouraging the Jelliot shippers to the point of no return. 

“We tried to destroy it forever,” Lawrence explained, and sure enough the next two seasons had JD and Elliot in a purely platonic state. At one point JD even remarks that there’s zero lingering tension left between the two, to the point where they could be naked in the same room together and neither of them would even be tempted to have sex. There’s even a whole storyline about Elliot sleeping with JD’s brother, with JD’s main conflict centering around how much he should pretend to be upset by it. 

If Scrubs had kept the two in this dynamic, the chaos in Season 3 would’ve been worth it. Sure, it was ugly, but at least the show had taken a bold stance on the two characters, paving the way for a storyline that had subverted this typical trope and let JD and Elliot move on to more interesting, exciting romantic partners. By the end of Season 5, it seemed like Elliot was getting serious with Keith (Travis Schuldt) and JD was finding the new love of his life with Kim (Elizabeth Banks). 

It’s easy to imagine a version of Scrubs that kept the focus on the medicine instead of revisiting that Ross/Rachel dynamic, one that allowed Keith and Kim’s characters to develop organically and grow to become central characters to the show in their own right. Instead, Lawrence caved to the pressure from fans and the studio. “I didn’t want [JD and Elliot] to end up together,” he explained, but “there was a ton of chemistry between Zach and Sarah, and for a lot of the audience, there were huge stakes. And we had to come up with a compromise.”

The result is that Seasons 6 and 7 of Scrubs fall back on the same clumsy contrivances of Season 3. After two years of happiness and stability with Keith, escalating to him proposing and her saying yes, Elliot breaks up with him due to the sudden, unconvincing realization that she only said yes because she wants to get married, not necessarily because she wants to get married to him. Meanwhile, Kim and JD’s relationship falls apart due to Kim’s out-of-nowhere decision to lie to him about having a miscarriage. It’s a soap opera-esque plot twist, one that poisons the well of their relationship to an unfixable degree. 

It all serves the purpose of getting JD and Elliot back together for Season 8, which is meant to be a happy ending for them—even though the show has spent far more time convincing us they’re bad for each other than convincing us they could make it work. To be fair, Scrubs did a great job at avoiding any petty drama during this period (their relationship is far more mature and understated this time around), but the more Season 8 tried to sell us on Jelliot, the more those previous storytelling choices started to age poorly.

When JD tells Elliot in the Bahamas two-parter that he loves her more than Turk, for instance, it’s hard not to remember that he straight up told her “I don’t love you” in Season 3, and he sure seemed to mean it with all his heart. It’s also hard to forget about Elliot sleeping with JD’s brother, or Turk confidently telling JD that he and Elliot are “terrible for each other.” It’s hard not to notice how much the show is contradicting itself, undoing one of its smartest choices for the sake of following along with what long-running sitcoms are “supposed” to do.

Scrubs could’ve given Elliot and JD a happy ending, or it could’ve spent most its runtime establishing them as the most toxic couple ever, but it definitely should not have tried to do both. Scrubs was always a far stronger show than Friends, regardless of what the ratings implied; it did not need to follow the Friends playbook. The show’s controversial ending to Season 3 could’ve been handled more gracefully, but if they were going to go there, Scrubs should’ve stuck to its guns.

Michael Boyle is an entertainment writer for /Film, with bylines in Paste, Slate, The Daily Beast, Digital Spy, Polygon, and more. You can find him on Twitter at @98MikeB.

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