TVSquad

In the hall of TV show bands, The Blanks are The Rolling Stones. Definitely The Who, tops.

The a cappella quartet made their small screen debut on Scrubs as Ted's band The Worthless Peons, played by Sam Lloyd, Philip McNiven, George Miserlis and Paul F. Perry (not to be confused with Ted's air band The Cool Cats that was just a brief side project when they probably failed to win those water park tickets) and have since become a hard-working touring band that has gone back and forth between both sides of the U.S. coasts. But they were a band long before Scrubs was even an afterthought in Bill Lawrence's skull, assuming that Lawrence didn't come up with the idea for Scrubs when they all met at Syracuse University.

Lloyd and McNiven (the completely bald one that looks like Professor Wonder Bread) were nice enough to dish out all the backstage dirt that comes from the hard and edgy road life of an all-male vocal band.

One of Scrubs' minor but more memorable characters will become a memory this season.

Actor Sam Lloyd, who plays the hopelessly pathetic attorney Ted, will leave the show in the upcoming season. Lloyd said he just finished filming his final episode and called it a "bittersweet moment."

"It was a nice episode, but it was very bittersweet for me," Sam said. "It was basically my choice and I just decided I should move on at this point."

I sat down with Lloyd and fellow band member Philip McNiven to talk about their a cappella music group The Blanks for a feature interview that we'll post soon. In the meantime, enjoy their famous rendition of "Over the Rainbow" to give this sad moment the solemn tone it deserves.

Several DVD sets came my way this week, so I did some marathon viewing sessions for Jane After Dark. I'm brand new to some of these, so you'll get the stark, raw newbie version. But I'll start with one I've watched since the beginning ...

Dirty Sexy Money: The Complete Second and Final Season. I really liked this show at the beginning. It had all the elements of a great series, including excellent actors (starting with Donald Sutherland, Jill Clayburgh, and Peter Krause) and intriguing storylines with rich people, sex, murder, and mystery. But by the time they got to season two, the storylines just seemed to fizzle out. I would love to hear your thoughts on why Dirty Sexy Money didn't work. Crummy writing? Poor use of great actors? Too many characters to keep track of? Poor timing with the writer's strike occurring in the middle of its run, resulting in ten months between seasons?

Bonus features: Directing the Darlings (behind the scenes with director Jamie Babbit); A Total Knockout (a day in the life of Natalie Zea, who played Karen); Dirty Sexy Crafty (a featurette about the food on the set); Faux Pas (bloopers); deleted scenes.

On the last day of the TCA press tour, as the stars of ABC were yukking it up at a crowded party at the Langham Huntington in Pasadena, Bill Lawrence and I were out in the courtyard talking about what the new season of Scrubs -- or as I'm calling it, Scrubs 2.0 -- is going to look like.

Essentially, it's going to be like a medical version of The Paper Chase, with Turk and Cox being the professors. We'll be following the lives of young medical students who will shuttle back and forth between classes and their rotations at the "new" Sacred Heart, which is being rebuilt on the med school's campus. While in the hospital, they'll run into a lot of the characters from Scrubs 1.0, including J.D., as Zach Braff is scheduled to be in the first six episodes.

It all sounds a bit confusing, so I'll let Bill lay it out for you folks. An edited transcript is after the jump. The full transcript can be found here. And I'll be getting on the phone with Bill to talk Cougar Town sometime next week, so stay tuned. Oh, and at the end of the interview, we talk about the role Bill's wife, Christa Miller, had on Scrubs that didn't involve any acting.

Here's the full transcript of the interview I did with Bill Lawrence on the last day of the TCAs. It's goes into some of the financial nitty-gritty of the Scrubs deal and drops a few other details. I also asked him to repeat what was going to go on in the new Scrubs a few times, just so I could understand completely what was going on. Enjoy! The main post, where you can leave your comments, is here.

Well let's start with the obvious. You've been thinking about doing another season of Scrubs for like a year now.
(laughing)

Because you told me...when'd you talk to me about that? About a year ago?
We're the only people who shot the shit about it. I thought there was a chance it would happene. I just saw the landscape, you know.

What will the upcoming ninth season of Scrubs look like? Only ABC and show creator Bill Lawrence know the answer to that question.

During the network's recent upfront presentation, ABC Entertainment president Steve McPherson said Lawrence was playing with two possible scenarios for the show, one of which is "a complete rethinking" and the other a simple continuation of the format with a new cast.

Either way, things will be different. And with star Zach Braff signed on for only six episodes next season and Sarah Chalke not looking to return full-time, it seems like this might be Donald Faison's time to shine. Or bomb terribly. It could go either way, really.