Before the superhero tattoos and obsessions, before the sci-fi fascination and certainly before I decided what I wanted to do with my life, I would make a connection to something that I knew I would love from the moment I set eyes on it but would not realise how important it would be until a six or seven years later.

As an angsty fourteen or fifteen year old (I can’t remember exactly when) who never really felt like I fit in anywhere no matter how hard I tried, I turned on e4 to see a show that changed my outlook on everything. I used to hear people, and read about especially in music magazines, about how an album or song “changed their life” or “saved their life” – I never really got that then, I thought it was an overinflated way of describing how much you love something but it wasn’t until I started watching Scrubs that I would soon understand the true meaning of those particular phrases.

I remember the moment it really took hold. Episode 20, season 5, an episode called “My Lunch” was thrown on as I pottered around my conservatory. Something drew me to it, it must have been one of the few times it caught me when I wasn’t out playing football (or ‘soccer’, if by a weird miracle someone from American found this blog post – unlikely!) when I realised that something about this show was different. It was hilarious, yet somehow found a way to be so gut-wrenchingly emotional that by the end of that twenty one minute or so I found tears streaming down my face.

I hadn’t watched a full episode of Scrubs until that point.

How did a show that I knew nothing really about reduce me to having sitting there, defensively with a good few tears running down my face. It was absurd. I remember shortly afterwards scouring the internet, trying to find out THAT episode because I needed to watch it again. I hadn’t even thought about getting context about that episode, the storylines that ran through it and the characters it involved – all I knew was I had to see it again.

Eventually, I tracked it down late one night on some streaming site (long before the days of Netflix, etc). I watched it again. Tears rolled down my cheeks once more and I had to know what happened after that episode. I watched the following episode and I remember the ending of “My Fallen Idol” moving me to the point where my eyes threatened to well once more.

After watching a couple more episodes afterwards, I begged my Mum and Dad into buying me a series of Scrubs for Christmas, and after only really being able to afford one season – I knew immediately what season I wanted, season five. It was a no brainer. I clearly remember rinsing that season for as long as I could until I could get my hands on the other seasons, and once I got my first job (sixteen at this point), I set out to buy the whole series.

From the ages of fifteen through solidly to eighteen I would religiously watch the show every night on repeat over and over. I’d finish the seven seasons I had (at the time S8 hadn’t aired) and would take a couple of days off, you know, just so I didn’t seem TOO crazy, of course then it was back to season one.

It wasn’t until recently I showed my Mum a clip of Michael J. Fox’s character Dr. Kevin Casey have a break down in front of J.D. because of his crippling O.C.D. (S3E12), which I would later be diagnosed with at the age of nineteen along with anxiety and depression, that it really made me understand why I took comfort in watching Scrubs all those years ago. I didn’t understand how it did it, but that show managed to make me realise so much about who I was as a person, who I was growing to be, and most of all would be the catalyst to pursuing the career I’m in now. I didn’t care how much I watched it; I got the show and more importantly to my angsty teenage self, it got me. I didn’t know how much it would get me through until I was diagnosed and am now able to reflect upon those days where all I felt I had was to come home and escape into the fictional world of Scrubs.

I saw huge parallels of J.D.’s personality and how I was and the show managed to get me to understand that things like “being in your head” all the time was a good thing, that it wasn’t weird, and if it was then you could embrace it, and make use and fun of it. It made me understand damaged, complex people like Dr. Cox. It taught me about love and relationships, understanding diversity and people’s quirks, and when my friendship group begun to disperse after full-time school ended at sixteen – it made me strive to have a friendship group like that on the show – one that I could always rely on, that would always be there. Scrubs’ endings always taught me about how to approach complex situations in my life, the mistakes that people make (and that you can recover from them) regardless of how lost and alone you feel. And most important it gave me exactly that – when my life felt as if it was falling apart at sixteen, at home and the fact I’d screwed school and had no idea what I was doing with my life, it gave me a sense of togetherness and friendship. No matter how lost and useless I felt throughout the day as I aimlessly walked around sixth-form education with a mask on that projected on to the world that underneath I wasn’t complete mess with no idea what I was doing with my life, that my Dad wasn’t at home disabled after an accident, that I was failing and hated everything I was “studying” at the sixth-form – I could come home and Scrubs would always be there to rely on, to provide me with the assurances that everyone can feel lost and confused no matter how successful they were or how perfect their life seemed; shit would happen and things got bad, but you kicked on anyway because you had to, and oddly enough if you continued to lead your life the best you could – things would have a funny way of sorting themselves out.

Every time Scrubs made me laugh or drew a tear from my eye, or made my hair stand on end, even before I realised I wanted to be a filmmaker/writer, whenever I watched Scrubs I used to think “I wish I could tell these sorts of stories and make people feel the way I feel when I watch this show”. I looked back on this time a couple of years ago and realised that seeds were being planted every time I watched that show to put me on the career path I pursue now. I didn’t know it then – all I wanted was to make people feel the way I did when I watched Scrubs. I still take that desire now into all film works I do now, be it a fictional piece of writing or be it a wedding video that coupled with the perfect piece of music would make people feel a whole series of emotions.

It’s unreal to reflect on how much it shaped me then and how much it still shapes me now.

Prime example…

Okay, just kidding about that one.