Photo: Apple TV

During its original run, Scrubs built every single episode to a serious emotional moment. Sometimes it involved the lives of the doctors and nurses (and Janitor) who worked at the show’s Sacred Heart hospital. Sometimes it involved the lives — and deaths — of their patients. Sometimes it was both. 

Either way it’s the sort of thing that would normally be death for the show itself. This is a sitcom we’re talking about, a situation comedy. If every situation were Sam Malone falling off the wagon, or Dorothy Zbornak failing to find a diagnosis for her chronic fatigue syndrome, or the Diff’rent Strokes episode with the “funny bike shop owner, they wouldn’t be comedies anymore, would they?

This never eluded Bill Lawrence, Scrubs’ creator. I can’t speak to the man’s oeuvre since, but back then he knew that for every spoonful of sadness or schmaltz, he needed to include some of the silliest, goofiest, stupidest jokes imaginable. There’s a lot of great character-based work on Scrubs, don’t get me wrong, but if you watched the show I bet you remember The Todd’s banana hammocks or Turk’s dance routine to Bel Biv Devoe’s “Poison” as much as you remember J.D.’s long-running rivalry with his older brother or whatever. 

The point is that Scrubs worked hard for its laughs. Jokes, gags, pratfalls, wordplay, cutaway surrealism, workplace humor, slapstick, guys in banana hammocks, you name it — that show tried everything to get you to laugh. And it worked! It isn’t for everyone of course, but it’s one of this century’s few dramedies, as you might broadly define the subgenre, to understand that its drama portion requires comedy ballast. 

To put it another way, O.G. Scrubs understood something virtually no dramedy or comedy that gets serious or whatever has understood since: If you’re going to bastardize the sitcom format to tug at the heartstrings enough to make every episode a Very Special Episode, you’d better make me fucking laugh by any means necessary first.

Margo’s Got Money Troubles has never understood this. Sure, it’s an affable show, full of likeable characters doing vaguely amusing things, like professional wrestling, or OnlyFans modeling, or getting married in an Elvis chapel. It’s stacked to the ceiling with actors I like a lot: Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman, Greg Kinnear, Nicole Kidman. (I’ve never been super high on Marcia Gay Harden and her work here is not turning me around, but your mileage may vary favorably.) It’s about important and interesting topics: sex work, single motherhood, the death of the middle class, professional wrestling. (Sorry, I really like professional wrestling.)

But is it funny enough to sustain an episode like this one, in which Margo is put through the stations of the cross by her awful babydaddy, his ghastly mother, her hugely irresponsible and selfish parents, and the iron fist of Child Protective Services. Not on your life, buster.

The primary attraction of this episode is seeing almost all the big-name actors listed above together when Margo and Mark come together for mediation. The session is a joke: Mark spends the entire time acting like OnlyFans modeling, something millions of people do, is akin to robbing graves and making masks out of people’s faces. Rather than have any kind of defense prepared, Margo simply freezes, tears in her eyes. Frankly, I find this writing to be an insult to Elle Fanning, who could surely do something much more interesting in that moment than crumble like a cookie.

Not that it matters much given the conduct of Shyanne and Jinx. Admittedly goaded by Mark’s mother Elizabeth, a character with fewer redeeming qualities than Emperor Palpatine (the guy loved to laugh!), Shyanne punches her in the waiting room, breaking her jaw while her daughter is trying to make the case that she’s providing a safe environment for her baby.

This argument has already been complicated by her father Jinx’s decision to break Mark’s hand. Feeling sorry for himself, he…well, it’s not entirely clear. He shoots heroin and ODs, but the show sends conflicting signals as to how hard or why. Is it because Margo has failed to properly monitor his pain pill intake, as she suggests? Or is it because this was a suicide attempt following his failure to woo Shyanne, as the fact that he shot up in a running bathtub would appear to suggest?

Fortunately, Jinx has Shyanne’s conveniently available apartment to move into, because she’s been maintaining it after moving in with Kenny because, she says, it’s cheaper than a storage unit. (I guarantee you that isn’t the case.) Unfortunately, he’s not quite out the door before CPS shows up, by coincidence, to investigate allegations of unsafe conditions clearly leveled by Mark himself. (The agent somehow knows Margo’s an OnlyFans model, tipping Susie off as to the identity of the complainang.) 

The visit, which also entails Jinx, Margo, and Susie all getting piss-tested for drug use, is hostile on the part of the agent in such a way as to skew the results of the observation by freaking out Margo, an actually good mother. But that’s Margo in a nutshell. The show gins up dramatic interest by carelessly shoveling adversity onto Margo in big wet globs, while hoping our affection for her and her family is enough to pull us through. The one thing this episode really has going for it is Offerman, who turns in a quietly moving and profoundly sad performance as Jinx at his lowest. It’s still real to him, damn it, and that’s great. Personally, I’d like a comedy to make me laugh before it demands anything else.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.