It Turns Out ‘Scrubs’ Is Way More Realistic Than ‘Friends’ Ever Was
Scrubs and Friends don’t often get compared to each other often because they had very different premises. One followed medical residents as they navigated life in a hospital. The other documented the lives of six friends in New York City who didn’t seem to work much at all — they were all too busy hanging out in a coffee shop.
But both NBC comedies became aspirational for fans because of the way they depicted adult friendships with all their triumphs and challenges. However, Scrubs is considered a very realistic show for a scripted sitcom.
And Friends? It’s not even close.
‘Scrubs’ was a goofy medical comedy with plenty of realism
Fans are often surprised to find that Scrubs, which thrived on over-the-top humor and situations, received praise for being a realistic comedy series. Compared to medical dramas like Grey’s Anatomy, it’s way closer to real life.
“Out of all the medical shows that have hit the air, I think Scrubs is the most accurate,” ophthalmologist Dr. Ross Kopelman told Insider. “Though it’s a comedy, for the most part, it accurately depicts the life of a resident doctor. It shows what happens in a hospital on a day-to-day basis, not just what happens when there is an emergency.”
“As a doctor, Scrubs is one of the few medical shows that I can watch and not cringe because something is wildly overdone or inaccurate. In fact, Scrubs is the most relatable series that I have watched from a medical perspective,” pediatrician Dr. Cherilyn Cecchini concurred.
‘Friends’ was plagued by inconsistencies
Taken at face value, Friends is a show about 20-something singles living and loving in New York City. But just beneath the surface, we see that many of the details about this beloved comedy just don’t add up.
The friendships on the show took center stage and eventually, became totally unrealistic and slightly annoying to fans. The six main cast members hung out all the time and seemed to spend very little time going to work and attending to mundane tasks like cooking and cleaning. Relationships, children, and family responsibilities didn’t detract any time from their schedules.
The Friends cast members would frequently hang out on weekday mornings at Central Perk and didn’t seem to spend anywhere close to 40 hours per week working. Plus, how exactly could Monica and Rachel afford that roomy 2-bedroom Greenwich apartment on their meager salaries? Inheritance and rent control aside.
As Time noted, Friends is “basically an adolescent conception of an ideal adulthood; your entire clique is hanging out all the time, with (almost) no parents and (almost) no responsibilities and plenty of cute boys. Sounds nice — but it’s only fiction.”
‘Scrubs’ and ‘Friends’ were made for different audiences
Ultimately, the people who love Friends are bound to be slightly different from the fans obsessed with Scrubs, and both groups will need to suspend their sense of reality to fully enjoy either series. Friends may have been more popular in mainstream culture, but Scrubs boasts a lot more real-life situations that Friends just can’t match.
It all comes down to a matter of preference. And both shows are worth watching (and re-watching) for the purity of the friendships they portray.
