‘Scrubs’: John C. McGinley on Dr. Cox Return

[This story contains spoilers for “My Odds,” the April 8 episode of Scrubs.]

Throughout the run of Scrubs — both the original series and this season’s revival — John C. McGinley’s Dr. Perry Cox has been, as McGinley himself puts it, “a profoundly damaged guy.” The character uses an arsenal of putdowns and deflections to paper over the vulnerability he steadfastly refuses to admit to or show.

Turns out, he’s not that different as a patient.

The penultimate episode of the season, “My Odds,” brings Dr. Cox back to Sacred Heart. At first it seems he’s just there to briefly check in on J.D. (Zach Braff) — the hospital’s chief of medicine after Cox stepped down in the season premiere — before heading out to dinner with the equally acidic Dr. Kevin Park (Joel Kim Booster). The episode builds in such a way, however, that it becomes conspicuous that Perry is spending a lot of time at the hospital. Sure enough, just as J.D.’s voiceover narration makes the same point, Perry faints in the hallway.

He’s diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder — one that’s treatable but will have him spending more time in the hospital, under J.D.’s care. As he’s done throughout the life of Scrubs, Perry chafes at the idea even though he knows, at some level, that J.D. is giving him good advice.

“I think Zach’s character, as the protagonist, on the hero’s journey … the protagonist needs a threat,” McGinley told The Hollywood Reporter. “There has to be jeopardy. And right now, the threat is his interns not learning the way they should. But he [also] needs personal threat. It has to be a fragile landscape. And integrating Cox back into this satisfies that.”

Cox’s obstinance is also of a piece with the way he’s always approached his work, McGinley notes. The weapons-grade sarcasm and withering monologues are part of both how he teaches and who he is. He left Sacred Heart at the beginning of the season, and picked J.D. as his successor, because he realized his method of teaching wasn’t landing with the current generation of interns (that point is also the subject of a well-played joke in the episode’s final scene), and he tries to atone for his past tactics in a heartfelt scedne with Sarah Chalke’s Dr. Elliot Reid.

“I think his perception is that in teaching these people how to save lives, he’s serving a greater good, and the greater good is save their lives. Don’t worry about mine. I got me,” he said. “You’ve got to take care of a greater good. So when I teach you, Elliot, or you, J.D., or any of the other people, there’s a bigger game at play here. We’re not changing light bulbs, we’re not connecting pipes, we’re saving lives. Cox has got to supplement that stuff. [His well-being] has to take a back seat to what the objective is, and the objective is for you people to be able to do this without me.”

McGinley also praised the show’s writers, past and present, for not making Dr. Cox’s “cavalcade of eccentricities and damage” become one-note over the course of the character’s life. “Perry Cox is a profoundly damaged guy, right?” he said. “Writers can write damages without making the character redundant. The leading man’s got to get the girl, the girl’s got to get the leading man, and then where they go from there, they have to invite new challenges into their story arc. The writers, over 10 years now, have been able to make him not a redundant exercise in revisiting the same conflicts.”

For all its silliness, Scrubs has never hesitated to face the realities of its hospital setting — patients die despite the doctors’ and nurses’ best efforts, and it can have a profound effect on them. McGinley said Cox’s current situation reminds him of the guest arc Brendan Fraser had early in the show’s original run: Fraser played Ben, Cox’s brother-in-law who was diagnosed with leukemia over two season one episodes. Ben returned in season three, seemingly in remission, but went into cardiac arrest and died — a fact that Cox refused to face for a while.

“We saw that impact Cox in a deeply disturbing way,” he said. “For him to be facing this internal challenge, this challenge with his organs, you arguably might be able to see the end. When your friends and mine have the opportunity, you reconcile things before they pass. That’s a whole different journey. Obviously, some of your friends and mine are taken out and there’s no such thing as the verb ‘to reconcile’ — things go sideways. Cox has now been afforded an opportunity to either set things right, or whatever the cliche is. And he’s taken it upon himself to do that.”