Ten Useful Words

Hospital Drama:
a television genre centred around hospitals and the lives of hospital staff and patients

Scrubs is set in a hospital and is also a hospital drama. I will look into the hospital genre alot as I am looking to discover how Scrubs subverts this genre.

Hybrid Genre:
a cross between one film genre and another

As well as being a hospital genre, Scrubs is also a comedy. It manages to cover serious issues but at the same time is very funny !!

Target audience:
the audience group in which the text is purposefully made for. All media texts have a target audience.

Scrubs has a variety of target audiences. Many may watch this for the comedy aspect, whereas others could watch it for "personal relationship/identity" as many characters lives are looked into quite deeply.

Stereotypes:
the social classification of a group of people by identifying common characteristics and universally applying them in an often oversimpliflied and generalised way, such that the classification represents value judgements and assumptions about the group concerned.

In Scrubs there are many sorts of Stereotypes. Mainly with the black surgeon TURK and the white female doctor ELLIOT. They both have a few stereotypes based around them but do occassionally break them.

Social realism:
The representation of characters and issues in film and television drama in such a way as to raise serious underlying social and political issues

Scrubs is a more realistic hospital genre than others as it deals in a more mature manner with things such as death and show them as they really are.

Audience profile
personal charcteristics of the target audience and finding out what appeals to this audience

As hospital genres have been very popular over the years, Scrubs was bound to be watched by quite a few, but now that there is a comedy aspect to it, Scrubs will appeal to a different audience

Censorship
the practice, excersized by elite groups of authority, of monitoring and controlling media content by removing, supressing or classifying content

Scrubs tends to show alot of love making scenes and I feel it is good that they are not censored as it is a show i believe that is made for an older audience and also discusses issues such as love.

Male gaze:
This is when the camera takes the point of view of a male

Although this is not a mian focus point in my study, I will mention how some females (Elliot Reid in particular) are objectified and are sometimes shown in just their bra's. As this is a single camera show it does tend to look much worse.

Patriarchy:
This is the male domination in our society.

Scrubs does tend to have a few male dominating characters but it does also challenge a patriarchal society with the addition of certain women as they are very strong and independent.

Preferred Reading:
the meaning of a text as intended by the author

Scrubs usually ends the episode with the protagonist JD sharing his thoughts on the day and giving a moral. This moral could be the authors meaning that he is trying to portray.