10 TV Shows You Should Stop Watching Before The Final Season

For me, this is one of the most clear-cut examples of a show that had a perfect ending, and then a real ending.

This hospital-based comedy-drama technically has a total of nine seasons, but if we all collectively ignore Season Nine, did it really happen?

For the first eight instalments, the show followed the lives of those working in Sacred Heart teaching hospital, narrated by the central character J.D.

After years of getting to know and love the characters, Season Nine scrapped them almost completely and introduced a whole new premise too. It was essentially a whole new show, kind of like a spin-off, but without the change to the title. Understandably, people were pissed.

We moved from the hospital to the classroom, with med students taking centre stage and some familiar faces making part-time appearances. Dr Cox, Dorian and Turk were all now medical professors, teaching students who would sometimes attend Sacred Heart hospital.

Taken as its own thing, the season wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but the fact remained that it made no sense to try to claim it was still the same show we started watching nine seasons earlier. Scrubs' creator, Bill Lawrence, even petitioned ABC to subtitle Season Nine (which was obviously rejected), and himself considers Season Eight to be the final one.

Essentially, everything that needed to be tied up was tied up at the end of Season Eight and that was the perfect place to leave things. Unfortunately the overall reputation of Scrubs was irreversibly impacted by the terrible decision to go ahead with Season Nine, which was unsurprisingly cancelled after a short time.

I’m gonna carry on pretending Season Nine didn’t happen so I can continue to enjoy all the good that came before it, and so should you.