TV Tonight: Doctors, with Borders

ABC

The midseason is getting under way in earnest, with more primetime debuts tonight:

* On ABC, Scrubs returns for a possibly-last season on a new network. I'll admit that I haven't followed the show closely for a couple of years, so I'll take other critics at their word when they say that the new episodes represent a return to the show's early years on NBC. For my part, I still see a very funny show that overrelies on fantasy sequence gags and doesn't always pull off the transition between characters-as-cartoons and characters-as-people. Tonight gives us the debut of Courteney Cox, whose chief mode as an actress, from Friends to FX's Dirt, is to seem like she's just given someone a fake compliment. Somehow that manages to work in this role. Everytime I watch Scrubs, I laugh and wonder why I don't watch more often—yet I don't actually get around to watching more often. 

* In FX doctor news, Nip/Tuck returns with a premiere that (for now) steps back from the Hollywood-satire extremes that put me off last season and refocuses on the central characters of Sean and Christian. I haven't really loved Nip/Tuck since season 3, but I'm going to give it another chance. 

* And back on ABC, we get the debut of Homeland Security USA, a reality show from Big Brother's Arnold Shapiro about the government employees who oversee border crossings and airport entry points. Have the DHS's eagle eyes prevented another 9/11? I don't know, and considering that DHS's eagle eyes were allowed to vet and approve this series before air, I wouldn't depend on this show to tell you. In the debut episode we do see the affable agents stopping a Swiss belly dancer from entering the country without a work visa; scanning mail for barbecued bat and tainted food that "could cause illness, and death!"; and seizing narcotics, including over 100 pounds of marijuana at a border crossing, a crime so heinous the driver gets three years' probation.

As for the actual protection from terrorism, that's mostly left implied by the voiceover and the interviews. When a radiation alarm goes off at a checkpoint, for instance, the show allows a DHS employee to explain that these could be the materials for a "dirty bomb." The fact that a dirty bomb is not the same as a nuke, and that it presents relatively little threat to life (as opposed to property), is left implicit: "It only takes a little radiation," he says, "to make something that can scare a lot of people."

Or you can have ABC scare them for you.