Today, I’m Thankful For “Guy Love.”

Fellow Scrubs-aholics, no doubt, have this duet from season 6 (“My Musical”) on total recall: After admitting a patient who hears everyone’s speech in the form of singing, the cast works out their usual issues, only tunefully.

For Turk (Donald Faison), left, and JD (Zach Braff), right, above, no topic trumps their bromance. (Favorite couplet: “It’s like I married my best friend / But in a totally manly way!”) Hence their “nothing gay about it” paean to the same.

Today, I’m thankful Scrubs, one of my all-time favorite television shows, will be starting its ninth season on Tuesday, December 1. I’m not hopeful for the series, however. I hope I’m wrong.

Part of this nimble, surreal ensemble comedy’s appeal always lay in the way that it drew nuanced, fully-fleshed out characters, then kept them bumping into each other in highly combinatorial ways. (The central cast consisted of l-r, John C. McGinley, Neil Flynn, Sarah Chalke, Zach Braff, Donald Faison, Ken Jenkins and Judy Reyes.)

Though Braff’s character was central, and, thus, certain relationships were core to the series—see above—it’s hard to think of a character that didn’t have a significant storyline with any other one. So those relationships were, as they are in the best comedies, a big part of the show’s appeal.

All that seems to have been decapitated. After numerous false starts, word is that the new season changes the show’s location from a hospital to a medical school; that McGinley, Faison, and Flynn will be the only regulars, as other cast members make occasional appearances; and that a whole “new generation!” of scrubs will be entering the cast, right.

All of which is enough to make you long for earlier, better days, when Braff wasn’t yet making $350,000 an episode, and Scrubs hadn’t yet jumped the shark.