The single most interesting actor and character on television wasn't honored at this year's Emmy Awards.

But while I'm still griping about it, you won't hear John C. McGinley complaining.

Well - maybe just a little.

"You want to at least be in it yeah, I was disappointed," said McGinley, who plays the benevolently bent Dr. Perry Cox on the NBC comedy "Scrubs." "I thought some of the work I got a chance to do this year was the best I could possibly do."

In an ensemble comedy of equals, McGinley stands out. In short, da man wuz robbed.

"John is creating a category all of his own," said Ken Jenkins, who play's Dr. Cox's foil, chief of medicine Bob Kelso. "When they give him the Emmy it's going to be for being John McGinley."

Despite the "Scrubs" snub, NBC is banking heavily on the sophomore show by airing it at 8:30 p.m. Thursday, the post-"Friends" time slot. If "Scrubs" does well - it didn't exactly rip in the ratings last year on Tuesdays - it could be tapped to take over the marquee 8 p.m. slot when "Friends" departs, likely, at the end of this season.

"They keep upping the ante: Now it's Thursday night at 8:30," said Zach Braff, who plays "newbie" doctor J.D. Dorian. "The game keeps getting bigger."

"Scrubs" hopes to avoid the lethal curse that befalls all holders of the post-"Friends" slot, which has previously seen the demise of "The Single Guy," "Union Square, "Jesse" and "Inside Schwartz."

"Thursday nights?" executive producer Bill Lawrence said in mock horror. "We're on Thursday nights? That's a death slot."

But the inventive comedy has a distinct advantage over the other shows that have crashed and burned there.

It's good. Really good.

Maybe it's telling that on the set of "Scrubs," which is shot in an abandoned California hospital, the writers work out of what was the psych ward. A warped outlook with unexpected flights from reality serves as the show's foundation.

"Scrubs" employs inventive sight gags, frenetic pacing, fantasy sequences and a solid top-to-bottom cast headed by McGinley to create one of the best comedies on television. (You can't call it a sitcom: with its single camera, lack of a laugh track and occasional patches of real drama, "Scrubs" tries to avoid any trite sitcom conventions.)

Lawrence said to expect fewer fantasy sequences this season: "Only if it's really weird and worth it." (Thursday night's premiere included a great extended bit with Colin Hay, the frontman for '80s band Men at Work.)

"In the beginning, I thought I made the mistake of trying to throw everything we could think of into the show," Lawrence said. "Sometimes it was a little too frenetic. By the middle or the end of the year, there were only two or three."

Lawrence's real-life wife, Christa Miller ("The Drew Carey Show"), returns as Cox's shrewish ex (she once slept with Dorian as payback). Heather Locklear and Ed Cavanaugh ("Ed") will guest star. There is a possibility that Brendan Fraser may return to guest star as Cox's old friend, who battled leukemia.

A moment critical to this show's success came last fall. It happened not on screen, but in a meeting between McGinley and Lawrence after the pilot was shot.

McGinley felt Cox, a mean cuss who tears down the interns under him, needed to have some benevolent motivation. He said the request came partly from hubris. Maybe, the actor adds, it was colored by his caring for his 5-year-old son Max, who is developmentally disabled. McGinley wants to wring something multifaceted and sincere from the character, rather than a mere caricature.

"In the pilot, Cox was way too similar to the head of the hospital; he was just caustically acerbic," said McGinley, who has previously played doctors in "Fat Man and Little Boy" and "Article 99."

"I think this guy should function from love. So he can be an empowered mentor and leader, so he can absolutely crush these kids because he loves them," McGinley continued. "For me, it changed the whole landscape.

"It's so much easier to torture these kids knowing that every once in a while - kind of like what Lou Grant does with Mary - he's going to give them a hug."

McGinley explodes on the screen when he gives one his single-breath tirades, which roll and roar like water through a broken dam. Sometimes these explosions are from the script, other times they're ad-libbed. They are delivered so fast that some viewers in Bensonhurst must be shouting, "Whoa, he's fast."

"Those walk and talks . . . this paragraph on the page is going to be executed between here and the end of the hallway," McGinley said, shaking his head. "And the end of the hallway is only 40 feet."

But McGinley said he's no rush to complete his run on the comedy. "I will drive this into the ground," he said.

Not before you cop that Emmy statue. You are owed one.

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