Who’s back, which couples survived, big changes

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the season 1 (or season 10? season 9?) premiere of “Scrubs” (2026), which premiered Wednesday night on ABC.

When the cast and producers of the hit early 2000s comedy “Scrubs” reunited for a panel at the 2022 ATX TV Festival, the demand naturally turned to a revival of the series. Most of the cast loved the idea, but found it a non-starter. “It can’t be a full season of a show,” said star Donald Faison (Turk), who suggested a TV movie instead. “Everyone is doing things.”

But creator Bill Lawrence – who is currently quite busy (“Shrinking”, “Rooster”, “Bad Monkey”) – still wanted to get the gang back together. “I just thought it would happen,” he says. “People often say, ‘Why would you restart this?’ If you enjoyed spending time and working with people you know, I would think you would be crazy not to try. Even if the worst thing that can happen to you is being able to spend some time with the people you love again. We had reached points in our lives where we couldn’t spend so much time together – because everyone is successful and doing their own thing – that eventually everyone would be open to a change of pace and to see if we were having fun again.

Star Zach Braff (JD) noted that the “Scrubs” rewatch podcast he and Faison hosted during the pandemic, “Fake Doctors, Real Friends,” helped spark interest in a revival. And then there are those T-Mobile ads, where Braff and Faison play themselves but remind viewers of the chemistry of their “Scrubs” characters. “I think that took it a step further,” he says. “I think that’s when Bill started figuring out how to make it work.”

Because Lawrence is obligated to produce his other shows – and he is under contract with Warner Bros. TV, while ‘Scrubs’ is produced by Disney – he enlisted ‘Scrubs’ alumnus Assem Batra to show the revival. “I feel this show in my soul,” she says. “The balance of heart and humor. Bill gave me a lot of leeway on what this will be. It feels like we’ve been talking about it for years, so it’s exciting that it’s finally happening.”

Now that the revival of “Scrubs” has officially premiered on ABC (the next day on Hulu), here are some things to know about the show’s return:

The new ‘Scrubs’ opens with a tribute to ‘The Pitt’ before revealing that it’s all a JD fantasy, and that he really works as a successful but bored janitor doctor.

“I’ll tell you right now: my favorite medical show on TV is ‘The Pitt,’” says Lawrence. “I put Scrubs second, but I’m obsessed, and it kind of represents the world of what it means to end up in a place that you know, on some level, just by the simple act of being there. It’s because you want to be of service and you want to do things that matter to the world. Man, that’s the kind of storytelling arena that always fascinates me.”

But when JD visits Sacred Heart, he realizes he’s missing the calling to be in the middle of the action. And so when Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley) offers him the job to replace him as chief of medicine, he accepts.

Braff says, “That’s in him, that passion, and then Cox says, ‘What are you doing?’ He has the attitude of, “I trained you to be much more than what you do, and you are better than just being a concierge doctor.” You have to come back and make a difference.” I think that really gets to JD, especially when he sees what a difference he can make. During the two days he spends in the hospital, he gets a small impression of what it is like to be a teacher, to share your knowledge. It just comes back into his system. Like, ‘I miss this. This is a lot harder and the money may not be as good, but I want to make a difference again.”

The decision of Dr. Cox’s decision to retire was also out of necessity: McGinley was busy filming Lawrence’s new HBO Max series “Rooster.” But that Dr. Cox/JD relationship is still the focus of the first episode. “We’ve always kept that dynamic where Cox didn’t let him in, and he’s letting him in a little more now,” Aseem says.

As ‘Scrubs’ returns after fifteen years, the characters are now the experienced doctors teaching a whole new generation of ‘newbies’.

New cast members include Joel Kim Booster as Dr. Eric Park, JD’s new rival (and someone who expected to replace the responsible Dr. Cox) and Vanessa Bayer as HR director of the Sibby hospital. Ava Bunn, Jacob Dudman, David Gridley, Layla Mohammadi and Amanda Morrow play the next generation of interns.

“It’s 21 minutes and 30 seconds, and you almost feel like you’re doing two shows,” says Batra. “You do a show with our old cast, and you do a show with the new cast. So it’s tricky, but we hope there’s enough for old fans and new fans to participate in this.”

One of the themes for the recurring “Scrubs” characters: What it’s like to grow older.

“In healthcare, you deal with so much humanity every day, and some of humanity is getting older and older, and what that means emotionally, spiritually and physically,” Batra says. “It’s almost organic to see our cast going through these issues in a hospital setting. We’re basically talking about ‘what does it feel like to get older?’ And there will be an episode of that.

Fans soon find out that JD and Elliot (Sarah Chalke) have divorced.

“Elliot and JD’s relationship has always been difficult because people root for them so much,” Batra says. “But if you look back at their dynamic in the first season, it was a hot mess. There was something we could pull out of them not being together that would be more complex and layered than if everything had worked out. It felt like Turk and Carla were always the core, the solid couple. We were actually excited to do this because for Elliot and JD, even just because they broke up didn’t mean they didn’t love each other. And that we could have that arc for them of how they get back together, even if it is not romantic, we don’t know. But when we see them rebuilding something together, we also have so much to do.

Says Chalke: “Elliot and JD figuring out who they’re going to be to each other in this new version, I thought, was such a really clever way to come in. I thought it leaves so much room for storylines, for conflict and interests. It’s such a unique experience to come back and play a character that you’ve been doing for eight years. It’s unique to be able to do it once, but to be able to do it again feels really happy.”

Batra and Braff, who directed the pilot, say they wanted to keep the return of “Scrubs” more grounded rather than the fantasy the show later became famous for.

“I think what we both understood and agreed on was that we had to keep it tonally grounded,” Batra says. “We couldn’t start with the ‘Scrubs’ 10 about weirdness. We had to give people a way to emotionally connect with it. We know it’s going to be pushed more towards the comedy, but we really wanted to connect with our audience, and so we based it more on that for now.”

Braff says, “Outside of the fantasies, we really wanted to take the show back to where it was in Season 1 of the original show. We’ve gotten broader and broader over the years, and it became almost cartoonish at points. And we want to be real. When I was directing, I caught myself and the other cast and said, ‘That’s kind of a heightened version of that. How would you really say it in the real world?’ And I kept trying to ground it.

That’s not to say there isn’t fanservice. Eccentric surgeon Hooch (Phill Lewis) – apparently fired in season 8 – is back, as is brother doctor The Todd (Robert Maschio).

“The Todd was a tricky issue because we thought, ‘well, the Todd is so problematic these days,’” Batra says. “So for the Todd twist, he thinks he understands what’s going on, and he’s like, ‘you get permission.’ So he’s not a bad guy. He’s just a dated guy, and he tries his best to understand the rules, but he probably gets them wrong. So that’s how we decided to address Todd today.

Also returning: Judy Reyes as Carla, Christa Miller as Jordan and Neil Flynn as The Janitor. “It’s hard to pick up the thread of giving the fans everything they want, even if it’s just availability and the ability to introduce a new cast, rather than emphasizing the older cast,” says Batra. “After the pilot we got eight episodes, which I think also defined what we can do. Hopefully if successful and a season 2 we can bring back a lot more fan favorites and address some issues. Sam Lloyd [who played Sacred Heart lawyer Ted] passed away, and we wanted to do a memorial for him. Something similar may come up next season as we really feel his absence from the show.

And yes, Turk and JD revive their “eagle” lift in the season opener, but soon realize their bodies aren’t cut out for it anymore.

“We just didn’t want it to be a greatest hits nostalgia session,” says Braff. “Although we have characters that people like, and of course we do our probably first and last ‘eagle’ at age 50 in the pilot, I think the main thing is that we want to introduce a new audience that doesn’t know ‘Scrubs’ to this world and make it so that you can just start the show again without having known anything about ‘Scrubs’. Then it’s about a doctor who goes back to work in a hospital after years away.”

ABC is labeling this as “Scrubs” Season 1, even though it is technically Season 10. But Lawrence prefers to call it Season 9.

“I would say this is the ninth season of Scrubs, and it’s set 20 years later,” Lawrence says. That’s because the previous final season of “Scrubs” was actually a bit of a different show, as the focus turned to new characters played by Eliza Coupe, Kerry Bishé, Michael Mosley and Dave Franco.

“The ninth season of ‘Scrubs’ wasn’t supposed to be ‘Scrubs,'” Lawrence notes. “It was called ‘Scrubs Med’ and it was supposed to be a fun spinoff. And as a spin-off, I don’t regret it at all. I think a lot of those actors and actresses, Mike Mosley and Eliza Coupe and Kerry Bouche, Dave Franco, did really funny, cool things. And if it would have been interesting to see where it went. But for me, the show “Scrubs” ended its eighth year, and this is kind of 20 years later. later.”

Braff adds, “If we go back to the Bill Lawrence vision of ‘Scrubs,’ it’s seasons 1 through 8. And if you look at eight the way it ends, when all those images are projected onto that sheet, that’s exactly what JD hopes will happen. That’s what he daydreams will happen. It doesn’t necessarily mean that any of these things actually happened.”

That means some of what happened in Season 9 is no longer canon, and the new ‘Scrubs’ will instead pick up after the events of Season 8.

“It doesn’t mean we don’t respect season 9, but we feel like this was more of a spin-off,” Batra said. “So we really decided, let’s move on from Season 8. We knew we were going to annoy some people with that, people who are hardcore about all that, but we decided that in terms of tone and everything else, that just felt right to us.

Faison adds, “For all you nerds out there, just think of Season 9 as a ‘what if’.”

The cast and producers are keeping the ‘Scrubs’ revival going.

“We definitely want to continue and tell more ‘Scrubs’ stories,” says Braff. “This is kind of like an audition, to see if people like it. And I think if people like it, I know we and ABC would love to do more.”