Blog

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 early 2000s hit comedy “Scrubs” gathered for a panel at the ATX TV festival in 2022, the question naturally turned to the series’ revival. Most of the cast loved the idea, but thought it was 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’s pretty busy right now (“Shrinking,” “Rooster,” “Bad Monkey”), was eager to get the gang back together. “I just thought it would happen,” he says. “People often say, ‘Why would you restart this?’ If you like spending time and working with people you know, I think you’d be crazy not to try it. Even if the worst that can happen is that you get to spend time with the people you love again. We had reached points in our lives where we couldn’t spend as much time together, because everyone was successful and doing their own thing, and ultimately everyone would be receptive to taking another turn and seeing if we could have fun again.

Star Zach Braff (JD) noted that the “Scrubs” rerun podcast he and Faison hosted during the pandemic, “Fake Doctors, Real Friends,” helped generate 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 pushed things at an even greater pace,” he says. “I think that’s when Bill started trying to figure out how to make it work.”

Because Lawrence is obligated to produce his other shows (and is under contract to Warner Bros. TV, while “Scrubs” is produced by Disney), he tapped “Scrubs” alum Assem Batra to direct the revival. “I feel this spectacle in my soul,” he says. “The balance of heart and fun. Bill gave me a lot of freedom on what this will be. It seems like we’ve been talking about it for years, so it’s exciting that it’s finally happening.”

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

The new “Scrubs” begins with a small homage to “The Pitt” before revealing that it’s all JD’s fantasy, and that he’s actually working as a successful, but bored, janitor doctor.

“I’ll tell you right now that my favorite medical show on television is ‘The Pitt,’” Lawrence says. “I’ll put Scrubs a close second, but I’m obsessed, and it kind of represents that world of what it means to be thrown into a place that you know, on some level, just for the sake of being there. It’s because you want to serve and do things that matter to the world. Man, that’s the kind of storytelling realm that always gets me hooked.”

But when JD visits Sacred Heart, he realizes he misses the call of being in the middle of the action. And so, when Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley) offers him the position to replace him as chief of medicine, he accepts.

Braff says, “That’s in him, that passion, and that’s when Cox says, ‘what are you doing?’ He has the attitude of, ‘I trained you to be so much more than what you’re doing and you’re better than just being a concierge doctor.’ “You should come back and make a difference.” I think that really hits home with JD, especially when he sees the difference he can make. In the two days he spends in the hospital, he gets a glimpse of what it is like to be a teacher and share knowledge. It just goes back into your 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.”

Dr. Cox’s decision to retire was also one of necessity: McGinley was busy filming Lawrence’s new series for HBO Max, “Rooster.” But that Dr. Cox/JD relationship remains central to the first episode. “We always had that dynamic where Cox wouldn’t let him in, and now he’s letting him in a little more,” Aseem says.

When “Scrubs” returns after 15 years, its characters are now veteran 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 he hoped would replace Dr. Cox in charge) and Vanessa Bayer as the hospital’s human resources director, Sibby. Ava Bunn, Jacob Dudman, David Gridley, Layla Mohammadi and Amanda Morrow play the new generation of interns.

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

Among the themes for the returning “Scrubs” characters: What it’s like to get older.

“In healthcare, you deal with a lot of humanity every day, and some of humanity is aging and aging, and what that means emotionally, spiritually, physically,” Batra says. “It’s almost organic to see our cast go through these issues in a hospital setting. We’re actually talking directly about ‘what does it feel like to get older?’ And we have an episode of that coming soon.

Fans quickly learn that JD and Elliot (Sarah Chalke) have divorced.

“The Elliot/JD relationship was always complicated, because people are very supportive of them,” Batra says. “But if you go back and look at their dynamic in the first season, it was a disaster. There was something that we felt we could get out of them by not being together that would be more complex and layered than if it had all worked out. I felt like Turk and Carla were always the core, the solid couple. In fact, we were excited to do this, because even being separated by Elliot and JD didn’t mean they didn’t love each other. And to be able to have that arc for them about getting back together, even if it’s not romantic, we don’t know. But Seeing them rebuild something together also gives us a lot to do.”

Chalke says, “I thought Elliot and JD figuring out who they were going to be for each other in this new iteration was a really smart way to do it. I thought it leaves a lot of room for plots and conflicts and interests. It’s a unique experience to come back and play a character that you spent eight years on. It’s unique to be able to do it once, but then to be able to do it again, I feel really lucky.”

Batra and Braff, who directed the pilot, say they wanted to keep the return of “Scrubs” more grounded compared to the flights of fancy the show was later famous for.

“I think what we both understood and agreed on was that we had to keep the tone firm,” Batra says. “We couldn’t start with the silliness in ‘Scrubs’ 10. We had to give people a way in, to get emotionally hooked. We know it’s going to push more toward comedy, but we really wanted to connect with our audience, and so we’ve relied more on that for now.”

Says Braff: “Beyond the fantasies, we really wanted the show to go back to where it was in Season 1 of the original show. We got broader and broader over the years, and it almost became cartoonish at points. And we want to be real. When I was directing, I would surprise myself and the other cast and say, ‘that’s kind of a heightened version of that. How would you actually say that in the real world?’ And I kept trying to land it.”

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

“The Todd was complicated, because we thought, ‘Well, the Todd these days is very problematic,’” Batra says. “So, to give Todd a twist, he thinks he understands what’s going on and says, ‘You get consent.’ So he’s not a bad guy. He’s just a dating guy and he tries really hard to understand the rules, but he’s probably screwing them up. 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 thread that idea of ​​giving fans everything they want, even just with availability and the ability to introduce a new cast, rather than putting emphasis on the older cast,” Batra says. “After the pilot, we got eight episodes, which I think also determined what we can do. Hopefully, if we’re successful and have a second season, we’ll be able to bring back a lot more fan favorites and address some of the things. Sam Lloyd [who played Sacred Heart lawyer Ted] He passed away and we wanted to pay tribute to him. Something like that might come up next season, because we really feel his absence from the show.”

And yes, Turk and JD relive their “eagle” lift in the first game of the season, but they soon realize that their bodies are no longer made for it.

“We just didn’t want it to be a greatest hits nostalgia session,” Braff says. “Even though we have characters that people like, and of course we probably do our first and last ‘Eagle’ at age 50 in the pilot, I think mainly we want to introduce this world to a new audience that doesn’t know ‘Scrubs’ and so that you can start the show over without having known anything about ‘Scrubs’. In that case, it’s about a doctor who returns to work in a hospital after many years away.”

ABC is calling this Season 1 of “Scrubs,” 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 takes place 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 was on new characters played by Eliza Coupe, Kerry Bishé, Michael Mosley and Dave Franco.

“’Scrubs’ season nine wasn’t supposed to be ‘Scrubs,’” Lawrence notes. “It was called ‘Scrubs Med’ and it was supposed to be a fun spin-off. 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, were doing really fun, cool things. And it would have been interesting to see where it went. But for me, the ‘Scrubs’ show ended the eighth year, and this is like picking it up 20 years later.”

Braff adds: “In terms of going back to Bill Lawrence’s vision of ‘Scrubs,’ it’s seasons 1 through 8. And if you look at the way all eight of them end, when all those images are projected on that sheet, that’s just what JD hopes will happen. That’s what he dreams will happen. It doesn’t necessarily mean that any of those things have actually happened.”

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

“It doesn’t mean we don’t respect season 9, but we feel like it was more of a spin-off,” Batra says. “So we really decided to continue after season 8. We knew we would upset some people with it, people who are hardcore about all that, but we decided that it was fine with us as far as tone and everything else.

Faison adds, “For all my nerds, watch season 9 as a ‘what if’?”

The cast and producers are on board to keep the “Scrubs” revival alive.

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