Some TV series are so engrossing they take us away. Some turn us inward. And some are comfort shows, the old standbys we turn to at the end of the day when times are rough.
“I think Scrubs is kind of like a warm hug for people,” Zach Braff says.
And, well, right now we could use a hug.
Braff, who grew up in South Orange and Maplewood, starred as John “J.D.” Dorian, a hospital doctor prone to flights of fancy across nine seasons of Scrubs. Now he’s back for an ABC series revival alongside his friend and co-star Donald Faison, who plays J.D.’s best bud, surgeon Christopher Turk.
“A lot of people grew up on it, and they remember it fondly, and it was a really pivotal single-camera comedy that mixed drama and comedy and fantasy in a very unique way, thanks to (creator) Bill Lawrence’s geniusness,” Braff tells New Jersey Monthly. “And I think if you look at what he created with Ted Lasso that broke so huge during the pandemic, that tone that is so Bill really resonated with people … And I think times being what they are, so topsy turvy these days, it is a good time for something nostalgic and comforting.”
Scrubs arrived on network TV at a particularly sensitive time. The series premiered on NBC in the weeks after September 11, 2001. Braff and Faison endeared themselves to audiences as interns at Sacred Heart Hospital. J.D. and Turk’s friendship—silly, heartfelt, constant— became an anchor for the show. The series became a favorite for its whimsy and levity, filled with J.D.’s cutaway fantasy sequences, but also for how it remained grounded in the heart of its characters.
Braff and Sarah Chalke Photo: Disney/Jeff Weddell
The show introduced Braff in a big way before he headed back to New Jersey to film Garden State, his 2004 feature directorial debut. The actor went on to direct episodes of Scrubs, which moved to ABC near the end of its run in 2009. He was nominated for an Emmy and three Golden Globes for playing J.D. in the show, which was up for best comedy series at the Emmys in 2005 and 2006.
Braff both stars in and helmed “My Return,” the first episode of the Scrubs revival. The half-hour comedy series premieres with two episodes on Wednesday, February 25 on ABC.
While Scrubs hasn’t been on the air in almost 16 years, Braff and Faison stayed connected on and offscreen. They parlayed their friendship and their bond as J.D. and Turk into T-Mobile home internet commercials. The duo appeared together in giddy, musical Super Bowl ads for the company set to melodies from West Side Story and Grease featuring guest stars like John Travolta. In March 2020, just in time for lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic, they launched the Scrubs rewatch podcast Fake Doctors, Real Friends with Zach and Donald.
“That almost honed our skill set,” Braff says. “The podcast was basically just improvising for two hours a couple times a week or once a week. So I think in a funny way, I haven’t thought about this before you asked the question, but it sort of was years of rehearsal for us becoming even more experienced in riffing with one another, because with Scrubs, we always have a brilliant script to work off of, but Donald and I just sitting there trying to make an audience laugh with no script at all was not something we’d ever done before, and we didn’t know that people would like it, because we’re just sitting there shooting the s–t, and people really seem to respond to it. So I think that was good for me and Donald.”
Judy Reyes with Faison and Braff Photo: Disney/Jeff Weddell
They just didn’t realize how many people would respond. “We honestly thought maybe some hardcore fans and our parents will like this,” he says.
The podcast’s proof of audience lit up preexisting conversations about revisiting the show.
“It finally came together after many years of talking about it,” says Braff, 50. “It’s always been something we discussed. Would we do, like, a TV movie kind of thing on Hulu, because it’s a Disney show, or would we do a miniseries? How can we do something for the fans and for us, because it would be so much fun.”
The T-Mobile commercials and podcast “just really stoked the fire,” he says. “And then it was just left for Bill Lawrence to figure out how to do it, because he has a Warner Bros. deal, and this is a Disney show. But once those companies figured it out, it got real. I didn’t imagine it would ever be primetime ABC again. That’s really something that’s extra exciting.”
This time around, because of his commitments at Warner Bros. Television making shows like the Apple TV series Shrinking, Ted Lasso and Bad Monkey, Lawrence is back as creator and executive producer, while Scrubs writer and producer Aseem Batra, who played the intern Josephine in the original series, is showrunner (series producer Tim Hobert was originally co-showrunner, but left the show in October).
Braff has continued to work on multiple Lawrence shows, most recently helming episodes of Shrinking, which Lawrence created with Brett Goldstein and star Jason Segel, and the upcoming HBO comedy series Rooster starring Steve Carell (premiering March 8), which Lawrence created with Matt Tarses. The Scrubs star received Emmy and Directors Guild of America Awards nominations for directing the 2020 Ted Lasso episode Biscuits.
A dynamic trio and the return of Perry Cox
While Braff eventually came on as a producer during the first run of Scrubs, the revival sees three stars of the show—Braff, Faison and their co-star Sarah Chalke—as executive producers.
Chalke returns as Elliot Reid, a doctor at Sacred Heart who, like Turk and J.D., started as an intern. She married J.D. before the series ended in 2010, with both characters leaving the hospital where they trained. When the revival starts, J.D. is working as a “concierge doctor” making house calls to the luxe mansions of wealthy patients. He ends up back at Sacred Heart when one of his patients is admitted there.
Braff with John C. McGinley Photo: Disney/Darko Sikman
Turk hasn’t been told J.D. is on the premises, but somehow he knows. As soon as his best friend spidey-sense goes off, he slides out of surgery and down the hall for a blissfully ecstatic reunion. Sure, they’re older, and they both have kids—and adult problems—of their own, but they’re still those young interns at heart.
“It’s so fun,” Braff says of working alongside Faison and Chalke again. “We’re all very close. So many times you make something, you spend so much time just getting to know each other and figure out rhythms and figure out how someone works comedically as a director, figuring out how they like to be directed, how to get the best performance out of people. We start day one knowing all that.”
Sacred Heart regular Judy Reyes reprises the role of head nurse Carla Espinosa, Turk’s wife—pretty much the only person who has the power to somewhat moderate J.D. and Turk’s bromance. Also slated to return: Neil Flynn, who played Janitor in the original series. The first episodes feature appearances from “crazy” Hooch, a surgeon played by Phill Lewis (“Is Hooch still crazy?” J.D. asks. “He’s gotten worse,” Carla says.) and another surgeon, Todd “The Todd” Quinlan, played by Robert Maschio. Todd, known for his enthusiastically delivered, non-workplace appropriate double entendres, is up to his usual tricks with sexually charged, skeezy comments. This time, they’re modified for the post-#MeToo era.
“He’s a work in progress,” Braff says.
New character Sibby Wilson, the hospital’s human resources manager and wellness program coordinator, played by Saturday Night Live alum Vanessa Bayer, puts checks on behavior that is now officially considered out of bounds. Bayer issues cheerful warnings using pronounced hand gestures.
Series creator Bill Lawrence with Faison, Chalke, Braff, Reyes and McGinley Photo: John Fleenor/ABC
That creates a problem for another returning character—Perry Cox, the chief of medicine at Sacred Heart, who always made a sport of putting interns through the wringer.
“I can’t work ‘em crazy hours or even abuse them anymore,” he laments. “I am now supposed to watch every word that comes out of my mouth because apparently they are all fragile little Christmas ornaments.”
Cox, played by John C. McGinley, was both foil and mentor to J.D. in the original show—a kind of beloved bully. Braff and McGinley always kept audiences coming back for the simultaneously abusive and intimate relationship. Eventually, Cox roasting J.D. became a kind of sacred ritual, a familiar comfort in the comfort show.
In the revival, Cox tries to compel a TikTok-focused intern to show up early to observe a procedure in person despite her assertion that she’s already seen it performed on YouTube. However, his bite is now somewhat muzzled as Sibby threatens him with sensitivity training. It’s no idle threat since he already has “900 strikes.”
Later this season, the show will welcome back Christa Miller, who played another Sacred Heart fixture: Jordan Sullivan, Cox’s ex-wife and on-off partner, a former member of the hospital’s board.
GoFundMe, OnlyFans and the season they regret
Scrubs maintains its status as that warm hug of a show, in part, because of a bittersweet quirkiness. The series allows just enough prickly reality to stop it from becoming too maudlin.
New episodes take on some of the trappings of life in 2026, like social media, influencers and the crushing costs of medication, even with insurance coverage.
Among the new Scrubs cast members are Joel Kim Booster, who plays Eric Park, a doctor who graduated top of his class at Stanford University. He takes a taskmaster approach to supervising interns, played by Amanda Morrow, Layla Mohammadi, David Gridley, Ava Bunn and Jacob Dudman.
The question of money and medicine is an ongoing thread in the comedy. Do doctors comply with policy by seeing five patients an hour to “maximize profits,” or spend more time advocating for each patient?
Though Cox was a mentor and teacher to J.D. in the original run of the show, in later seasons, the student became a teacher. Then, in the ninth and final season that aired in 2009 and 2010, Scrubs shifted setting and focus to students at a medical school.
Back at Sacred Heart 15 years later, J.D. connects with current interns, seeing his own story in their beginnings.
“It was really important to me, and I said this to Bill early on, that I wanted it to be clear that J.D. was an incredible teacher,” Braff says. “I thought that was a really interesting thing to develop. Because one of the things that put a bad taste in my mouth with the spinoff, what Bill wishes he had called a spinoff with season nine, it was a complete opposite direction, in hindsight, that I think we should’ve gone. It was so extra goofy, and so the podcast rewatch was so informative. I was like ‘wow, if we ever do this again, I’m so much more interested in him passing on the knowledge he learned from Dr. Cox.’ And he’s actually an amazing teacher. So that was something that was one of the ground rules we were going to set up.”
Braff behind the camera on set Photo: Disney/Jeff Weddell
Braff and McGinley also both worked on Lawrence’s HBO series Rooster, in which McGinley stars opposite Carell. The Scrubs actors share a Jersey connection that predates their time as J.D. and Cox.
“I took my SATs at Millburn High, where he went to school, and I went to Columbia (in Maplewood),” Braff says. “So we both are Essex County boys.”
McGinley, who grew up in Short Hills, seems to dip out of Scrubs after the premiere, but Braff promises there will be more Perry Cox to come.
“I’ll give New Jersey the inside scoop,” he says. “Millburn’s own Johnny C. McGinley will be back.”
The Scrubs revival premieres with two back-to-back episodes February 25, 8 pm on ABC, and airs weekly on Wednesdays. The show streams the next day on Hulu.
As we prepared to leave the house where we raised our children for a decade, a location scout offered an unexpectedly cinematic way to say goodbye.
The world’s first movie studio. The country’s first film hub and drive-in cinema. The coining of the term “cliffhanger.”
