Josh Reviews the Scrubs Revival!
I was a fan of Scrubs from the very beginning. I loved it in its prime, I’d say through the first four or five seasons. In the later years I felt its charms started to wane, but I followed and enjoyed it all the way through, including the move from NBC to ABC for the eighth and final season of the show’s original run. I’m not sure if I saw any of the controversial ninth season, which was a hybrid reboot/relaunch. I think I might have seen the first few episodes and it didn’t hold my interest; though it’s possible I missed that season altogether. The show had lost my interest by that point. Even though I felt it petered out at the end, I’ve always loved Scrubs and held the show in high esteem. It’s been fun in recent years seeing Scrubs creator and show-runner Bill Lawrence have so many new TV hits on his hands. (In the last few years, he’s co-created two stone-cold masterpieces in Ted Lasso and Shrinking, along with Bad Monkey and Rooster — two shows that look great and that I need to find time to watch soon!!) People tend to ask Mr. Lawrence about a Scrubs revival, and he’s always seemed interested. My ears have always perked up every time Mr. Lawrence discussed this possibility and teased/hinted that it could be in the cards. When a nine-episode revival season was announced, I was ecstatic.
And also, I was nervous! There have been a lot of “legacy sequels” in recent years, both in movie theaters and on streaming platforms, and so few of them have worked. On the TV side of things, attempts to bring back Frasier, Will and Grace, Murphy Brown, Mad About You, That 70’s Show, The X-Files, Arrested Development, and so many other once popular (and great) shows all floundered. It’s so hard to recapture lightning in the bottle! (I’m wracking my brain to think of any projects that succeeded. The recent Hulu seasons of Futurama have been great; I loved the revivals of both Party Down and Girls5Eva — both perfectly recaptured the highs of those two great shows — though they were both cancelled after one meager 6-episode season each; I loved Amazon Prime Video’s brief revival of The Tick, which was also cancelled far to soon; the crowd-funded new seasons of MST3K were a lot of fun; Star Trek: Picard was awful for two seasons but the third season, that re-assembled the TNG gang under the stewardship of new show-runner Terry Matalas, was fantastic. What am I missing?? That’s a pretty short list.)
Well, bravo to Bill Lawrence and Scrubs season 10’s show-runner Aseem Batra, because this nine-episode revival, coming almost two decades after the show went off the air, is phenomenal!
This revival perfectly captures what Scrubs was like at its best — sweet and funny and silly, with some emotional character drama mixed in. It has the good-hearted nature of Bill Lawrence’s best shows; it’s ultimately optimistic and life-affirming, with a focus on how smart people working together can do almost anything. The show does a great job at bringing back the three original leads — Zach Braff as J.D.; Sarah Chalke as Elliot; and Donald Faison as Turk — as well as a great many of the show’s supporting characters. They also introduce a wonderful array of new characters, who they did a great job at developing and making likable and interesting even in this short nine-episode run. (This is particularly impressive. It would have been very easy for viewers to be bored with these new characters and wish we were spending time with the old favorites — or, conversely, resenting the time spent with the old characters and wishing we could spend more time with the new ones. Instead, the show is beautifully balanced between the new cast-members and the old.) I think this Scrubs revival season could easily be enjoyed by someone who’d never seen the old show — the characters’ relationships and personalities are quickly and clearly (re)established in the season premiere. At the same time, it was deeply satisfying and enjoyable for a long-time fan like me. Wow!! What an accomplishment!!
I’m impressed by how perfectly Mr. Braff, Ms. Chalke, and Mr. Faison were able to step back into their old roles. All three of them still look great, and they still had the same comedic timing & charisma together. That’s so critical in a revival like this. There can be an audience disconnect if the actors come across as too old and tired — it can seem sad instead of exciting and fun. But that wasn’t at all the case here; it was pure joy for me to see all three of these actors back on screen, playing these roles. At the same time, the show wisely didn’t run away from the fact that these actors, and the characters they’re playing, are much older than they once were. They managed to thread the needle of finding ways that it made sense narratively for J.D. Elliot, and Turk to all still be working together at Sacred Heart, while also giving each character storylines that embraced the stage of life they’re currently at, navigating new roles as administrators and teachers/mentors in the hospital, dealing with burnout, parenthood, divorce, and other types of situations befitting who they are now as adults and experienced medical professionals, not young interns.
(The revival’s only misstep, in my mind, was establishing that J.D. and Elliot have gotten divorced. One of the things that frustrated me about Scrubs over its original long run was the interminable back-and-forth between Elliot and J.D. as a couple. This was also a problem for me with Friends and many other shows of that era. The first season of Scrubs got me invested in J.D. and Elliot as a couple, and so I found it annoying that the writers kept them so often apart and at odds. While I didn’t love the final season, I was happy at least that they finally gave J.D. and Elliot a happy ending together. So I was annoyed to discover they walked that back here. Mr. Lawrence & Ms. Batra have said in interviews that they felt they needed to bring interpersonal drama into the show, and that they didn’t believe from the show’s original run that J.D. and Elliot would have really made it as a couple. I disagree. I think they could have mined plenty of drama from Elliot’s now having to work under J.D. as the newly-appointed chief of medicine, even if the two were still married. That might have been even MORE fraught in that case, actually!! And it would have made me much happier to see the show find stories in the work and home lives of J.D. and Elliot as a happy couple — stories I truly believe good writers could have found — rather than an angry broken-up one. And while maybe their making it as a couple wouldn’t have been “realistic”, this is a TV show, and with long-running shows like this I want to believe in the fantasy of characters I love getting a happy ending.)
It was great to see so many Scrubs supporting players back as well! I knew that Judy Reyes wouldn’t be in all the episodes as Carla, because she was busy on another show, but I thought they did a great job weaving Carla in and out of the season in a way that felt natural. When she wasn’t in an episode, I could imagine that Carla was just off-screen. It worked, and Carla still felt like a major presence throughout the season. I loved seeing John C. McGinley back as Dr. Cox! The idea of the abrasive Dr. Cox navigating today’s more sensitive culture is comedic gold, and they mined that well. I knew that Mr. McGinley also would only be in a few episodes, because he’s currently on Mr. Lawrence’s show Rooster, but they made strong use of his character at the start and end of the season, and it worked well that Dr. Cox’s absence provided the narrative reason for J.D. to return to Sacred Heart. When Dr. Cox was around, Jordan couldn’t be far behind, and after falling in love with Christa Miller’s work as Liz on Shrinking, I was delighted to see her back in the finale. I hope we get to see lots more of both Jordan & Dr. Cox next season. I was surprised that we didn’t get to see Neil Flynn back as the Janitor until his brief appearance in the finale. Was Mr. Flynn not available? (He’d popped up on Shrinking recently, but only in a small role.) It made me smile to see Robert Maschio back as “the Todd”; he was well-utilized as the comedic button on many a scene.
Many comedies these days have long episodes. Mr. Lawrence’s shows like Ted Lasso and Shrinking have often delivered installments that were well over thirty minutes in length, sometimes getting closer to the one-hour mark. I never minded that (though I know many on the internet complained), but let me say I thought it was a delightful choice that the episodes of this Scrubs revival stuck to the typical network TV length of around twenty-two minutes. That’s how Scrubs episodes always were, and frankly it’s great to see a modern TV comedy sticking to that format. I like how briskly paced these new Scrubs episodes are! The jokes come fast and furious, and the show doesn’t allow any scene to drag on too long. Bravo!
One of the stylistic devices that Scrubs was always known for was its extended fantasy sequences, and we get some fun new fantasy sequences here in this revival. Thankfully the writers didn’t overdo it in this area. Frankly, by the later years of the show’s original run, I’d gotten tired of these flights of fancy. So I was pleased that I felt they handled this just right in these new episodes, giving us a few fun new silly imaginary sequences, but not too many.
I was impressed by how much the show got me to love all the new young interns. Sometimes I complain that TV shows don’t do a good enough job giving me reasons to care about and root for their characters. This seems to particularly be a problem in today’s short streaming seasons. But in only nine episodes, the Scrubs team did a terrific job developing all these new characters: Jacob Dudman as Asher Green, the sweet but tentative British intern; Ava Bunn as Sam Tosh, who is chatty, smiley, and extremely social-media-focused; David Gridley as Blake Lewis, who is handsome, self-confident, and something of a lone wolf; Layla Mohammadi as Amara Hadi, who is quiet and somewhat mousey; and Amanda Morrow as Dashana Trainor, a surgical intern who is confident in her surgical abilities but less comfortable interacting with patients. What a great new group of medical interns!! I enjoyed each one of their characters; this is an interesting group to follow through the highs and lows of learning how to be good doctors.
There were many other new characters beyond that crew. I loved Michael James Scott and X Mayo as the two new chatty and very sassy charge nurses. Those two were so funny!! It’s always fun to see Vanessa Bayer (SNL, Brooklyn Nine-Nine) on screen, and she’s well-cast as Sibby Wilson, Sacred Heart’s head of HR and wellness specialist. Watching her clash with Dr. Cox was fantastic. (The only problem was that when Dr. Cox was absent from the show, it didn’t seem like they knew what to do with this character.) Joel Kim Booster is an entertaining villain as Dr. Kevin Park, J.D.’s new nemesis. Conversely, I liked that J.D. had a new pal in the form of Darcy Michael as the “Maintenance Guy”, a fun reversal on J.D.’s former antagonism with the Janitor. (I actually didn’t love that they flipped back to the former archetype in the finale’s final scene — I liked it the other way!! I hope they go back to that in season two.) I liked seeing Rachel Bilson in the finale as Charlie, a new love-interest for J.D. — I hope we get to see more of her in season two!
And the show is getting a season two!! Yay!! (Or a season eleven, I guess??) I’m so happy we’ll be getting more of Scrubs. I hope they’re able to make a nice long run of this new iteration. I can’t wait for more!
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