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To this day, television maestro Bill Lawrence and Dr. Jonathan Doris remain old buddies. That their friendship goes back nearly four decades to when they were in school together at the College of William & Mary is heartwarming to anyone, but doubly so for fans of a particular era of millennial humor that Lawrence created. After all, this is the connection that gave the world Scrubs back in 2001, complete with its own tight friendship between the fictionalized medical intern, John “J.D.” Dorian (Zach Braff), and budding surgeon Christopher Turk (Donald Faison). And, as it turns out, the real thing is still shaping the landscape of television comedy, including J.D. and Turk, 25 years on.
“We’re both in our mid 50s, so we play a lot of pickleball because it’s the law,” Lawrence smiles about himself and the cardiologist sometimes called the real J.D. “And recently while watching him, even as he’s beloved by all his students because he’s a teacher and in a position everyone loves and looks up to, here is this guy who’s been beaten up and has trouble surviving in the system. It takes a lot out of you. So just seeing him head toward the tail-end of his career and going, ‘I don’t know how many years I can still do it, it’s just really hard emotionally and mentally,’ let me know there’s still a great story to tell.”
And that story, like the original Scrubs, seeks to carve its path with humor and grace, as well as the wary resignation that comes with aging in an ageless field.
Picking up where Scrubs ended in 2009, this year’s revival finds Braff’s J.D. returning to Sacred Heart initially as a visitor. His former mentor and Sacred Heart’s now cranky chief of medicine, Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley), holds court over a new generation of medical interns and residents, but the years wear on him, as they do for other familiar faces like Turk, Dr. Elliot Reid (Sarah Chalke), and Nurse Carla Espinosa (Judy Reyes).
The new series is a crossroads between the new and the old. This includes behind the camera, too, where writer Aseem Batra, who got her start on Scrubs both as a scribe and an actress playing a background intern, takes over showrunner duties. One thing Batra kept, though, was Dr. Doris’ role as medical advisor on the next generation of Scrubs.
“He set up amazing interviews for us with young interns and residents so we could find out how the landscape has changed,” Batra says. “And basically it hasn’t other than the huge amount of technology. They use AI for so much, and the interns and the residents are treated better now than in his day, but there is still burnout, and it’s incredibly hard to do their jobs. When you hear them talk about it, you can understand it’s kind of what we show in the pilot of physician burnout, and even intern/resident burnout. It’s still very high because of how intense it is to be in that field.”
Treating the interns better is also a source of humor given how so much of Scrubs’ early years were defined by Dr. Cox’s aggressive “tough love” approach to mentoring J.D., complete with a deluge of nicknames. Internet lore has it that actor McGinley improvised many of those phrases from “newbie” down the line, however when we catch up with the performer, he’s quick to set the record straight.
“I didn’t improvise those,” McGinley chuckles. “Billy wrote them. But I cross-gendered him a couple of times… I called him girls names, which may or may not be acceptable in 2026.” With that said, he admits Dr. Cox still does it “a little” in the new series, because old habits die hard. Which might just be the thesis of the show.
“[He’s] a hundred percent burned out because the new crop of students he has are also an exercise in mediocrity, the characters, not the actors,” McGinley observes. “So he’s now charged with trying to teach them, and it’s an ongoing frustration, so he has tools to deal with the frustration and it’s usually pretty aggressively gruff.”
Dealing with that stuff appears to be the M.O. of all returning favorites, including Carla. Actress Judy Reyes notes Carla has grown into the de facto matriarch of Sacred Heart as the head nurse in the hospital, but her relationship with the interns is changing.
“She’s a bit of a leader,” says Reyes, “that’s why she’s still there, it’s why she still runs the house. She’s passionate about it. But she will have to confront, dare I say it, aging in the world of being a nurse in this environment. And I’m grateful that the show is going to be tackling that down the line… because it gets to you. We’re aging and the world is different, and what you want to do differently is bring what you learned and bring it to the interns, who are there to learn.”
Yet the appeal is to continue to do it with pluck and good humor. As Lawrence points out, the idea of Scrubs originally came from conversations he had with the real Doris about the grave solemnity of shows like ER back in the 1990s.
“He lived in that world and he would say, ‘The only way to survive was with gallows humor and finding the joys in small moments and goofing around with your friends and forming community,’” Lawrence recalls. The new era of Scrubs will be much the same. Already in the first episode, there is a tip of the hat to The Pitt, a series that Lawrence tells us he considers the best show on television. “It’s ER if they put a little humor into it.”
And Scrubs will continue to live and adapt to that TV landscape. In addition to a wink toward The Pitt, Lawrence teases we’ll soon see “J.D. and Turk talking about the value of Bridgerton, because we love Shonda [Rhimes]. So they definitely live in the same pop culture they used to. The things that matter to all of us matter to them.”
Scrubs itself seems like something that matters to folks too, including those who made it.
“Once we all got together and did that table read, it all felt like coming home for Thanksgiving or for Christmas,” Reyes says. “Like you’re with the people that you know and it all fell into place and it got really exciting. “
But then, that’s always been the appeal of Sacred Heart and the daydream that created it.
Says Lawrence, “The one thing [Doris] always makes us use as canon is to remind us that the stereotype of wanting your son or daughter to get into medicine so they can be rich and golf, and marry a doctor, that’s gone. Everybody who goes into this business is there because they want to be of service, especially at a teaching hospital. So we really held onto that.”
Scrubs returns on Wednesday, Feb. 25 at 8pm on ABC.
The post Scrubs: How a Real-Life Friendship Shapes J.D. ‘At the Tail-End of His Career’ appeared first on Den of Geek.
