Bill Lawrence said the “Scrubs” reunion has been in the making for over 20 years. The beloved comedy series premiered on NBC in 2001 and later ran on ABC. Twenty five years since its debut, the series creator told TheWrap the fandom and family behind the show are more alive than ever.
The revival series has been hinted about by fans and producers since the show wrapped in 2009. Then Lawrence sounded reboot bells at the ATX Television Festival in 2022. He told TheWrap that the recap podcast, hosted by co-stars Zach Braff and Donald Faison, illuminated how hungry the fandom was for more of the Sacred Heart crew.
“What was always interesting about this show is the friendships seemed authentic,” Lawrence told TheWrap.
“People have seen us hanging out together and bounce around,” he added. “It’s hard not to reach our age and say, ‘Man, it’d be nice to reclaim one of the most fun times in our lives and see what it looks like.’”
Since “Scrubs” wrapped, Lawrence’s reach in television has expanded significantly. This TV season alone the showrunner has four shows coming out — “Scrubs,” “Shrinking,” “Ted Lasso” and “Rooster.”
For Lawrence, the “Scrubs” reunion was not about the team’s willingness to participate, but coordinating with the cast’s busy schedules and creating a product that the fans could be proud of. Judy Reyes is a series regular on another ABC comedy “High Potential;” Zach Braff directs episodes within Lawrence’s canon; and Sarah Chalke voices Beth Smith on “Rick and Morty.”
“The cool thing about this world was that all those people I just mentioned they’re all just crazy talented, and it’s not like they’re banging down doors looking for work,” he said. “They’re all working constantly because they’re awesome. So really, [the reunion] was just a product of being lucky enough that a fanbase wanted to see it.”
The new season sees JD (Braff), Turk (Faison) and Elliot (Chalke) return to Sacred Heart, but this time as the grownups at the teaching hospital. A new crop of medical and surgical interns join the ranks, but the same immature, affable OG cast ground the reincarnation of the series.
Though JD, Elliot and Turk are the adults in the room, the characters do not take themselves too seriously. Lawrence said that this “childish exuberance” was part of what made audiences fall in love with these characters. The reunion had to capture that despite aging the characters up.
“I was fascinated to go, ‘I wonder how we can figure out if we can hang on to JD and Turk’s infectious childish joy when they’re around each other, but still have them step into the role of being adults and being the teachers that they once had in their lives,’” Lawrence explained. “That was a fun challenge.”
For Braff, Chalke and Faison, this childlike friendship never left them.
“We are still those people,” Braff told TheWrap. “The three of us, when we’re hanging out, we’re laughing all the time, and we are pretty silly adults.”
“You can’t fake that,” Chalke added. “You hope when you start a new job, that you’ll all have chemistry and get along, but you can’t fake 25 years of knowing each other and spending time and working together.”
“When you take all of the history that we’ve had in the past and put it into something now,” Faison told TheWrap, “in my opinion, it can only succeed because there’s so much love and so much stuff that came with that history.”
Evolving the series for 2026 required the team to look retrospectively at its origins. Lawrence, a self-proclaimed fan — “no way Bill, you’re a fan of your own shows, yeah, whatever,” he joked — understood the weight of adapting the show for the modern day.
Braff and Faison even confronted the show’s stumbles in their rewatch podcast. Braff, who serves as an executive producer and director of the reboot’s pilot, said that it only made their performances and writing on the series that much better.
“We were very honest on the podcast,” Braff said. “We’d be like, ‘This one sucks,’ and ‘we’re so broad.’ I think that we did it in a funny way for the fans, hopefully, but when it came time to really go, ‘How do we re-approach this?’ It was very informative.”
The revival brings in a new intern class with newcomers Ava Bunn, Jacob Dudman, David Gridley, Layla Mohammadi and Amanda Morrow. The 2026 series also includes recurring guest stars Vanessa Bayer, Joel Kim Booster, John C. McGinley, Reyes, Andy Ridings, Lisa Gilroy, Rachel Bilson, Michael James Scott and X Mayo.
“Scrubs” premieres with two episodes Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET/PT and streams the next day on Hulu.
The post How ‘Scrubs’ Creator Bill Lawrence Revived Original Cast’s ‘Infectious Childish Joy’ to Reunite 16 Years Later appeared first on TheWrap.
