The cast of “Scrubs” knows that the show’s creator, Bill Lawrence, has a habit of building communities with his series, which include “Ted Lasso” and “Shrinking.” But the “Scrubs” crew knows they are the closest.
“Since I work on all those shows, I can say that we’re the tightest-knit group,” says Zach Braff on a video call with his fellow fake doctors Sarah Chalke and Donald Faison. “We vacation together.”
Lawrence, just a day later, has to concede that Braff has a point. “It’s annoying because I have to admit that they are right,” he says. “We’ve stayed the tightest because we all still spend way too much time together.”
And now the gang is back together for a new, nine-episode season of the beloved series premiering Feb. 25 on ABC, and the next day on Hulu. When “Scrubs” debuted in 2001, narrator J.D. (Braff), his best friend Turk (Faison) and on-again, off-again love interest Elliot (Chalke) were interns at Sacred Heart Hospital. Now, J.D. is a concierge doctor, while Turk and Elliot have advanced to leadership positions at Sacred Heart. There’s a new batch of interns, a new cheery hospital representative (Vanessa Bayer) whose job involves making sure no one gets offended, and a new doctor (Joel Kim Booster) who is not too fond of J.D. But there are also other familiar faces including John C. McGinley as J.D.’s begrudging mentor Dr. Cox and Judy Reyes as nurse Carla, who also happens to be Turk’s wife.
In the Season 8 finale — before the show reset with a medical school setting — J.D., always prone to elaborate fantasy sequences, sees a vision of how his life is going to turn out. His reality doesn’t exactly resemble that.
“We say midlife crisis or whatever, but it’s a time of questioning, a time where you take stock of your life,” says showrunner Aseem Batra. “That’s really a cool time to catch up with our characters because when we saw them last, they were in their quarter life.”
Batra herself has followed a similar path to the characters. After working as an assistant at ABC, her first writing gig was on “Scrubs.” Now she’s in a position of authority. “Truly, it was the best job I had and it was my first job and I’m doing it again out of pure love,” she says. (Longtime “Scrubs” writer Tim Hobert was originally announced as co-showrunner but departed the project.)
Lawrence, who serves as executive producer on the new incarnation, can also see a parallel between his path and that of his fictional creations. “I’m only good at writing about stuff that’s at least tangentially part of my life and the idea that of those young goofballs who are the students now being the teachers, it’s very much part of my life right now,” he says.
Still, Lawrence says the reason the revival of the show was able to work is because of the closeness of the original cast. Faison and Braff are still constantly collaborating whether that’s on a podcast or commercials, and even though she’s decamped from Los Angeles to Canada, Chalke makes a point to keep in touch. On a boisterous Zoom call, we spoke about returning to their beloved characters.
What were your reactions coming back to this world?
Donald Faison: Please. Please. Revive it. Do me that solid and revive it.
Sarah Chalke: I manifested it. A couple years ago, I was like, “Oh, I miss ‘Scrubs.’ I want to do a comedy like ‘Scrubs’ that shoots in Vancouver, and then it all happened.”
Zach Braff: To be honest, I was very surprised when it actually started happening that ABC was going to put it in prime time. I thought it might be something on Hulu. That felt like a giant audience with Hulu the next day and a really big scale and really a belief in the project. That was really exciting.
Why do you think the show’s legacy is so strong that there is that belief?
Braff: I think that it’s Bill’s unique mix of comedy and pathos and emotion and fantasy. It’s such a unique recipe. But in execution, as he did with the first pilot, it was undeniable. It was so groundbreaking at the time. No one had done that in the network space. It was also at a time when there was no streaming. So, the show was on at 9:30 and Bill was trying to push what you could still do on network [television]. That’s why it was a more risqué version of what we’re doing now. I think now the goal was — well, there’s streaming for that. What’s a show that we can have on at 8 that pairs with “Abbott Elementary” that parents can watch with their kids? Maybe some jokes will fly over the kids’ heads, but it’s not trying to compete with what people are doing on streaming.
What do you remember about getting cast? You were all in your 20s.
Faison: I was the oldest one. Still the oldest one. I remember how big of a deal it was. This was the pilot of the season. I remember everybody and their mama was talking about how great the script was and how they wanted to be on the show. I remember my agent telling me, “This is a big one. The creator of the show really likes you. Let’s see what you can do.”
Chalke: I didn’t know this until two days ago. Our casting director came up to set to visit, and she said I was the first person to audition on the first morning of casting. In the character description, it said she moves and talks at a faster pace than normal humans. And in every single job, I’ve been told, “Slow down.” It felt like the luckiest thing; I’ll never forget when Bill called me and said that I got it and I truly couldn’t believe it. And the experience far exceeded any expectation I could have had about what it was going to be.
When I think back on it, what I remember is what that felt like to be at work every day, genuinely laughing so hard to the point where it would get late at night and there was one sound that Zach and Donald could make that would make me laugh.
What was the sound?
Faison: It’s almost like a fart.
Braff: No, it’s not a fart.
Faison: I’m not trying to make a fart joke. But do you know how when you fart, it always sounds like a question mark. So, that’s the sound.
Braff: Esther, do not use this, please. It’s a high-pitched noise like this [does noise]. We would do it quietly enough that no one would hear we were doing it. And then she would break down laughing and ruin the take and we’d be like, “Sarah, what are you doing? It’s late. We want to go home.”
Zach, what were your initial thoughts about the project?
Braff: I was waiting tables at a French-Vietnamese restaurant called Le Colonial at Beverly and Robertson [in L.A.]. And I had to wear a tunic, which I put into “Garden State.” I’d been auditioning for so many things and not really getting much traction in the sitcom space, but I read this and I thought it was so funny. I was like, “Oh, I think I could really sell this because I find it so funny.”
How did you know the chemistry between the three of you was going to work?
Braff: When we were shooting the pilot, I was just like, “Wow. I really love these people.” I was obsessed with Sarah. I thought Donald was the funniest person I’d ever met. And then Bill was legitimately the funniest person I’ve ever met. I just felt in really good hands.
Chalke: We were all so excited to be there and we’d just hang out and watch the other scenes that we weren’t in. And I remember just being by the monitor, watching everybody else work and just being so blown away.
Braff: We would hang out after we were wrapped, which Sarah still does occasionally. This time Donald came early because there’s this really weird coffee robot in the production office that Donald seems to think is amazing coffee. So, I caught him a few times coming in early for the coffee robot.
Faison: That’s not why I came in early. I was notoriously late and unprepared the first go of “Scrubs.” I heard Tom Hanks talking about how he was a young actor and a very established actor kept forgetting their lines. And the director finally goes, “Ah, come on, come on guys. Three things. Show up early, know the text, have an idea. Let’s take 10,” and walks away. And Tom Hanks goes, “Oh, if that’s what it takes, I can do that s—.” So, I took that to heart and this is the second opportunity.
Braff: I thought it was the coffee robot.
But Sarah would hang out after you wrapped?
Chalke: We are all executive producers on this. Zach is producing and directing and editing and writing and doing all of the things, and that’s been really neat to watch. I legitimately do want to learn. Obviously, there’s a balance of that with also going back into work full-time and having two kids.
Braff: Sarah gave me this whole speech at the top of the show. She’s like, “Hey, I really do want to learn this stuff. I want to sit by your director’s chair. I want to ask you questions. I want to learn to genuinely [executive produce], genuinely direct.” And I was like, “Great.” The first week I was like, “All right. Sarah, we’re going on a big tech scout. It’s probably going to be about…”
Chalke: “In a van for seven hours.”
Braff: I go, “You’re going to learn more on the tech scout than you could in film school.” And she’s like, “No, I won’t be able to do that.” And then by the end of the nine episodes, Sarah was like, “I think my EP thing is morale.”
Faison: I want to piggyback on something Sarah said though. Zach has done a lot, these nine episodes. For this revival, he’s done so much and has worked so hard on this. And that’s made us all feel very safe and secure also because we know we have the No. 1 guy on the call sheet who cares about the show completely putting in 100% to make sure that we’re coming out the gate with something very, very, very, very strong and undeniable for the fans.
What were your conversations about where your characters would be after all these years?
Braff: One of the big conversations we had was we wanted to reground the show because the show got really broad over the years and we wanted to dial it back and go back to where we started, where it exists in a real place. We have the luxury of the fantasies where we can be super silly. And obviously, we dip our toe over the line sometimes and stuff is a little broad. But for the most part, the new show is back to Season 1 and grounded again.
As we all know, especially when you reach 50 years old, a lot of things in life don’t turn out the way you hope they would. And that’s why we opened the show with J.D. living this fantasy that he is this heroic trauma ER guy when in fact he’s fixing toes in the suburbs. Also, I think with regard to me and Donald, [Lawrence] said, “I want them to be silly as those two guys are in real life, but … when they drop in and they’re teachers, they’re really good teachers.”
Was it easy to fall back into your rhythms?
Faison: When we did the table read, I laughed so hard when the first voice-over kicked in, when Zach read the voice-over.
Braff: The whole room did. It was really funny because no one had heard me do that voice in 20 years.
Chalke: One of the coolest things that helped with the show was Bill would just write to everybody’s strengths or write to their quirks or write to their personalities and weave it in. That happened this season, but it happened all through the first eight years. And so, to a certain extent, the lines blurred sometimes between ourselves and our characters. So, stepping back into them, there’s a reason why it felt so comfortable.
Braff: Sarah is a fast-talking klutz.
Chalke: I am. We met all the interns and Zach said, “So, guys, Chalke’s going to come in every day and something’s going to be broken. Every day there’s going to be a story.” And then I proceeded the very next day, which was the day before filming, to fall and break my finger. So, I did have to come in on the first day and say, “So, I broke my finger.”
How did you break your finger?
Braff: Walking.
Chalke: It’s part of who I am, but it’s also part of who Elliot is.
Braff: I think if we put in the show how really klutzy you are, people would think it’s too much.
Was there anything you were nostalgic for that wasn’t in the new incarnation?
Chalke: Sam Lloyd.
Braff: Sam Lloyd who played the lawyer was such a big part of the show and not only a fan favorite, but our favorite. He was just the funniest, nicest man. And Bill calls people like Sam Lloyd “comedy assassins.” They come in and they have one line and you’re laughing. And he was one of the greats.
Faison: It’s not the same “Scrubs.” And I kind of miss a little bit of that. There are so many new stories to tell. And you get nostalgic when you see the stuff that we’re doing in it, but I do sometimes miss some of the stories that we told in the past. It’s like capturing lightning in the bottle again, and I feel like we did it. I really do hope we have that opportunity again. I really do hope that this isn’t just nine. But it’s important for the audience to know that we’re definitely older. That’s just real talk. I’m not a 26-year-old man anymore. I’m 50.
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