Noah Wyle found an unexpected ally last year when his medical show The Pitt broke out as a buzzy drama touted for its realistic portrayal of hospital life: Zach Braff. The star of the beloved medical comedy Scrubs slid into Wyle's DMs to congratulate him.
Nearly a year later, speaking from his trailer on the set of ABC’s upcoming Scrubs revival, Braff says, “When we came back to work, I said that I don’t know that we’re going to be able to beat The Pitt in terms of medical accuracy, but I want to be the most accurate medical comedy on TV.”
He says the directive from Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence was always, “If we’re going to be silly and we’re going to do jokes, I want the medical stuff to be fully accurate. I don’t want anyone to question it.”
The series, which ran from 2001 to 2010 (eight seasons on NBC and one on ABC), showed cool surgeries and diagnoses but also found ways to talk about doctor burnout, patient deaths, imposter syndrome and god complexes in more light-hearted ways than contemporary medical dramas like ER, House and Grey’s Anatomy. In fact, Scrubs ran for so long, the writers were able to make timely references to all of those programs (plus a tribute episode to the breakthrough medical drama of the 1980s, St. Elsewhere).
The new series, premiering February 25, delivers nine episodes that serve up a healthy dose of empathy and comedy for a new generation. Braff is back, serving as an executive producer and a director in addition to starring as a more world-weary John “J.D.” Dorian, who returns to the hospital that trained him after some years in concierge medicine.
Zach Braff behind the camera on the set of the Scrubs revival.
Other cast members returning to the halls of Sacred Heart hospital include Donald Faison as surgeon Chris Turk, J.D.’s best friend since college; John C. McGinley as Perry Cox, J.D.’s self-righteous, workaholic mentor; and Sarah Chalke as Elliot Reid, J.D.’s on-again, off-again love interest. (By the end of the first series, they were very much on again, but details of their current relationship status are under wraps.) Newcomers include Vanessa Bayer (I Love That for You) as Sibby, who runs the hospital’s wellness program, and Joel Kim Booster (Loot) as attending physician Dr. Eric Park.
Although the story is still being told through J.D.’s point of view, it features a new group of enthusiastic medical interns ready to enter the workforce. They just may not be as wide-eyed as J.D. once was. “A huge part of the [revival’s] first episode is that it used to be said that if you wanted your son or daughter to have this incredibly lucrative career, and get to golf and take vacations, they’d say, ‘Be a doctor,’” says Lawrence, who based J.D. on his college friend, cardiologist Jonathan Doris.
Lawrence notes that while some things about the medical field have improved — like a cap on hours and regulations on the emotional abuse heaped on newer doctors — these days, he says, “Most of the people going into this have some kind of calling to be of service. Because it’s a shitty, weird world.”
Director Michael Spiller, Sarah Chalke and Zach Braff on the set of the original iteration of Scrubs. 
Another revival necessity? Acknowledging the need to mature the characters — if only a little. “The trickiest thing about this show was if Turk and J.D. came back and were still acting like 25-year-old goofballs, the show wouldn’t work,” Lawrence says. “We had to figure out a way to do it and acknowledge that they’re both 50.” (In a teaser released late last year, the duo reunited for their classic “Eagle” piggyback ride, only to end up groaning on the hospital floor.)
For the show’s new faces, Lawrence says showrunner Aseem Batra (Duncanville) and the writers, including pilot scribe Tim Hobert, interviewed medical interns and nurses. They created characters such as a woman who paid her way through medical school via day-in-the-life social media posts, and a British character whose perspective allows the story to explore the U.K.’s socialized medical system. They also found slightly older interns who had prolonged medical school for a few years and, in a shift from what Lawrence found during the first iteration of Scrubs, more women in surgery.
This means that Faison’s Turk, the chief of surgery, is surrounded by women at home and at work. He’s still married to Judy Reyes’s nurse Carla, and they now have three daughters. “Turk is exhausted,” Faison says. “In a lot of ways, it is my life when it comes to the kids and sports and trying to maintain a family; it’s difficult. But when you’ve got someone who is on your side, like Turk has Carla, on the outside it looks effortless.”
Donald Faison behind the scenes during the filming of the Scrubs Season Eight finale.
At the hospital, though, something essential is missing. Now that J.D. hasn’t been working at Sacred Heart for so long, Braff says, “I think Turk feels that he’s lost a lot of the joy in the work, because there was the camaraderie and the teamwork and the silliness he had with his best friend. This is a show about how friendship and community help them cope with such a hard job, with life and death on the line and patients not taking your advice and getting sicker.”
The hours and workload are also taking a toll on Carla, Reyes says: “Carla is a master of her craft, but aging and menopause are bound to catch up with her. I’m looking forward to the way the show tackles that.”
Braff and Faison are famously friends in real life. Perhaps you’ve listened to their popular Scrubs rewatch podcast, Fake Doctors, Real Friends, or seen them joking around together in their series of T-Mobile commercials. Like J.D. and Turk, Braff and Faison found that life after Scrubs meant less time together than they would have liked, but it didn’t mean the end of the friendship. Faison likes to think the same is true for their characters. “It is very much like Zach’s and my relationship,” he says. “He could be on the other side of the country, but we still figure out ways to keep the bromance alive.”
Turk isn’t the only doctor struggling with his work-life balance. Naturally, Dr. Cox is still scrubbing in at Sacred Heart. “He’s the chief of medicine and hasn’t changed that much,” McGinley says of his character. “He’s one of these guys who found his lane, and he’s still in that lane — an arrested development of convenience. Because he’s found an environment where he thrives.”
Cox does harbor some resentment toward J.D. because of his protégé’s decision to leave Sacred Heart for private medicine. “J.D. is working as a concierge doctor, writing prescriptions in the suburbs,” Braff says. “He’s not dialed into the adrenaline of what it was to be a doctor in a hospital, and he’s a bit dispirited by that, because he was trained by Dr. Cox to be an exceptionally good doctor.”
Conversely, McGinley says, Cox “totally gets it and, probably deep down, is quite envious. But you lose your street cred when you leave the battle.” With his penchant for calling J.D. female names and barking orders at anyone who crosses him, Cox would not have fared well in a more progressive, post-#MeToo environment. “The conflict for Dr. Cox is you definitely are in an era when you’re not allowed to treat interns and residents the way they did when he was originally teaching on the first show,” Lawrence notes.
Where Cox struggles to adapt to a more progressive hospital culture, Elliot has evolved. She wasn’t always the most confident doctor on Scrubs — her catchphrase was “frick,” which she’d frequently curse to herself under her breath any time she screwed up or got into trouble — but Chalke says she’s matured with time. “She’s definitely become a really good doctor, which is fun to play, and she’s the head of the hospital’s medical simulation program,” Chalke says. Elliot’s neuroses have “definitely morphed and changed, but her confidence level as a doctor is really high. She’s become good at this, and she knows it,” she adds. And with this new group of interns, she says, “We get to see Elliot as a mentor. They’ve even started to weave in all of the good things that she has taken from Dr. Cox in how she mentors the new kids.”
Lawrence says this version of Scrubs is meant to pick up after the first iteration ended on NBC. That version’s final year on ABC, which also focused on a new group of medical students, did give screentime to then–up-and-coming talent like Kerry Bishé and Dave Franco but was mostly panned by critics and fans.
Lawrence liked that season, even if he agrees that it might have benefited from a subtitle for clarification, since Braff was barely there, and it focused on Bishé’s Lucy Bennett. For canon’s sake, he says, “That was when J.D., Turk and Dr. Cox were teaching at a med school.”
It also means recreating the Sacred Heart sets, as the first show’s primary filming location — the North Hollywood Medical Center — has since been demolished and replaced by an apartment complex. The new production is filmed in Vancouver, where original series production designer Cabot McMullen’s sets were rebuilt with the addition of modern equipment.
In his role as an executive producer, Braff says, “I was very adamant that the hospital feel the same and have the nostalgic element for the fans and for us but also have new elements layered on top of that.” (Even “Superman,” the Scrubs theme by rock band Lazlo Bane, is back with a modernized take.) How those updates translate to the story itself — whether J.D. still gets lost in whimsical daydreams and heightened imagination — is still a mystery, though Chalke teases, “I think my favorite fantasy we’ve ever done is in the third episode of this round of Scrubs.”
Of course, not everything about the show or its people can stay the same. Scrubs has lost cast and crew, including Sam Lloyd. The actor, who played anxiety-riddled hospital attorney Ted Buckland, died from cancer in 2020. There’s also no report yet on appearances by other original Scrubs actors, like Ken Jenkins (who played chief of medicine Bob Kelso) and Neil Flynn (hospital janitor and J.D.’s lead antagonist) — or even Lawrence’s wife, actress Christa Miller, who played Dr. Cox’s partner, Jordan.
“If you reboot a show like Roseanne or Will & Grace, you can go back to the exact same characters and go, ‘Hey, here’s what they’re doing now,’ because they’re a family,” Lawrence says. “If you rebooted Scrubs 20 years later and had it be the hospital with the exact same people working there, it would be so disingenuous. The tightrope to walk is making a show that honors what the show used to be and services the faces we remember.”
This article originally appeared in emmy Magazine, issue #1, 2026, under the title "Second Dose."
