Scrubs Creator Says Potential Follow-Up Will Be a Revival and a Reboot — Wait, What?
As all you savvy TV enthusiasts know, a series revival is a continuation of a previously existing show. A series reboot is a reimagining of a show, which often involves new actors playing established characters, a new setting, etc.
In an interview with our sister site Deadline, Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence says a potential revisitation of his popular medical comedy would be both.
“We’ve been talking about a lot, and I think the only real reason to do it is a combo,” he said. “A: People wanting to see what the world of medicine was like for the people they love, which is part of any successful reboot. But B: I think that show always worked because you get to see young people dropped into the world of medicine, knowing young people that go there are super idealistic and are doing it because it’s a calling.”
He added: “So I think that, no matter what it is, it would be a giant mistake not to do as a combo of those two things.”
Scrubs ran for nine seasons between 2001 to 2010, producing a total of 182 episodes. Its first seven seasons aired on NBC, until it moved to ABC for its final two runs.
Lawrence’s vision may give those who watched the show’s final season déjà vu, given that the series’ focus moved to med-school students including Lucy, played by Kerry Bishé, and only and only Donald Faison (Turk) and John C. McGinley (Dr. Cox) returned as full-fledged series regulars
In 2022, Lawrence, Faison and McGinley joined Scrubs‘ Zach Braff, Sarah Chalke, Judy Reyes and Neil Flynn at ATX Festival to talk about a return to Sacred Heart. “I think we all want it,” Faison said at the time. “We all would love to work together again. It’s just that it’s really hard. It can’t be a full season of a show. It would have to be a movie or something like that, where you could only give a couple of months to it. Everyone is doing things.” (To his point: Braff recently played a doctor on Lawrence’s Carl Hiaasen adaptation Bad Monkey.)
In the more recent interview, Lawrence noted that the new Scrubs is “getting really close to being figured out, and I think in a good way… Big chunks of the creative team behind the camera, and most of it from in front of the camera, are all super invested and excited, so very close.”
