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Bill Lawrence is on a tear. This is the man who gave us Ted Lasso and Shrinking, and who is days away from launching Rooster, the Steve Carell sitcom that HBO already sees as the anchor to its comedy output. At this stage in his career, Lawrence could blow his nose and the contents of his tissue would become a beloved heartwarming comedy series.
So it’s interesting that, of all his available options, Lawrence has instead decided to revive Scrubs. It’s a show with a big footprint – when Friends ended, you could argue that it became the biggest sitcom on Earth – but it still felt very much of its time. It was a medical comedy that not only derived a lot of its laughs from Family Guy-style cutaway skits, back when they counted as new and exciting, but also had more than one character who specialised in baroque cruelty, which doesn’t seem particularly on-brand for Lawrence any more. Ted Lasso would never.
Add to this a cast that seemed to go to great lengths to steer away from the show’s zaniness the moment it ended (Zach Braff became an indie director, while Donald Faison and Sarah Chalke became most visible in drama) and you’re left with the horrible feeling that the magic might have dissipated in the past decade and a half.
Luckily, this feeling vanishes about 15 seconds in, because the Scrubs revival is as Scrubsy as it gets. Obviously your enjoyment of this new run will depend on how much you liked Scrubs to begin with. But if you were a fan, the new series will feel like the safest pair of hands imaginable.
We meet Braff’s JD deep into his new career as a concierge doctor, sipping tea while he delicately hands erection pill prescriptions to the wealthy and unruffled. But a chance visit to Sacred Heart hospital leaves him remembering what he’d left behind. Within 20 minutes he is back enmeshed as a senior member of staff there.
Other old characters are dealt with just as swiftly. Chalke’s Elliot has shaken out a set of old resentments in little over an hour and – I’ll keep this vague to avoid spoilers – Faison’s Turk starts the first episode with a very serious set of new character traits that other shows could build their entire premise around, but manages to snap out of it in less time than it would take you to make a Pot Noodle.
However, Scrubs is a show about a teaching hospital, which means there needs to be an influx of newcomers for the oldies to teach. Here the show is slightly less successful. You’ll remember, of course, that this is the direction the original run of Scrubs attempted with its ill-fated Med School series.
But let’s stay positive. As of the first four episodes, the new young doctors of Scrubs are a bunch of one-trait nobodies but, given the paucity of screen time they are afforded, this is probably to be expected. There is every chance that they will evolve as the show wears on. More excitingly, Vanessa Bayer gets a plum role as Sibby, a sort of HR chief tasked with reining in the more noughties-tinged aspects of the show. In the best possible way, her character often feels airdropped in from a different, weirder show. My guess is that she’ll run away with the whole thing before long.
It must also be said that one way in which Scrubs has moved with the times is in its mood. The original show carried an air of exasperation about the US healthcare system; now this often tips into outright anger. A recurring theme of the opening episodes is that characters are placed in danger – often mortal – due to a lack of affordable coverage. Doctors either scramble to bend the rules to help them, or play by the rules and ignore them. Neither approach ends well.
There is even a new British doctor, whose entire purpose is to tell the American audience that prescription medication only costs a tenner. And yet somehow these two poles – deliberately silly comedy and volcanic fury – manage to blend into a show that’s just as watchable as Scrubs ever was. May it run and run.
