Sixteen years after Scrubs came to an end, Zach Braff and Donald Faison are scrubbing in yet again as the comedy returns for a revived 10th season.
The return comes after years of buzz — as well as the stars’ rewatch podcast Fake Doctors, Real Friends and their hit T-Mobile commercials — but even Braff is shocked at the result, admitting at the L.A. premiere on Monday, “I never thought [a revival] would be primetime ABC, 8 p.m., I thought maybe we’d do a little movie or a miniseries or something. This is the most glorious incarnation of it that I could have daydreamed about.”
Bringing back the show was no straightforward task, though, because of the complicated way it ended. The first seven seasons aired on NBC, but moved to ABC for season 8. That was expected to be the show’s last season, even closing with an episode titled “My Finale;” it then ended up coming back for a controversial ninth season, with many new characters, a new setting and Braff appearing in only some of the episodes.
Braff confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that for the revival, “we decided we would pick up where we left off with season 8,” and disregard the storylines in that ninth season, which “Kirsten Chuba Bill [Lawrence] says all the time it was meant to be a spinoff, it wasn’t really in the canon of O.G. Scrubs.”
Faison noted that he and Braff’s rewatch podcast ended up becoming research for the new show, and “We really realized what we liked; the fans told us what they liked, told us what they didn’t like. We were very honest with ourselves about the things we were watching and how we were performing. Season nine was like, ‘What the heck were we doing?’ And towards the end of Scrubs, the original run, we kind of got off the rails, and we brought it all back to reality and grounded the show quite a bit,” with the revival.
Fellow original stars Sarah Chalke, Judy Reyes and John C. McGinley are also back, with Chalke noting “one of the craziest parts of this experience was stepping onto set,” with the Sacred Heart Hospital set having been recreated exactly as it was for the original. And as for if they’ve got another eight (or nine) seasons in them this time around, Braff mused, “I think that’s all up to the powers at be at Disney, so we’ll see. We hope so, we’d love to do it. We’re having a blast.”
Scrubs premieres Wednesday on ABC, streaming next day on Hulu.
