SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the Season 2 first two episodes of the “Scrubs” revival, which aired Wednesday night on ABC and will stream next day on Hulu.
When ABC’s “Scrubs” returned earlier this year after a nearly 16-year break, fans were quite divided on one major change in character dynamics: J.D. (Zach Braff) and Elliot (Sarah Chalke) had divorced. In Season 1 of “Scrubs” 2.0, J.D. returned to Sacred Heart as chief of medicine, which put him back in the same workplace as his ex.
And that was the point. If Season 1 was about setting up that new dynamic between J.D. and Elliot, Season 2 is about seeing how they’ve adapted to this new reality. And that includes seeing your ex start to date other people. As the Season 2 premiere episode (“My First Time in a While”) opened on Wednesday, J.D. is smitten by Charlie (Rachel Bilson). But is this just a rebound?
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Meanwhile, along with Episode 2 (“My Mentee”), also shown on Wednesday, viewers get an update on Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley) and his autoimmune disease. And we see some cracks continuing to form in Turk (Donald Faison), while J.D. and Elliott adjust to their roles as mentors to the fresh crop of faces — including new arrivals Grant (John Higgins) and Mimi (Keyla Monterroso Mejia).
Besides McGinley, other OG cast members making appearances include Carla (Judy Reyes), Jordan (Christa Miller) and The Todd (Robert Maschio). And later in the season, expect to see more from the Janitor (Neil Flynn) and also Elliot’s ex-flame Sean (Scott Foley).
Variety spoke with “Scrubs” exec producer and showrunner Assem Batra about the premiere episodes’ revelations, and where we go from here — including whether Dr. Cox will be OK, and if J.D. and Elliot’s child Ollie will be seen.
You kick off the season digging deep into Dr. Cox’s disease, and how it impacts J.D. and the others. What made you decide to spend so much more time on that?
We focused a lot on that because we set up this very sort of dire, serious feeling last season. We wanted to put our audience at ease that we aren’t in any way putting Dr. Cox in such jeopardy that he might not be with us. We feel like it’s a way of making the audience know that he’s always going to be part of this family. When we were reading comments, people were like, “Is he gonna die?” This is a comedy. We don’t want to go that far with it. So part of it was just showing their continued journey to help Dr. Cox stabilize this particular autoimmune disease that we gave him. With the kind of medications they have these days, people can do very well on them. So it’s just a matter of now finding the right treatment.
I mean, people do die on “Scrubs!” So it was within the realm of possibility that something could happen to Dr. Cox.
Absolutely, of course. That is always open and in the air, but we just wanted people to at least feel like our family is back together, and we’re not only playing into the jeopardy of that. That’s why we wanted to focus on treating him as opposed to putting him in jeopardy.
How much do we see Dr. Cox throughout the season? Obviously John has his other job in the Bill Lawrenceverse.
I know, we would have loved to see him more. But what we could get with his ‘Rooster’ schedule was about four episodes, so that’s about what we’re going to see him for this run.
We also got to see Judy Reyes as Carla in the season opener, but she also has a day job on “High Potential.” I’m sure it’s been a challenge finding ways to get familiar faces back.
We have to give a lot of love to our line producer Mike Livanos, because he’s always going back and forth, trying to figure out how. It’s not just the days we get them to shoot, but they have to fly up to Vancouver. So we really can eke out sometimes a very small amount of time for people who are doing more than one project.
Christa also makes an appearance as Dr. Cox’s wife, Jordan, and she too has another job on Bill’s “Shrinking.” It is nice to see you managing to find ways to get folks in, so they’re still part of the universe.
Yeah, everybody’s been so kind about giving their time and coming back to do the show, and we thought it would just be a really fun opener to have her reacting to Perry’s illness because we haven’t seen her point of view on it more than her finding out. We saw her find out, but this is her reacting to what happens when somebody you care about that much is so sick.
Things seem to be going OK so far with J.D. and Charlie. What are the plans with those two?
I always call these post-divorce relationships the “first pancake” relationships because it’s like you make that first pancake, it’s all weird, and not the most beautiful one, and then you try again. It is a little bit his rebound relationship where he’s finding himself again. And like we see in the early episodes, he’s doing too much and overthinking it. He’s almost reverting back to when he was younger. And so, he does stabilize with her a little bit more as we see them together. But this is very much trying to show that first relationship after a big breakup.
And there’s the moment where he hires Joey Fatone to do a Cameo for her.
That was going to be an off-screen joke, and then we found out Joey Fatone was OK to come do the joke. So it was great.
How would you describe these first few episodes in terms of storylines that will evolve as the season goes on?
We really want to explore who J.D. and Elliot are now that they aren’t together as a couple. What’s their new normal? We don’t have that many episodes to tell the stories of them outside of the hospital, but we do want to see them a little bit as parents and who they are to one another now that they’re back in the friendship zone of post-divorce.
Are we going to see their child?
If I’m allowed to do that as a spoiler, we will. We will see their kid. We don’t have a lot of time, as we’re telling these stories and wanting to get all of our new cast in as well. But where we can sprinkle it in, even if it’s a mention, we try to keep that whole world alive, that they are parents now.
Donald has talked in other interviews about how you’re exploring Turk’s mental health a bit more this season. It was hinted at briefly last year. How will you dive in a little more on that?
It’s important for us to not just let it drop. We’re a comedy, and we want to show our relationships and the fun dynamics between friendships. But it is important for us to mention that these things don’t just disappear for people. We do hit on that a little bit, and what is J.D.’s take on it for his friend.
And then we know Scott Foley is coming back. Can you tease what’s going to be happening with him and with Elliot?
What was great was how when he came back in, it just felt like he had never left. It felt like he was such a part of it. What happens when somebody you’ve always had chemistry with, but never could quite work it out, comes back into your life. Do you say? Do you give it another shot? That’s Elliot’s dilemma. She’s in a very different place, and what does that mean for them?
Sounds like there’s a lot on J.D. and Elliot handling the fact that they’re both moving on. What does what does that mean for the two of them?
They don’t even really know. As we, the writers, explore it, you can see that they’re on their own journey, which is one of the reasons we chose to not have them stay married. We kept Turk and Carla married, but there are so many fun, interesting things to explore with J.D. and Elliot. What’s it like to see your ex date when you’re also working with them, and you have to know everything about their personal life? How does that make you feel? What does it mean to now be a friend again and not a partner. We get to explore all of those very organic things that happen to people after a breakup, and because they’re working together, it’s intensified for them. This season is a little bit more about J.D. and Elliot in those terms of who they are to each other now.
Another story you left hanging last season was the janitor and the janitor’s son, and the renewal of that rivalry.
We have a little bit of fun coming up with them and picking up on this sort of bizarre idea that this is the janitor’s son, or is it really? What’s going on with this? It gives Neil a good reason to come back if his son is in the hospital. So we play a little bit of that in an episode as well.
With Joel Kim Booster departing and both Dr. Cox and the Janitor only guest starring, does J.D. need another foil?
We have John Higgins as sort of a frustration for J.D. Whereas J.D. was always so needy, wanting Dr. Cox to be his mentor, now he’s still kind of needy, wanting Grant, the character played by John Higgins, to be his mentee. He’s like, “Why don’t you like me more?” That color on J.D. was always so fun — the neediness, and it gives him a way to play that still. Grant may not be a foil in terms of stopping him from accomplishing what he wants in the hospital, but he’s not accomplishing that mentor-mentee relationship that he craves, that he had with Dr. Cox or believes he had.
Yeah, I noticed there’s already sort of a generational thing going on with the two of them, with JD willing to bend the rules to help Dr. Cox, and Grant saying, absolutely not.
It’s funny that you pick up on that, but that is a very Gen Z thing of how they don’t look at things the same way. Something that he learned from Dr. Cox, and we always think of as metaphorical parents, is that you’re going to pass down what you learn, and it’ll be easy. But the interesting thing about so-called parenting or being a mentor, it’s never easy. There’s always something you didn’t see coming. Grant’s personality is so different. He’s an ethical person, but J.D.’s an ethical person too. They just see whatever that means in two different lights. It’s a fun dynamic for us to play with.
Elliot is also doing her own mentoring and also seeing those limitations too.
And that’s another fun Gen Z thing to play. The thing I love about this generation is, they don’t see age as a limitation the way Gen X was taught to see it. That’s a cool thing to play between Tosh (Ava Bunn) and Elliot, where Tosh is just kind of like, “it’s not too late to do what you’ve always wanted to do.” That’s just like a new thing for Elliot to hear.
I know you’ve been asked a lot about Ken Jenkins returning as Dr. Kelso. Any hope of an appearance?
What I tell everybody is, we have to remember that people have their stuff going on in their lives. They can’t always do these things, and it doesn’t mean they don’t want to. It’s just whatever limitations they’re having in their own life or schedule. He knows that the door is always open. He could call me today and say I can fly in next week, and I would write him in. So it’s really just a matter of if he could make it happen, we’re here for him.
Any other themes you want to tease for this season?
There’s mentorship. I think honestly, the J.D./Elliot of it all. I hope our audiences can be excited about that because I think people have questions about why we broke them up. That’s one of those cool relationships where you’ll always wonder why they couldn’t work. But that’s just one of the complex things we get to play between them.
