SPOILER ALERT: The story includes details about the Season 1 finale of ABC‘s Scrubs revival.
Scrubs showrunner Aseem Batra vowed when she got into the TV business in her 20s that she would stay away from social media for mental health reasons, so she has not seen first-hand fans’ reactions to the revival, which she executive produces with the original series’ creator Bill Lawrence.
“What I hear from other people is really lovely and encouraging, because the most important thing for me, and I think also Bill, was coming back and having people feel that they’re watching a continuation of Scrubs and the tone that they remember, the people they remember, the feeling that they remember,” she told Deadline.
Batra may not have seen online reaction to the revival, which shoots in Vancouver, but she has certainly seen its strong ratings performance on linear and streaming, which has made a renewal very likely. Have conversations about the new season already started?
Watch on Deadline
“Yes, we always start this conversation because it is the world of television where unless you’re out of the gate hit, you don’t know what’s going to happen,” Batra said. “So we always start the conversations early, whether we have a pickup or not, everyone’s feeling optimistic, so we’re talking in that direction of like, what do we want this to look like? What changes do we want to make? That started already.”
One change Batra is looking to make is to reintroduce a popular feature from the original series.
“I think something that Bill nailed so well was doing musical bits,” she said. “I don’t necessarily mean like singing to camera, but using music to tell a story. That is something that takes a lot of work and planning, but now that we know the Vancouver of it all and how much time it takes to coordinate, getting something like that in Season 2 is a personal goal of mine, because as a fan, when I would watch that show early on, before I was on it, I was just so taken — as many fans are — by how he used music in that.”
Season 2 OG Wish List: Jenkings, Kastl, Foley & More
To the delight of fans of the original, the Season 2 plans also include the return of other popular former cast members who were not in the first nine-episode installment of the revival. That includes the one OG main cast member not in Season 1, Ken Jenkins, who played Dr. Bob Kelso for all nine seasons from Scrubs‘ original run.
“Dr. Kelso will be back next year,” Lawrence told Deadline in February. “It just didn’t work out this year but it will next year.”
Is that still the case?
“Absolutely,” Batra said. “We will be rolling out characters that we didn’t get to see last season for sure. We too were figuring out how to do all of this. We’re in Vancouver, and we’re in LA and we have nine episodes, really eight, because once you do the pilot and establish everything, then you have eight more to go and introduce new people. So we have plans for all of that, we’re very excited to see folks that we miss from the old Scrubs.
Who is on her wish list?
“Well, we’ve got Johnny Kastl, we’ve got Scott Foley, we would love to have him back, and, of course, Ken Jenkins,” Batra said. “We want to see more of Neil Flynn. So we have quite a wish list.”
Kastl, who played the highly inept Dr. Doug Murphy in a heavily recurring role on the first eight seasons of the original series, left acting after wrapping Scrubs to embark on a career as a lawyer. Meanwhile, Foley appeared in Seasons 1, 3 and 8 as marine biologist Sean Kelly, a romantic interest for Elliot (Sarah Chalke). Flynn reprised his Janitor role in the Season 1 finale.
What about Elizabeth Banks, who played the mother of J.D.’s first child?
“We’d love that. I don’t know if Elizabeth Banks has time for Scrubs, she’s a busy, very successful woman, but certainly we’d love to see her.”
As for why Scrubs got a nine-episode order, shy of the 10 episodes new midseason series typically get, “we’re in a very interesting climate for television, people aren’t feeling like taking risks, and even though Scrubs might feel like, Oh, well, that’s not much of a risk, it has a built in fan base, I think everything feels like a risk, so I think it was just a way to test the waters, give us a chance,” Batra said. “And of course, we appreciate all of it, because it’s hard to make anything right now, so we’re happy to do that.”
More Dr. Cox & Carla
Two key original cast members, John C. McGinley (Dr. Cox) and Judy Reyes (Carla), did only three and four episodes of the revival’s first season, respectively. Each is a series regular on another show, Lawrence’s Rooster on HBO (McGinley) and ABC’s High Potential (Reyes).
Scrubs fans’ biggest criticism of the revival has been that there wasn’t enough of Dr. Cox and Carla in Season 1. With Rooster and High Potential both renewed and both filming in Los Angeles while Scrubs is in Vancouver, is it feasible to get more of Cox and Carla? Is it a goal for next season?
“Absolutely. Look, it was one of the wish things we had for this season, but we had to work with what we could work with,” Batra said. “And certainly we hear the fans, because that’s our own instinct as well is we want our family back together, and so whatever we can do to make that happen. Both shows have been amazing and working with us to get those performers over to Vancouver. So we’ll do our very best to keep them in the fold, because they are part of this in a big way, but we’re happy for their success in other areas, and we’d just love them back as much as we can get them.”
Helping with logistics is the fact that Scrubs and High Potential are produced by the same studio, 20th Television, for the same network, ABC. Rooster is produced by Warner Bros. TV but it shares an executive producer with Scrubs, Lawrence.
Dr. Cox’s Prognosis & His New Dynamic With J.D.
In a Season 1 finale cliffhanger, J.D. gets a text from Jordan (Christa Miller) to come over and check on her long-time partner, Perry Cox (McGinley). It came hours after tests J.D. had ordered showed that the prescribed treatment of Cox’s microscopic polyangiitis was not working.
Jordan followed up with a second text, asking J.D. to disregard the request but he ignored it and headed over at the end of the finale. What is waiting for him there?
“I think it’s kind of interesting, because we had to walk this line of, like, Dr Cox’s thing with J.D. has always been to keep him at absolute arm’s length, and we don’t want to, in a way, completely mess with that, and yet we have to have some forward progression in that relationship,” Batra said. “So we are showing that it’s not necessarily how he would choose to get closer to Dr. Cox, but this is how he’s getting closer to Dr. Cox. It’s like careful what you wish for; he’s always wanted to be part of his life, and now he is as his physician.”
The duo’s new storyline has a hidden agenda.
“We’re just teasing, really, that we love John C. McGinley, and we want him to come back and do more on Scrubs, Batra said. “He’s on Rooster and so this is our sneaky little way of like, come back, be in the hospital more, be in our world more. So that’s what we’re hoping. We didn’t want to scare fans that he’s going anywhere. We want more of him.”
Well, the finale did scare fans. We didn’t get to see the test results but things seemed pretty dire judging by J.D.’s face. How bad is it?
“You know, 21 minutes, you have to cut out a lot of things,” Batra said. “What we do want to show, which is going to end up being saved for Season 2, is that this is J.D.’s moment as a physician, and he’s not going to stop trying. If the treatment isn’t working, he’s not going to stop there.”
Broadcast series have to meet an exact length, which for half-hour comedies like Scrubs is 21 min without commercials.
“We have talked to physicians about, what does happen? How do you manage these things?,” Batra said. “So we want to show that this man who started at this as this young intern and protege of Dr. Cox is someone who can actually now help him in this very difficult chapter. That is something that we will show — I’m teasing it for Season 2 — that he has more medical tricks up his sleeve for Dr. Cox, and it is something we had in this episode that we had to cut out for time. We don’t want to leave people feeling too uncomfortable but there’s more to come, and it’s positive.”
New Formidable Foe(s) For J.D.
In a recent interview with Deadline, McGinley made a case for why Scrubs needs more Dr. Cox, arguing that J.D. needs a strong foil, which he somewhat lost this season with very little of Cox and the Janitor and no Kelso. Is the hospital’s maintenance guy, revealed to be Janitor’s son, tipped as a new nemesis for J.D.?
“Yes, that hopefully will be a fun dynamic,” Batra said. “Also, we have a lot of characters, but we’re not done introducing new characters. And that is something we’ve talked about too, is he does need more conflict. He came in, and there was a lot of internal conflict. He’s got personal issues where he’s trying to find love again, but he does need the conflict to his work.”
Could Dr. Cox again provide that conflict?
“That probably won’t come through Dr Cox anymore, so that is an open question, and what we start talking about early on for Season 2 is like, how do we give him that?,” Batra said. “That’ll be fun, but Dr. Cox will come in and give a different kind of conflict, it’ll be like, how do you treat someone who was your mentor and knew better than you, and now you have to know better than him, or be the objective party in that relationship and have that person respect your decision, so that’s a different kind of conflict for him.”
Will the maintenance guy be going 180 from this huggable, lovely guy to a monster next season?
“I don’t know if I’d call him a monster, but the fun of Neil Flynn is that he always has something up his sleeve, and so that was sort of, where he took this relationship,” Barta said. “And we don’t know if that’s his son, he lies about everything. He kind of, like throws a wrench in all of J.D.’s peaceful plans, so yes, we want to see some conflict there, for sure.”