Bill Lawrence says a Scrubs revival is "very close"
Bad Monkey's Bill Lawrence has said he's actively working to get a revival of his medical comedy Scrubs back on TV
Photo: Bill Lawrence and Zach Braff (Credit: Eric Charbonneau/AppleTV+ via Getty Images)
In language that’s really only threatening if you want it to be, TV creator Bill Lawrence has revealed that a Scrubs revival is now “very close.” Lawrence, who’s on a hot streak lately, what with Ted Lasso, Shrinking, and his well-received Vince Vaughn project Bad Monkey, revealed that the only thing stopping him from embarking on a reboot/revival/re-something of the medical comedy is negotiating some leeway in his Warner Bros. TV contract to work on the Disney-owned brand.
Pretty much everyone in the Scrubs universe has said “Yes, absolutely” at some point or another to the concept of coming back for more of the show; worth noting that a ton of them have stayed within the larger Bill Lawrence casting universe over the years, including, notably, Zach Braff, who appeared in an episode of Bad Monkey recently as a doctor who gets involved in a medical fraud scheme. (Or, in Lawrence’s words, answering the question of what would happen if Braff’s Scrubs character had “taken a bad turn.”)
When asked whether a new Scrubs would be a reboot or a sequel series, though, Lawrence split the difference, suggesting the show would focus both on the old characters, as well as new ones:
We’ve been talking about a lot, and I think the only real reason to do it is a combo. 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. There’s no cliché ‘rich doctors playing golf” — that’s not what it is anymore. 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.
Now, Scrubs-ologists might feel a little leery about all that, since it sounds kind of a lot like the show’s infamous ninth season, which was marketed as Scrubs: Med School, and which featured only a handful of returning characters who served as mentors to a new cast of young doctors. It was not well received, especially since it came after what was already a pretty definitive series finale; Lawrence, presumably, would be able to come up with a more elegant solution with all this extra time.
Whether it ends up happening or not, Lawrence remains busy as hell: In addition to his current shows, he’s also developing a new TV project with Steve Carrell. Also, don’t bother asking him about Ted Lasso‘s heavily threatened fourth season: “Jason Sudeikis, is the voice, heart, driving factor behind the show,” Lawrence said, “Not only professionally, but on a personal level, that’s the dude whose life gets upended and who would be making the biggest sacrifices. The only sure bet in Hollywood is that nobody involved with Ted Lasso will ever, ever speak about it until Jason makes his decision of who he wants to talk to and what he wants to tell.”