Zach Braff is dusting off his, well, you know.
The actor is officially returning as John “J.D.” Dorian on the upcoming Scrubs revival in the works at ABC, which hails from 20th Television, Entertainment Weekly can confirm.
Braff played the central physician on the medical sitcom for its first seven seasons on NBC and its eighth on ABC. He also returned for six episodes of the show’s ninth season, which introduced a new set of primary characters.
Since the show’s end, Braff has maintained close professional ties with Donald Faison, who played J.D.’s bestie, Christopher Turk, forming perhaps the most quintessential TV bromance at the peak of bromances being a thing people talked about. Braff and Faison launched the Scrubs rewatch podcast Fake Doctors, Real Friends in 2020, and have teamed up for approximately 10,000 T-Mobile commercials that harken back to their onscreen friendship.
The Scrubs revival has been in the works for several months from the show’s original creator, Bill Lawrence, who went on to oversee hit series like Ted Lasso and Shrinking (both of which Braff has directed episodes of) . Deadline Hollywood reports that Lawrence’s commitments to those other shows, which are returning for additional seasons on Apple TV+, mean that he will not serve as showrunner for the new iteration of Scrubs.
The outlet also reports that with Braff now on board, it’s safe to expect deals to be negotiated with other original cast members, including Faison, Sarah Chalke (who played Elliot Reid), John C. McGinley (Perry Cox), and Judy Reyes (Carla Espinosa).
Kevin Winter/Getty
Zach Braff at the ‘Shrinking’ season 2 premiere in West Hollywood
Lawrence previously told Deadline that he expects the new version of Scrubs to be a hybrid of a revival with the original cast and a reboot with new characters. “We’ve been talking about a lot, and I think the only real reason to do it is a combo,” he said. “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.”
He added, “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.”
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The original Scrubs followed the misadventures of physicians at Sacred Heart Hospital, and ran for 182 episodes between 2001 and 2010.
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