The Dr. Cox news comes shortly after Judy Reyes worked out a deal to appear as a special guest star on the show while also starring on High Potential for the same network. Zach Braff, Donald Faison, and Sarah Chalke are set to lead the series. Lawrence previously said he hopes to establish where all the old Sacred Heart characters have ended up, specifically noting a wish to bring back Ken Jenkins as Dr. Bob Kelso. With McGinley on board, we can reasonably expect a return from Cox’s wife Jordan, played by Lawrence’s real-life wife Christa Miller (if she’s not too busy on Lawrence’s other show Shrinking). Scrubs fans will no doubt also be waiting for news of Neil Flynn, who will hopefully return to also terrorize J.D. as the Janitor.Â
Scrubs 3.0 (if you count the soft-rebooted ninth season as version two) is slated to premiere this television season, most likely in 2026 as a mid-season debut. That will mark 25 years since McGinley began playing Dr. Cox, a role that was quite literally made for him. As he explained to The A.V. Club in 2013, “I got the pilot for Scrubs sent to me, and in the margin for Dr. Cox, it said ‘a John McGinley type.’ So when I went in to audition, I said to Billy Lawrence, who’s a dear friend of mine, I said, ‘Well, I’m John McGinley.’ And he said, ‘I know, but because there’s so many ladles in the soup in television, you have to go through an audition process.’ Disney was the producer, so I had to audition twice at Disney. And NBC was the exhibitor, and so I auditioned twice at NBC. So I auditioned for ‘a John McGinley type’ five times.”Â
