Sacred Heart is ready to start beating again at last, as ABC officially announced today that Bill Lawrence‘s Scrubs has been ordered for a revival season, fifteen years after it went off the air. Notably, that includes the revelation that actors Donald Faison and Sarah Chalke will be returning to the show as both stars and executive producers, joining the already-announced Zach Braff.
The Scrubs revival has been a reportedly tricky nut to crack, despite Lawrence’s own vocal enthusiasm for the idea (and current hitmaker aura), and the fact that pretty much all of the show’s cast members have gone “Yeah, sure!” when asked about it. The cast has spread out pretty widely into the pop culture ecosystem since the show went off the air back in 2010, after all. (Even those actors currently working in Disney TV at the moment, like High Potential‘s Judy Reyes, have struggled with commitments, although Deadline notes that there have been “positive scheduling conversations” with the procedural to share custody of Reyes so her character Carla can come back for the revival.) But with JD, Turk, and Elliot in place, there’s at least a solid core of characters to build around.
Lawrence won’t showrun the series this time, on account of being insanely busy with Shrinking, Bad Monkey, and telling people he actually really has very little to do with whatever the hell’s going on with Ted Lasso these days. Instead, those duties will be handled by Scrubs vets Tim Hobert and Aseem Batra, with the new series apparently combining the show’s returning characters with a new crew of young doctors dealing with the stresses of being on the bottom rung of the medical ladder. (Yes, that sounds kind of like the original show’s pretty bad soft reboot final season; we’re keeping our fingers crossed that a decade-plus of rest has gotten everyone a little more energized for the basic concept.) The logline for the revival show promises we’ll see “characters new and old,” although it cannily avoid specifics; notably, there’s been no mention of John C. McGinley, whose Dr. Cox not only served as a key mentor figure in the original series, but the core of a surprisingly large number of romantic fan-fics with Braff’s character when we did a brief perusal of the show’s 1,300-entry-deep page on FanFiction.net. (We thought you’d get more JD/Turk, but there ya go.) McGinley—who’s also reportedly working on Lawrence’s upcoming HBO comedy with Steve Carell— said in an interview last year that he expect to get an offer to appear on the series, but the show is so far keeping official statements about casting confined to Braff, Faison, and Chalke.
The Scrubs revival is expected to get a mid-season debut.
