After 16 years away, Scrubs is back and in good shape

What are we looking for from revivals, reboots, and sequels to beloved TV series? No matter how they’re categorized, the safe bet is, essentially, audiences want the same thing they loved originally…that’s just different enough. This nostalgic trend kick-started more than a decade ago when Netflix brought Arrested Development back from the dead with the first of two extended, wildly overstuffed, and not terribly funny seasons. So many shows from the youth of elder millennial Americans have come back, zombie-like, to varying degrees of success, from Frasier to Will & Grace to Murphy Brown. Comedies are an ideal source of creative rejuvenation, but it’s often incredibly hard to find the right tone and actually remain funny for a new generation while pleasing stalwart fans. Maybe, then, it makes sense that one of the more consistently enjoyable if unremarkable returns is from Scrubs, the ABC medical comedy that kind of already rebooted itself back in the old days.

The rapid-fire opening title sequence (after a cold open that feels like a sly riff on The Pitt) is enough to clue you into the fact that this Scrubs is the same…but just different enough. The theme music, “Superman,” is as it was when the show first started airing in 2001, coupled with the image of different doctors and nurses walking near a patient’s bed and then placing an X-ray on a screen, displaying the show’s title. But this time around, J.D. (Zach Braff) swipes the digital image of an X-ray from a tablet onto a larger display monitor. Even at the ramshackle Sacred Heart Hospital, technology has changed in the last decade-plus. The simple premise of the new season is that the students have become the teachers. J.D., his best friend Turk (Donald Faison), and his on-again/off-again love Elliot (Sarah Chalke) attempt to guide a new crop of interns, including the social-media-obsessed Serena (Ava Bunn), the meek and very British Asher (Jacob Dudman), and the handsome and overly self-assured Blake (David Gridley). 

You may recall that the show featured J.D. and friends teaching a different set of interns after Scrubs shifted from NBC to ABC. In season nine, the series made its lead and other familiar faces closer to supporting players to make room for new characters (like one portrayed by a young Dave Franco). But here, Braff, Faison, and Chalke are the regulars. The new interns are all listed as guests in the closing credits, whereas special appearances by John C. McGinley as J.D.’s grouchy old mentor Dr. Cox and Judy Reyes as hard-as-nails nurse/Turk’s wife Carla get called out in the opening.