Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste
In news that has us excited in a way we haven’t felt since the heady days of Alex, Inc.—the TV show that dared to ask, “What if a man had a podcast?”—Deadline is confirming that Zach Braff has formally signed on for the Scrubs reboot that’s been kicking around for several months at this point. Amazingly, this was apparently a much harder deal to nail down than you might expect, given how enthused all the show’s old stars have been in public about the general idea of getting the Sacred Heart gang back together. Difficulties reportedly arose over pay, and Braff’s insistence that the show film in Los Angeles, instead of Vancouver.
Braff is the first actor to officially sign on for the project, after protracted negotiations to get series creator Bill Lawrence on board. (Lawrence won’t serve as a showrunner for the series—he already has a frankly enormous number of shows he’s currently making, including Shrinking, his planned Steve Carell show, Bad Monkey, and whatever he’s still actively doing on Ted Lasso—but his overall deal with Warner Bros. TV means a lot of work had to be done to get him freed up to be even loosely involved with a Disney-owned show.) With these two in place, deals can now start going into place for Sarah Chalke, Judy Reyes, John C. McGinley, and Braff’s podcasting pal Donald Faison to join the series (plus any other members of the wider Scrubs family, presumably).
Lawrence has described the concept of the new Scrubs as a hybrid of a revival and a reboot, bringing back old characters and introducing new ones. (We’ll note, with some measure of cynicism, that Lawrence did try this once before, with the show’s soft-reboot final season; nobody appeared to come away from that experience especially happy with the result, but a few decades of absence have presumably made the Sacred Hearts grow fonder.) Still, everybody involved in the show seems to genuinely enjoy working together—Braff just popped up for an arc in the most recent season of Shrinking—so it’s presumably just a matter of syncing up people’s schedules (and their not-wanting-to-make-a-TV-show-in-Canada requirements, apparently) before the series can potentially return.
