JD may be returning to Sacred Heart Hospital, but he can’t do it all on his own. At the ATX TV Festival members of the cast came together to discuss the legacy of creator, executive producer and director Bill Lawrence‘s medical comedy, Scrubs, and inevitably talks of a reboot came up, Deadline reports. It’s been two decades since the last episode of the wildly popular comedy drama, but the sincere episodes and loveable cast have never left fans’ hearts, as evidenced by the massive turnout at the festival.
This weekend at ATX TV Festival, core members of the Scrubs cast met for a reunion panel. Fans shared company with the show’s creator, Lawrence, as well as Zach Braff, Donald Faison, Sarah Chalke, John C. McGinley, Judy Reyes, and Neil Flynn, all original members from the show that first aired in 2001. When asked if there would be a reboot, Faison, who plays JD’s best friend and Chief of Surgery Turk, told the crowd “Here’s the deal: I think we all want a reboot and want to work together again but it couldn’t be a full season. Maybe like a movie or something we could shoot in a few months.” Between Braff working on Disney+’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, Faison portraying Professor Drake Utonium for Diablo Cody‘s live action Powerpuff still in pre-production, and Reyes’s role in the upcoming Smile, the cast is keeping busy, making a full reboot nearly impossible. However, Lawrence offered the fans hope, as per his schtick in shows like Scrubs and Ted Lasso, adding: “We’re gonna do it because people still care about it, and we enjoy spending time with each other.”
The ATX TV Festival in Austin, Texas has provided fans a place to come together to experience and celebrate their television favorites since 2012. The festival typically consists of screenings, panels, Q&As, and events that allow fans to meetup with leaders of the TV industry and casts members of their favorite shows. For the festival’s eleventh season, the event showcased current series, pilots that never got off the ground, reunions like with the cast of Scrubs, and panels with the cast of other shows like Westworld, Euphoria, and Station Eleven. The intimate panels offer fans a chance to ask burning questions, like whether Scrubs will ever be made into a musical, to which Lawrence responded, “Do you really want to hear Sarah sing? No, you don’t.”
Beginning back in October of 2001, a tumultuous time for the US, Lawrence introduced viewers to the dedicated staff of Sacred Heart Hospital in his first television series, Scrubs. After the success of NBC’s medical drama ER, but before the enormous following of ABC’s soapy drama series Grey’s Anatomy, Lawrence provided a happy medium with sincerity and a hysterical assembly of characters.
Often regarded as one of the most accurate medical series on TV, each episode follows the charmingly dorky John “JD” Dorian as he navigates the medical world-with plenty of goofy internal monologuing. The episodes are informative on a House level, but Lawrence balances the tension and heartache with JD and Turk’s infallible love for one another, Chalke’s high anxiety, Reyes’s biting sense of humor and McGinley’s sage words of advice. Fans laugh and cry with the ever-evolving characters, often to heartbreaking scenes accompanied by The Fray‘s haunting early 2000s hits. Like its predecessors and those that came in its wake, Scrubs remains a fan-favorite to this day, standing the test of time.
Scrubs is available stream on Hulu.