Scrubs creator shares major update on reunion: ‘Six months to a year’

Exclusive: ‘People in the medical community are heroes right now,’ writer-producer Bill Lawrence told ‘The Independent’

Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence has revealed that the beloved sitcom’s cast could reunite in the next “six months to a year” as they all feel they have “stories to tell.”

The writer-producer, 55, dismissed the idea that the reunion would take the form of a movie, telling The Independent: “I’m not going to do a movie. That sounds like a lot of work!”

He continued: “We’ve been talking about it. We all spend time with each other in real life, but everybody is so talented from that show that they’re all working.

“We’ve really started to entertain the idea about getting the band back together because we all feel like we do have some stories to tell. People in the medical community are heroes right now. They certainly aren’t doing it for the money! It’s been a crazy rough time, so I would not be surprised if we figure something out in the next six months to a year.”

Lawrence reunites with Scrubs star Zach Braff in his new Apple+ crime comedy series Bad Monkey, with Braff starring as a disgraced, drug-addicted doctor named Israel O’Peele. Lawrence jokes that the character is a “slightly different doctor” to Braff’s Scrubs character JD.

“When you make someone a character for eight or nine years, you get to go and reinvent yourself and they don’t always get to do that. It’s very hard,” said Lawrence.

The cast of ‘Scrubs’ (left to right): Judy Reyes, John C McGinley, Zach Braff, Donald Faison, Sarah Chalke and Ken Jenkins (NBC/Getty)

“I think people forget that Zach’s really good, so I was like: ‘Dude, why don’t you come and do this?’ It’s not what he usually does. It’s pretty dark.

“I think people will see it and go: ‘Woah, I forgot that guy has those kind of chops.’ He really blew me away in it. I’ll say that to you, but I wouldn’t say it to him personally because I don’t want to compliment him too much to his face!”

Zach Braff as pill-popping doctor Israel O’Peele in ‘Bad Monkey' (Apple+)

Braff has previously suggested he’d been interested in making more episodes of Scrubs, saying in 2017: “It’s something we all talk about, especially now all these people are going back and doing Netflix versions of their shows. I’m very jealous of all this Gilmore Girls attention, and Full House. We talk about it every now and then, so you never know. I’d do it!”

When the hospital-set sitcom celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2021, The Independent’s Simon Bland spoke to Lawrence and the show’s stars about off-screen friendships, that first table read, improvising on set, and getting treated like The Beatles on the street for an oral history of the show.

Bad Monkey is on Apple TV+ from August 14.