‘Scrubs’ Begins Season 2 With Midlife Crises for Everyone

[This story contains some spoilers for the first two episodes of Scrubs season two.]

If the first season of the Scrubs revival was about reacquainting viewers of the original series and introducing new ones to Sacred Heart Hospital, season two is shaping up to focus on how its three leads handle the responsibilities of leadership.

The short answer, based on the two episodes that kicked off the season: It’s gonna be a little messy.

Wednesday’s season two premiere showed J.D. (Zach Braff), Turk (Donald Faison) and Elliot (Sarah Chalke) each navigating their own crisis. J.D. can’t seem to find a treatment that lets Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley) make meaningful progress with his autoimmune condition. Elliot feels like she’s at loose ends and sees too much of her younger self in Tosh’s (newly promoted series regular Ava Bunn) indecision while choosing a specialty. Turk is losing some confidence in his skills as a surgeon and wondering if he’s giving too much of himself at work and not enough to his wife, Carla (Judy Reyes), and their daughters.

Showrunner Aseem Batra says the season will continue to explore those ideas, while also making some more room for Tosh and her fellow interns to grow. Season two will run for only one more episode than the prior one — 10 vs. nine — but Batra tells The Hollywood Reporter that even a little extra breathing room helps.

“We have one extra [episode], but we also have a big cast, so we have more challenges,” Batra says. “We’re doing our best to try and give story time to everyone.”

The two-episode premiere isn’t all a downer — Scrubs is a comedy, after all, and there are goofy moments including a cutaway scene evoking the Power Rangers. J.D. is also moving forward in his relationship with Charlie (returning guest star Rachel Bilson), and Tosh and Asher (Jacob Dudman) are continuing their budding relationship as HR rep Sibby (Vanessa Bayer) tries to suss out who’s dating whom. (One standout line: When Sibby asks if J.D. and Turk are a couple, J.D. responds, “You don’t have the form for what we are.”)

Batra spoke with THR about what’s to come this season, giving the interns more space, the addition of Saturday Night Live alum John Higgins as a resident and the creation of the J.D. quartet in episode two.

J.D., Elliot and Turk have obviously come a long way since the original series. Is this season more about them growing into their leadership roles and and figuring out where they are at midlife?

Exactly. For Elliot, it’s like, what now? Her ex-husband is chief of medicine. Her other best friend, Turk, is chief of surgery, and it makes her question, What do I want next? Where do I fit in, in terms of leadership and taking the next step? For J.D., I think he’s having a fun, rompy time with romance, but it’s leading him to also question what that is going to look like for him. Also, he can know everything in the book, but when someone you care about is sick, it can always throw you as a physician to be like, “Am I objective enough to handle this? Do I have the answers? What if I mess up?”

We also have a little [reiteration] of Turk and where he is emotionally, both in his life with Carla and also in some of the things we set up in season one, his mental health and emotional health as a physician.

It’s mentioned early on in season one that J.D. and and Elliot co-parent, but we haven’t seen their kid yet. I’m curious if more of the non-dating, domestic aspects of their lives are going to come into play?

In a shorter season, it’s hard to do too much of it. But we know that people want to see them as parents, and we want to show them as parents. It’s not a show about that, but we just finished filming something in that area, so I think it’ll be very interesting for fans to get a chance to glimpse them as parents.

Ava has been moved up to the regular cast for this season, and she gets the most story among the interns in in these first two episodes. What else is on deck for them as a group?

We want to be able to, rather than just have them have a line or two in an episode, give each of them a chance to have more of a story or more of a moment in each episode. I think we’ve done that in a nice way, and it just lets the audience slow down and get to know that character more, or a dynamic between two of the characters more. That was a goal. We’ve also introduced John Higgins, who plays Grant. He brings a great level comedy for J.D., who finds him very frustrating to deal with, and that hopefully is reminiscent of the frustration Cox felt [toward J.D.], but in a different way.

Grant just brings out J.D.’s neediness. He was so needy with Dr. Cox — “mentor me” — and now he’s a little needy with Grant: “See my point of view.” It’s just fun for us to play.

Scott Foley is also coming back into the mix as Sean, one of Elliot’s exes. Can you talk about when he will show up and the effect it has on everybody?

He’s in episode three, unless anything changes. It’s a lot of fun for us to see the old dynamic between him and J.D. again, and what emotions he brings out in Elliot. It just felt like going home to see him at the table read and doing his thing. He was a big part of the first Scrubs, so it just felt great to have him again.

J.D. gets hit from above and below here, struggling with Dr. Cox’s treatment and not vibing at all with Grant. As writers, what new ways are you looking to work with Zach’s character and ride the line between him being the goof he’s always been and a leader at the hospital?

It’s an interesting balance because we have to keep some of the stuff that was always J.D. He always wants to be liked. That’s not going to drive him quite as much, but that doesn’t go away. Some of the ways we wanted to grow him up are in his dynamic with Elliot, how he looks at relationships. He might still fall back into patterns of being a little extra when it comes to love. But he’s also mature enough to know how to do the right thing now. Some of his silliness and all that comes out a little bit more this season than last season.

Tell me about how you came up with the quartet of J.D.s in the second episode.

We came up with that in the room, and then we played around with what that quartet would be singing, and then one of our writers pitched it on the fly there, and so we we changed that [to the theme song from Law & Order]. We we had a lot of fun with that.

Did Zach have any input on how the four versions would look?

Oh yeah. Zach definitely wanted to have a dad bod, and he wanted his belly to be showing. I’m like, well, he can’t be totally shirtless, so let’s have his belly to be showing. But that was hilarious.

You have deep roots with the original show, and obviously the main three stars do. But there might be a good portion of the audience that didn’t watch the original series religiously. What are the conversations you have with your fellow writers and with the cast in terms of where you want to strike a balance between old and new?

Sometimes we forget and have to be reminded that hey, not everybody’s going to understand these references. We try to make it where even if you don’t know these characters or their history, you can still enjoy what they’re going through.