Scrubs is back. Zach Braff and Donald Faison are goofing around. John C. McGinley is rattling off lists of things that Dr. Cox doesn't like. Coldplay's "Clocks" is on the soundtrack. The goal is clear: make it 2003 again, by science or magic.
Sitcom revivals — and boy, have we had a lot of them over the last decade — are a dicey proposition. Every successful TV comedy is a product of a specific time in the lives of the characters on the show, of the people making the show, and of the audience watching. Change one or more of those things, while still sticking to the old formula, leads to calamity more often then not. The small handful that succeed creatively — Roseanne/The Conners and Party Down, to name two — do so by figuring out how to make the passage of time a fundamental part of the story. And even that doesn't always work, as Sex and the City fans unfortunately saw with And Just Like That...
Scrubs is an interesting case. The series began 25 years ago as the story of a trio of interns — Braff's dorky, imaginative J.D.; Faison's cocky young surgeon Turk; Sarah Chalke's neurotic Elliot — being given life-and-death responsibilities when they're not too far removed from college parties. Their youth was a fundamental part of the story that Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence and his collaborators were telling. But by the time the show's eighth season ended, all three had grown up, assumed adult responsibilities, and were in positions of leadership. Lawrence even tried making a spinoff where Turk and McGinley's Dr. Cox were teaching a new generation of med students (with occasional cameos by Braff and Chalke), but ABC executives insisted on treating it as the ninth Scrubs season, making no one happy. Still, the idea of these former interns passing wisdom down to kids going through what they once experienced was now baked into the DNA of the show.
Alan Sepinwall