ABC put the official “Scrubs” Season 2 trailer online on 16 September, and the first thing it shows you is a desk. There is a laptop, a scented candle and a mug that says World’s Best Doctor. Next to them is a nameplate, and the nameplate reads John Dorian, MD, Chief of Medicine. That is the season in one prop. The intern who spent nine years narrating his own anxiety now runs the building.
Season 2 of the revival premieres Wednesday 30 September at 8/7c on ABC with two episodes back to back, and it streams on Hulu the following day. Zach Braff, Donald Faison and Sarah Chalke are back as J.D., Turk and Elliot. The original ran nine seasons between 2001 and 2010. The trailer runs one minute and fifty-two seconds. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for that trailer, including Dr. Cox’s condition, what the trailer reveals about his treatment, and the returning character the cut brings back.
That is the season in one prop. The intern who spent nine years narrating his own anxiety now runs the building.”
J.D. says it out loud over that opening shot. “As chief, I’m responsible for everything that happens here.” Then the trailer immediately undercuts him, which is the correct instinct. A football comes down a corridor. Somebody shouts “go long” and somebody else shouts “I’m out.” A man rides a one wheel through the hospital and a voice asks, flatly, “what the one wheel?” The building has not become serious just because its chief did.
Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley) gets the line that explains the promotion. “I gave you this job so that you’d find someone to drive you as crazy as you drove me.” That is twenty-five years of this relationship compressed into one sentence. Cox never taught J.D. by explaining anything but by being unbearable until the lesson stuck, and now he has arranged for somebody to do exactly the same thing to J.D.
The new intern class is the other half of it. One of them is told “you’re halfway through your intern year, you have to start thinking about your specialty,” and answers “I want to prove myself as a serious doctor.” Another gets the full J.D. treatment: “would you like to round with me today? I could show you the ropes around here. It’d be an honor.” Anyone who watched the original will hear exactly whose voice that is. J.D. has become the person who was insufferably keen at him, and the show knows it.
Then the trailer stops being funny. Season 1 ended with Cox diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, and Season 2 does not leave that in the background. “Dr. Cox is one of the most important people in my life,” J.D. says. Then the line the whole cut is built on: “when your mentor is also your patient, you take no chances.” A doctor says “your kidney function has taken a turn,” which means the disease has moved.
Jordan (Christa Miller) arrives with the threat, and it is a good one because it is not a villain’s threat. It is a wife’s. “You told me Perry’s treatment was working. You’d have 24 hours to figure out what’s going on or I’m moving him to a better hospital.” J.D. is chief of medicine and somebody is still telling him his hospital is not good enough. His own answer is the most honest thing he says: “I thought I had this all figured out. What am I getting wrong?”
The order is the trick. J.D. says “I know how to get a patient through this” at fifty-one seconds, which is the only moment in the cut where he sounds certain. Jordan’s ultimatum lands two seconds after it and his own admission of doubt follows at a minute and one. The diagnosis itself does not arrive until a minute and six, which means the trailer breaks his confidence before it tells him why.
The exchange that follows is the best thing in the trailer, and it is pure Cox. He asks “is this part of your grand plan to get my kidneys to fail so you can give me one of yours?” J.D.’s reply is instant. “Kidney, lung, or testicle. If I’ve got an extra, your name is on it.” Cox: “leave before I rip one of those out of your body.” J.D.: “okay, bye-bye.” Twenty-five years and the shape has not changed at all. He offers the man an organ and gets told to get out, and both of them are saying the same thing.
Elliot’s thread is the lighter one and the trailer is coy about it. Somebody says “have dinner with me tonight,” and J.D. responds with the catchphrase, delivered exactly as you remember: “cool. Cool, cool, cool. Very very cool.” Later a couple in therapy explain the problem. “We work together, so it’s a lot, especially when all we’re allowed to talk about our feelings.” The therapist says “that must be difficult for you to hear.” Then the punchline: “you know, he’s not even doing the workbook you assigned us.” The answer is a flat “you lie.”
A few smaller beats are worth logging. Somebody says “it’s my house now,” which is either J.D. claiming the building or Cox refusing to hand it over. J.D. greets a corridor with “good morning, everyone” in the sing-song of a man enjoying his own authority. There is a quieter exchange where somebody tells him “maybe you should let go” and he answers “yeah, you’re probably right.” That does not sound like it is about a patient. A voice asks him “what’s the thing you would do if you just trusted your instincts?” And near the end he says the line this show has given him in every crisis it has ever staged: “we are going to figure this out.”
There is a reason ABC gave this a two-episode launch. The revival premiered on 25 February and pulled 11.36 million cross-platform viewers inside five days. That made it the highest-rated comedy episode on ABC and the network’s biggest series debut on streaming in over a year. On linear it did a 0.74 in adults 18 to 49 on live-plus-three, the top-rated comedy telecast on any broadcast network in over a year. Three episodes in it was ABC’s number one series in that demographic. Sixteen years after the original signed off, a hospital sitcom out-rated everything the network had.
Scott Foley is in this season, and he is not a new character. He played Sean Kelly in the original run, which makes him Elliot’s ex, and the trailer puts romantic trouble in front of her without spelling out who is causing it. John Higgins joins as well, and Ava Bunn has been promoted to series regular. Judy Reyes, Neil Flynn, Robert Maschio and Christa Miller are all back in recurring or guest capacities, which means the Janitor and the Todd are in the building.
The risk here is the one every revival carries. A show about young doctors being terrified is a different show when the young doctors are running the place, and the fastest way to waste this cast is to let the new interns do the plots while the originals watch approvingly from a doorway. The trailer does not look like that. It looks like a show that has found its subject, and the subject is that J.D. has to treat the man who made him, using skills that man gave him, knowing exactly how bad the odds are. A title card in the middle of the cut just says that scrubs is back. On this evidence it has also grown up, which is harder.
What Do You Think? Is putting Dr. Cox in a hospital bed the right way to use John C. McGinley, or does a comedy lose something when its angriest character becomes the patient? Does making J.D. chief of medicine fix the revival’s biggest problem, which is what these people still have to learn? And after the original ran nine seasons, does bringing Scott Foley back read as a real story or as a nostalgia button?
See you on the next binge!
