‘Scrubs’ Reboot Episodes 1-4 Review: It’s mostly super, man

You can’t go home again, but you can build something new on the foundation.

When ABC announced it was reviving Scrubs for a new season—sixteen years after the show’s actual finale, seventeen if you count the disastrous Season 9 that we’ve all agreed to pretend didn’t happen—my reaction was mostly a weary sigh. Not because I didn’t love Scrubs. I did. I do. But because revivals are almost always a bad idea. And medical sitcoms that try to recapture the magic of their youth tend to look deeply embarrassing in the attempt.

But after watching the first four episodes, one thing became pretty clear. This Scrubs reboot isn’t trying to recapture anything. It’s trying to figure out what comes after everything.

The setup.

The two-episode premiere airs February 25 on ABC, and I’m constrained by what I can tell you about it. We begin with “My Return” to find J.D. (Zach Braff) back at Sacred Heart after a long absence. And he meets and reunites with both new and familiar faces. The show finds an elegant way to get John Dorian back into the hospital. And what unfolds from there is a show deeply interested in what happens when the wide-eyed idealists of 2001 hit middle age in 2026. Yep, that’s a quarter of a century later. Yikes.

Braff, Donald Faison (Turk), and Sarah Chalke (Elliot) are all back, along with John C. McGinley’s Dr. Perry Cox and Judy Reyes’ Carla in significant roles. There’s a new class of interns, played by actors I mostly didn’t know before this. Ava Bunn and Amanda Morrow stand out early, plus Vanessa Bayer plays a role that lets her do what Bayer does best, which is play someone whose cheerful competence barely masks a desire to scream. We also have Joel Kim Booster as an attending physician who gets immediately pulled into Sacred Heart’s signature ecosystem of chaos and…well, heart.

Bottom line, the show absolutely takes its premise seriously. The world has changed. Medicine has changed. These characters have lived entire lives in the years since we last saw them, and the show doesn’t hand-wave that away in service of nostalgia.

The positive diagnosis.

By the second episode, “My 2nd First Day,” the show has moved past most of its setup and started doing what Scrubs has always done best. It uses the medical setting as a framework for exploring what it means to show up for people even when you’re barely holding it together yourself.

The new interns integrate into the show’s fabric more successfully than any of the Season 8 attempts at refreshing the cast. (We’re not talking about Season 9. We agreed.) There’s a surgical intern named Dashana whose dynamic with Turk becomes one of the early season’s most compelling threads. There’s Sam, who initially reads as a broad Gen Z caricature—she’s nicknamed “Tik Tok” by Cox in the first episode—but who the show quickly gives more dimension. By episode four, even Blake, who starts as the intern you’re clearly supposed to dislike, has shaded into something at least a little more interesting.

Bayer’s Sibby runs some kind of wellness program and represents everything modern about Sacred Heart that drives Cox to his wit’s end: Sensitivity training, HR oversight, the “feelings police” as he calls them. It’s a dynamic that could have been lazy (kids these days with their feelings!). But the show is smarter than that. Sibby isn’t wrong, after all. Cox isn’t wrong, either. The hospital has changed because it had to, and the show is genuinely curious about what that means for doctors who learned medicine in a different era.

The Bill Lawrence of it all.

The showrunners for this reboot include Tim Hobert and Aseem Batra (who also co-wrote the first episode), but the original creator Bill Lawrence is still here as executive producer. And if you’ve watched Ted Lasso or Shrinking, you know Bill Lawrence’s go-to move. Take broken people, put them in a workplace, and force them to become each other’s found family whether they like it or not. It worked in Cougar Town. It worked in the original run of Scrubs. And it’s working here, though the question the show is asking has shifted a bit.

The original Scrubs was about young people learning how to be doctors and discovering that the only way to survive watching people die is to find people who will sit with you in that knowledge and occasionally make you laugh about poop. This version is about what happens when those people grow older. When they grow tired. When they have to figure out how to keep going anyway.

Episode three, “My Rom-Com,” is where the season really clicks into place. It’s the first episode that successfully threads all its storylines together into a cohesive thematic whole. Yes, the thing classic Scrubs did effortlessly at its peak.

There’s a sweetness to one of the surgical intern subplots that recalls the show’s ability to find real emotion in unexpected places. J.D. discovers online doctor reviews, which is the kind of premise that sounds like a bad idea but lands because the show uses it to explore his deep-seated need for validation. And Turk, dealing with his own professional exhaustion, finds an outlet in being a gaming nerd, which is so perfectly Donald Faison that I’m angry the original series never thought of it.

The eagles that don’t land.

The first episode juggles a lot. It’s packed with reintroductions, setup, getting all these characters in the same place at the same time. And some of that juggling shows. There are jokes about influencers and Gen Z that feel broad in ways the show usually isn’t. The writing isn’t as tight as Scrubs at its absolute best. Like in those episodes where every scene clicks into place like a puzzle box and the final voiceover ties everything together with a wisdom that never feels earned until suddenly it does.

Episode two is the weakest of the four, spinning its wheels a bit on conflicts that feel like necessary table-setting rather than organic story. We’re still in the phase where the show is figuring out what it wants to be, and that figuring-out process is sometimes more interesting conceptually than it is in execution.

And there are absences. Characters you’d expect to see aren’t there, at least not in these first four episodes. And the show doesn’t always explain why. Some of this feels intentional, to be fair. Like the show is saving certain reunions for maximum impact. But some of it just feels like gaps in the storytelling that might get filled in later or might not.

At least the fantasy sequences still work.

Without spoiling the fun with specifics, the fantasy sequences are indeed back, and they’re still doing what they’ve always done. They give us access to J.D.‘s interior life in ways that dialogue never could. The show hasn’t lost its visual inventiveness, its willingness to be deeply silly in service of emotional truth.

There’s a moment in the first episode involving a uniform and a badge that I won’t spoil, but it’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t work in 2026. It’s a joke structure the show was doing in 2001, except it absolutely does work because the show commits to it completely. The fantasy sequences were always the thing that separated Scrubs from every other medical show, the thing that let it be M*A*S*H and Airplane! at the same time. And it’s a relief to report that the Scrubs magic is very much intact.

And the music, too.

One of the best things about classic Scrubs was the way it used music, particularly indie rock and emotional piano ballads, to punctuate its biggest moments. The revival understands this is non-negotiable. In the first episode, there’s a Coldplay needle drop perfectly calibrated to evoke 2000s nostalgia while still serving the actual emotional content of the scene.

So the show definitely knows how to build to those moments, how to earn them through the accumulation of small character beats until suddenly you’re watching someone do something simple—close a surgery, make a decision, patch things up with a friend—and the music swells and J.D.’s voiceover kicks in and you remember why you loved this show in the first place.

What the Scrubs reboot is actually rebooting.

One of the most surprising things about these first four episodes is how interested they are in loneliness.

And no, not the romantic loneliness that drives so much television, though there’s some of that too. But the loneliness of being in your late forties and realizing that the friendships that sustained you in your twenties don’t work the same way anymore. The loneliness of being so overwhelmed by family obligations that you can’t remember the last time you had a conversation that wasn’t about logistics. The loneliness of being good at your job but realizing the job has changed around you and you’re not sure you still know how to do it.

The show’s central question so far is: how do you find community in the rubble of your old community? How do you build new connections when you’re exhausted and you’ve already failed at this once? How do you mentor the next generation when you’re not sure you have anything left to teach?

The Turk and J.D. symptoms.

It’s amazing to see the show poking and prodding at one of television’s best bromances. Specifically, how it investigates close friendships. Because even the closest of friendships require maintenance. You can love someone deeply and still drift apart. And showing up for each other gets harder when you’re both barely keeping your heads above water.

Braff and Faison still have that chemistry after all these years. They still have that ease with each other that made their bromance the emotional center of the original series. But the show is smart enough not to just recreate the greatest hits. These are men in their late forties now, dealing with the various exhaustions of middle age. And the show lets that weight sit on the relationship in novel ways.

The question of why.

The question that hangs over any revival is simple: why?

Why are we doing this? Better yet, why now? Is it a cash grab? Is it creators who couldn’t let go? Or, is it executives who saw an IP they could exploit? The answer is usually some combination of all three, and that’s fine. Television is a business, people need to make money, nostalgia sells. But it doesn’t make for good television.

What makes for good television is having something new to say with these characters. And based on these first four episodes, the Scrubs reboot has something new to say.

No, it’s not trying to recapture what it was like to be an intern in 2001. It’s trying to explore what it’s like to be a doctor in 2026. When medicine has changed, when the hospital business model has changed. When the entire healthcare system is actively hostile to the people trying to keep it running. It’s trying to figure out what mentorship looks like when you can’t just yell at your interns anymore. It’s trying to ask what happens when the idealism that carried you through your twenties runs up against the brutal realities of marriage and kids and everything in between.

The show can’t do this all on its own.

It’s easy to go into these episodes skeptical. But I came out cautiously hopeful. No, scratch that. I came out genuinely excited to see where this goes.

This isn’t perfect television. The first episode is overstuffed with setup. Some of the humor feels broader than the show at its best. The new characters need a few episodes to find their footing, and some of them haven’t quite gotten there yet.

But by episode three, something really clicks. The show finds its rhythm, starts threading its ideas together in ways that recall what made the original great. The cast—old and new—starts to gel into something that feels like an ensemble rather than a collection of characters orbiting a protagonist.

And most importantly, it still feels like Scrubs. The show hasn’t lost the thing that made it special. It still understands that we make jokes because we’re scared. It still knows how to build to those moments where the music swells and J.D.‘s voiceover makes something shift in your chest. And it still believes that being there for people—even when you’re exhausted, even when you’ve failed, even when you’re not sure you have anything left to give—is what makes life worth living.

Fittingly, the opening credits have been updated. Instead of J.D. putting an X-ray up backwards on the lightbox like he did in 2001, he swipes it onto a screen. It’s a small change, a visual acknowledgment that time has passed and things are different now.

But the song is still “Superman” by Lazlo Bane. And when that familiar guitar riff kicks in, when you hear “I can’t do this all on my own / No, I know I’m no Superman,” you remember why this show mattered in the first place.

And hey, we need to support this thing, anyway, because how else are we getting another musical episode?

The two-episode series premiere of Scrubs airs Wednesday, February 25 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC, and streams the next day on Hulu. You can watch the trailer here.

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Images courtesy of ABC.