Zach Braff remembers the moment that the original run of “Scrubs” might have veered too far in its flights of fancy. “There’s an episode where JD and Turk are pushed into a tree by ostriches who are guarding Jason Bateman’s house,” Braff recalls. “He has an ostrich farm and he makes belts out of their necks. One of the ostriches steals Turk’s Kangol hat and puts it on. It all sounds funny — if it were a fantasy. But it was in the reality of the show!”
To be fair, back in the day the “Scrubs” writers had 22 episodes to fill each season, and toward the end of the series’ 2001-2010 run, things got a little nutty. So when the time finally came to revive “Scrubs,” Braff and everyone involved agreed to bring the show back to a bit more grounding.
“Launching the show and trying to thread the needle for what the show would be in 2026 was really complicated,” he tells Variety‘s Awards Circuit Podcast. “If you look at the eight and a half years of ‘Scrubs,’ it got quite broad, and every year it became more and more silly. We wanted to bring it back and reground it as it was in sort of the first third of its run, if you will. There were a lot of chefs in the kitchen, and we wanted to please Hulu, we wanted to please ABC/Disney, we wanted to please ourselves, we wanted to please the fans.
