TVSquad

Figured today was going to be a good day to publish the Scrubs-centric part of my conversation with Bill Lawrence last month. Here we talk about what's going to happen during the first episode or two of the new season of Scrubs.

The biggest piece of information? That Judy Reyes, who played Carla during the first eight seasons, won't appear at all in this new-direction ninth season. She's the only regular of Scrubs Classic (my name for it) who won't appear at least once during the upcoming season. "I think she was either going to be a regular on this show or looking to go do other things with her career," Lawrence told me, citing that he "totally respect(s)" her decision.

Of course, with the new med-school-centric direction of the show, there's less of a need for some of the other semi-regulars; Sam Lloyd (Ted) has already shot his last episode, for instance.

Other info from Bill: How the season premiere will open, how the transition from Zach Braff's voiceover to another voiceover is going to work, and more about the new character directions for Classic regulars John C. McGinley, Donald Faison and Eliza Coupe.

In Bill Lawrence's interview with our own Joel Keller, he said: "There's going to be a new young lady with a voice over and she's either going to be funny and talented and great, or the show's gonna crater."

Well, now we know who that young lady is and I'm sure Kerry Bishe (Virtuality) will be thrilled to find out that Lawrence is hinging the entire success of Scrubs 2.0 on her. No pressure! She joins Dave Franco, cast earlier this week, and Michael Mosley to complete the new faces of Scrubs (Med School?).

Besides being the new narrative voice for the show, and presumably the lead, Bishe will be a 22-year old first-year med student. She's the first in her family of fisherman to go to college. Mosley, the other new cast member signed today, is ten years older than the rest of the students, the result of a major meltdown a decade earlier when he was at Harvard. So this is his second chance.

On the last day of the TCA press tour, as the stars of ABC were yukking it up at a crowded party at the Langham Huntington in Pasadena, Bill Lawrence and I were out in the courtyard talking about what the new season of Scrubs -- or as I'm calling it, Scrubs 2.0 -- is going to look like.

Essentially, it's going to be like a medical version of The Paper Chase, with Turk and Cox being the professors. We'll be following the lives of young medical students who will shuttle back and forth between classes and their rotations at the "new" Sacred Heart, which is being rebuilt on the med school's campus. While in the hospital, they'll run into a lot of the characters from Scrubs 1.0, including J.D., as Zach Braff is scheduled to be in the first six episodes.

It all sounds a bit confusing, so I'll let Bill lay it out for you folks. An edited transcript is after the jump. The full transcript can be found here. And I'll be getting on the phone with Bill to talk Cougar Town sometime next week, so stay tuned. Oh, and at the end of the interview, we talk about the role Bill's wife, Christa Miller, had on Scrubs that didn't involve any acting.

Here's the full transcript of the interview I did with Bill Lawrence on the last day of the TCAs. It's goes into some of the financial nitty-gritty of the Scrubs deal and drops a few other details. I also asked him to repeat what was going to go on in the new Scrubs a few times, just so I could understand completely what was going on. Enjoy! The main post, where you can leave your comments, is here.

Well let's start with the obvious. You've been thinking about doing another season of Scrubs for like a year now.
(laughing)

Because you told me...when'd you talk to me about that? About a year ago?
We're the only people who shot the shit about it. I thought there was a chance it would happene. I just saw the landscape, you know.

Casting like this makes me hopeful that the new iteration of Scrubs might have a chance. After all, you can't put the entire weight of the series on Cox and Turk. Dave Franco's role in Scrubs is described as charming, conservative, confidently stupid and incredibly entitled."

Now I never saw Superbad, but due to my esteemed position here at the Squad, I did get to review the awful Do Not Disturb, that featured Franco as well. In that, he was arrogant and cocky and lazy, which sounds pretty similar to what he'll be getting up to in Scrubs. More importantly, he played that role very well. I found myself wanting to slap him across the face several times. Partially because he was in such a terrible show, sure, but also because of his portrayal.

We never really got the background of that character, but his entitled whining here is because his family donated a wing to the school. I can already see the friction between him and Dr. Cox. On Scrubs 1.0, he'd have been fired immediately like Aziz Ansari (Parks & Recreation) was, but now Cox will have to put up with his crap.

With ABC's Scrubs transforming into a teaching show instead of a hospital show, it seemed a pretty safe bet that most, if not all, of the new interns we met during the last season wouldn't make the new format. Throughout the season, only one of those characters really grew into a character that anyone gave a damn about: ice queen Denise.

So I was pretty stoked to find that Eliza Coupe has officially been cast in the new season of Scrubs.

As it's been speculated in the last months, Scrubs will not be the same when entering its ninth season. We know that Zach Braff and Sarah Chalke have both inked deals to appear in only six episodes and that, since Donald Faison's pilot wasn't picked up, rumors were going around that Scrubs 2.0 could revolve around Turk and medical school.

Confirmation has finally arrived and the show will indeed go through an extreme makeover that will take the action from the hospital to medical school.

Slight spoilers coming up!

It looks like we're creeping closer and closer to ABC bringing Scrubs back for a ninth season. Now comes word that Zach Braff and Sarah Chalke have both inked deals to appear in six episodes, most likely at the beginning of the season to help set up the new J.D.-less Sacred Heart. Creator Bill Lawrence said that he responded well to Eliza Coupe's crotchety Denise (the intern with no bedside manner). He didn't seem to say much about the rest of the cast, but I think this could work.

Imagine transitioning Scrubs fully into a teaching hospital show. Instead of following one batch of interns, you can bring in a new batch every year or so. We can keep some of the good ones from prior classes, like Denise, but other than that it's new interns and we focus on the "teaching" staff, which would now include Turk. Donald Faison, Neil Flynn and John C. McGinley are on board for a full season, so that direction could definitely work. It would be a different kind of show, but if Lawrence stays involved it can still be a very funny show.

(S08E01) It's interesting how much attention Scrubs gets from us TV-loving types, considering how little attention it gets from everyone else. Why is it?

Well, partially it's because of Bill Lawrence and the cast, who have been entertaining to cover and very press-friendly. But mostly, it's because of the comedic potential the program showed over it's first couple of years, which included the ability to go from comedy to high drama in an instant and make it look easy.

The eighth(and final?) season premiere was more comedic than dramatic (the second episode of the night, "My Last Words," demonstrates this balance quite well), but it showed that Lawrence was serious when he told critics that he was going to dial down the silly and get back to what made people like the show to begin with.

It's a question worth asking as we approach the show's supposed final season.

In an article that ran in yesterday's New York Times, Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence confirmed that ABC, the show's new home, might continue the show in some form after the upcoming eighth season. As we reported in November, star Zach Braff and Lawrence are both leaving Scrubs after season eight, even if the show continues. I'm not opposed to the idea of keeping the show going without them, but I got one question -- What would a Braff and Lawrence-free Scrubs look like?

"It would have to be like Frasier was to Cheers, " Lawrence told the NYT.

One of the greatest guest stars in Scrubs, nay, in television history will make his triumphant return soon.

Tom Cavangagh told TV Guide he will make another guest appearance on Scrubs as J.D.'s older brother Dan before the final season's hourglass runs out of mortality sand.

Cavanagh confirmed the news by saying the "chances are 100 percent" that he'll get to go back on the show this season. Cavanagh will also star in the TNT show Trust Me with Will & Grace star Eric McCormick and Scrubs regular Sarah Chalke.

A lot of people -- fans included -- wonder how Scrubs has managed to get to an eighth season. After all, things weren't breaking its way at the end of what was supposed to be its seventh and final season: the writers' strike truncated the season, its network (NBC) no longer wanted the show, and, though the writing quality had picked up by the time the seventh season was cut short, it had declined enough that even the show's most ardent fans were wondering if it was time to put the show out of its misery.

But thanks to the efforts of Bill Lawrence and ABC Studios, Scrubs does live on, this time on ABC. And, after viewing the first two episodes of the new season, I'm happy to say that going to an eighth season was worth it. Lawrence told me that he wanted to get back to the humor and storytelling basics of the early seasons, and the episodes I saw show evidence of that.

Well, sort of.

Aloma Wright will return to the show this fall, even though her character, Nurse Roberts, was killed off earlier this season. It's part of a deal that she made with Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence: if the show returned for another season, then she could return to the show as Roberts' twin sister Shirley. She'll wear a wig.

Lawrence wasn't sure if there would be another season of the show when he planned her death, but now that they are returning after all he's going to stick to the deal. Which is a good thing. I really liked her character, and if the character can't come back at least the actress can.

(S06E13) If I had to sum up this week's episode of Scrubs in one word it would be 'jokey'. I know there was a common thread running through the show which was, in one word, 'trust', but it just didn't seem that it held a lot of substance. In the end it was just the glue attaching a constant barrage of jokes.

Now, before you point you finger at the flat screen and scream 'Of course they're jokes. It's a freaking comedy!' there have been plenty of episodes where the thread actually produced a nice story that wove around the show. A story where some of the humor would come from the situations rather than just from the jokes. Feh, what do I know? Maybe I'm looking too much into the episode. It just seemed to be more of a sitcom this week rather than a comedy. Am I off here, folks?

Anyway, despite all of what I said above, this was a pretty funny episode.

(S06E07) Let's see, over the past five seasons J.D. has given his special narrating powers to Turk, Elliot, Carla, and even Janitor. So, it was logical that he would pass on his abilities to one of the two remaining bigwigs of the show. And he did so this week, as the inner monologue was passed on to Bob Kelso.

Its been awhile since we've seen Bob strut his stuff on the show. Yes, he had some significant singing parts during the musical episode, but he's been in the shadows recently. He certainly isn't the powerhouse that he was in the earlier seasons. That was actually the plot of this week's episode: the staff are no longer afraid of Kelso's tirades since he barely shows up anymore.