TVSquad

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.

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.

In the behind-the-scenes interviews the network sent along with the pilot, the entire cast and the creator described Do Not Disturb, premiering tonight at 9:30/8:30 Central, as an "upstairs-downstairs" workplace comedy. Creator Abraham Higginbotham (Arrested Development) based the show on his time at the Paramount Hotel in the '90s. "It's Freaks and Geeks in a hotel," he said. "You've got your upstairs crowd where you have to basically turn in a photo to be approved to work where you come into face contact with guests. And then downstairs, anybody can work there because they're the people doing all the real work."

Unfortunately, if this is going to be the major thrust of the series going forward, they picked a pretty poor episode to establish that for the pilot. "Work Sex" tackled sex and promiscuity, which are such powerful subjects in this country they tend to overwhelm everything. And since the show is trying to introduce its premise, characters, relationships and the dynamics of its ensemble at the same time, it may have been better to launch with a subject a little less dominating. In fact, I didn't really get the struggle between the two groups at all.