The history of TV revivals is essentially a taxonomy of failure. You can fail by ignoring everything that made the original special. You can fail by trying so hard to recreate the original that you produce a hollow simulacrum - nostalgia without substance. You can also fail, as Scrubs Season 9 demonstrated, by pretending the original's character arcs never happened and resetting everyone to their factory settings.
Bill Lawrence has apparently been paying attention to his own mistakes.
TVLine's review of the ABC revival describes a show that succeeds by doing something deceptively difficult: it allows its characters to have aged. J.D. is not the naive, fantasy-prone intern of Season 1. The revival acknowledges, per the review, "his distance from friends like Turk and Carla, the evolution of his relationship with Elliot, and his time away from Sacred Heart." That is the entire thesis of a good legacy sequel in one sentence: characters should be changed by the time that has passed.
Season 9 failed precisely because it discarded that principle. Lawrence himself acknowledged in retrospect that the season was conceived as a spin-off - "Scrubs Med" - but aired under the original title, which made the regression of returning characters feel like betrayal rather than reinvention. Revisiting that season, the review notes, revealed how legacy characters "felt like shells of their former selves" and how "all the growth J.D. experienced by the end of Season 8... was discarded."
What the revival restores is what made the early seasons genuinely special: the tonal whiplash. The ability to shift, without warning, from silliness to emotional honesty. That tonal range was not a bug in Scrubs - it was the entire feature. A comedy about death and medicine and friendship that would cut from a Janitor pratfall to a devastating bedside moment, and make both land. The review specifically cites a moment between Zach Braff and John C. McGinley in the pilot as evidence that the revival's emotional register is intact. The original theme song is back. That matters more than it should.
Lawrence's track record since the original run is worth noting: Cougar Town successfully navigated being a show whose title everyone hated; Ted Lasso built one of television's great recent comedies from an advertising character. The man understands how to make ensemble comedy work at an emotional level, not just a joke-delivery level.
The revival's core insight is that audiences do not want their old shows back unchanged. They want to see what happened to people they cared about. Give them that and you might actually have something. Sacred Heart Hospital, apparently, is still open.
