The biggest gut punch of ABC’s Scrubs revival is a quick line halfway through the premiere. JD (Zach Braff) and Elliot (Sarah Chalke) talk on-screen for the first time in over 15 years, and JD drops this voiceover bombshell: “By the way, our marriage didn’t work out.”
The premiere, airing this Wednesday night at 8 p.m. ET, establishes that JD and Elliot are divorced. We don’t know exactly when they split up, but the wounds are fresh enough that the two are still bitter.
Throughout the four episodes released to critics in advance, JD and Elliot gradually establish a functional post-divorce relationship. They realize that even if they don’t work as a couple, they can still be good friends and co-workers. But haven’t we seen this before?
JD and Elliot trying to be nice to each other after a bitter break-up was a major storyline back in Season 1, as well as in Season 4, and arguably in Season 2 after their brief “sex buddy” experiment. Fans who rooted for the couple since the 2000s have suffered more than Jesus, because this show has raised and then crushed their hopes at each opportunity.
A lot of the JD/Elliot chaos stemmed from showrunner Bill Lawrence not wanting the two together, even though the network and much of the fandom disagreed. For the first three seasons, he seemed to be on a mission to kill any fan interest in a Jelliot endgame, culminating in a Season 3 storyline where JD pines for Elliot for 20 episodes straight—only to dump her 10 minutes after they start dating again.
“We tried to destroy it forever,” Lawrence said in a 2009 interview, but even after Season 3, the show (and the fandom) couldn’t help but flirt around with a JD/Elliot endgame. Their romantic tension defined so much of Seasons 6 and 7, and by the time the final eighth season came around, it seemed like the demands from viewers had forced Lawrence’s hand.
But whereas Ross and Rachel reunited in the Friends series finale in a big, last-minute romantic gesture, Scrubs took a surprisingly grounded, mature approach.
Four episodes into Season 8, the two had a thoughtful, extended conversation about how they’d grown in the past few seasons and how they might both be ready for a serious relationship. They spent the rest of the season casually together, with no major disputes. Unlike Friends, this show took time to prove that JD and Elliot had indeed changed, that they wouldn’t devolve into their old petty ways the moment the finale credits rolled.
That’s part of why it’s so frustrating for the revival to open up with the reveal that, no, falling back on their old ways is exactly what happened. JD and Elliot’s marriage fell apart because they’re both neurotic and bad at communicating, because they like the idea of being together more than they like the reality.
Every reason fans had to doubt JD and Elliot’s happiness was proven correct, even though so much of Season 8 (and even much of Season 9, often referred to as Scrubs: Med School) worked to assuage those doubts.
Is this divorce reveal as jarring as How I Met Your Mother breaking up Barney and Robin after spending an entire season on their wedding? Not quite, but it hits that same unsatisfying note.
Making the breakup of the show’s central couple feel extra lazy is how hollow the rest of the revival feels. The two-part premiere is filled with clumsy callbacks to the original run. The new cast of interns feels like lame reiterations of previous characters, albeit with a few Gen Z-coded quirks.
The show is filmed in a similar visual style as the T-Mobile commercials Braff and Donald Faison (Dr. Christopher Turk) star in, reinforcing the sense that this is all little more than a cash grab.
Even the explanation for why JD’s back at Sacred Heart in the first place feels like lazy fan pandering. It’s hard to believe that he’d become Chief of Medicine that easily, or that Dr. Cox would be so emotionally open with him regardless of how much time has passed.
It’s similarly hard to feel invested in this new state of JD and Elliot’s relationship because nothing about their new circumstances—that JD suddenly becomes her boss after 15 years away from the hospital—feels organic.
Not everything about the Scrubs revival falls flat. The fantasy sequences are still funny (though there are no show-stopper sequences like Floating Head Doctor), Carla and Turk are still delightful, and Vanessa Bayer’s new character, Sibby, blends in nicely with the cast.
Sibby’s the only new character here who doesn’t feel like a spiritual stand-in of some previous Scrubs character, which gives the show a boost of energy every time she’s on screen.
The news of JD and Elliot’s break-up might sting, but seeing them work together as stable, supportive divorcées could still make for a fun time.
Hopefully, the Scrubs writers know that, after over 25 years of emotional turmoil, nobody has any energy left for more JD/Elliot angst.
