More than 20 years after it premiered on NBC, Scrubs still ranks as one of the best sitcoms of all time. However, since the series, which moved to ABC in its final two seasons, took place inside Sacred Heart Hospital, Scrubs also had to do its due diligence with making sure the medical aspects were up to snuff. Clearly it succeeded in the eyes of Bill Lawrence, who explained in an interview why Scrubs is “the most realistic medical show of all time.”
Lawrence has been on a tear lately with his Apple TV+ subscription-exclusive shows, including Ted Lasso, Shrinking and, most recently, Bad Monkey. But while stopping by Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, the producer looked back on his Scrubs years, which followed his work on Spin City. When Shepard brought up how Lawrence and the Scrubs team won a Peabody Award, he said:
The weird thing about the Peabody Awards and Scrubs that has followed me around life-wise, and it matters to me, is it was embraced by the medical community, that show, on a level that no one expected.
There have been a lot of medical TV shows to air over the decades, from St. Elsewhere to ER to the still-running Grey’s Anatomy. Of course, Scrubs obviously stands out from those titles and more as a comedy, and one might assume that because it was chiefly providing laughs, the show didn’t have to worry as much about depicting the workings of a hospital as accurately as possible. But that’s not the case at all, and Bill Lawrence’s claim about this being the sub-genre’s most “realistic” offering isn’t just his own opinion. As he continued:
Google ‘most realistic medical show of all time,’ and for whatever reason, every single physician picks Scrubs. The reason is, all the stories and Scrubs, especially the first four years, my best friend in college — everybody calls him Real now because his name’s JD — was an absolute fuck up. We were in the same fraternity. We misbehaved so much that we decided he wanted to be a doctor after we went to college, he had to go back to undergraduate school again. Now he’s a cardiologist and a heart surgeon out here.
It’s through that personal connection, from whom Zach Braff’s starring protagonist got his name, that Scrubs was born, and it’s good to hear that the real JD got his act together and joined the medical community. On the other hand, his pursuit of becoming a cardiologist and heart surgeon resulted in his life becoming fodder for televised entertainment, with Bill Lawrence saying:
But the whole pitch of that show was for me to go ‘My worst nightmare would be waking up in the emergency room and seeing that fuck up, going, “Hey, you’re gonna be fine.”’ I’d be like ‘No!’ I stole his life.
That amusing scenario aside, Bill Lawrence went on to talk about how he and JD are not only still close, but JD ended up working on Scrubs too. That personal touch is what led to Scrubs being so successful with accurately showing the lives of doctors, nurses, surgeons and more in a hospital, As Lawrence put it:
We’re still so tight. He was the medical advisor on the show. So all those stories were real. And for whatever reason, that world of dealing with death, and having crazy mentors, and the nurses being smart, it just resonated. And that’s how it kind of got to the Peabodys. Because It became a dialog in the medical community about how the show was, even though it had fantasies, medicine was finally being represented in a real way.
If you’d like to revisit Scrubs after reading Bill Lawrence’s comments, it can be streamed with a Hulu subscription. Otherwise, check out Bad Monkey, which is currently unfolding on Apple TV+, and remember that Shrinking Season 2 premieres October 16 on the 2024 TV schedule.