Scrubs - Season 10 (2026) TV Series Review: Sacred Heart's Long-Awaited Return Proves ABC Made the Right Call on Hulu

Scrubs Season 10, officially branded by ABC as Scrubs (2026) Season 1, is a nine-episode comedy-drama revival premiering February 25, 2026, on ABC with a two-episode back-to-back launch, and streaming the following day on Hulu. The revival was created and showrun by Aseem Batra, a writer from the original series, with Bill Lawrence returning as executive producer alongside Tim Hobert. Lawrence, whose post-Scrubs career produced Ted Lasso and Shrinking on Apple TV+, lends the project considerable creative credibility. The show is produced under the ABC Studios banner and reunites the core Sacred Heart ensemble: Zach Braff as Dr. John J.D. Dorian, Donald Faison as Dr. Chris Turk, Sarah Chalke as Dr. Elliot Reid, John C. McGinley as Dr. Perry Cox, and Judy Reyes as Carla Espinosa in recurring roles. New additions include Vanessa Bayer as hospital wellness coordinator Sibby, Joel Kim Booster as attending physician Dr. Eric Park, and a fresh class of interns played by Ava Bunn, Amanda Morrow, Jacob Dudman, David Gridley, and Layla Mohammadi.

The season picks up sixteen years after Sacred Heart's most meaningful chapter ended. J.D. has been working as a concierge doctor for wealthy clients, a comfortable but hollow arrangement, and a visit to his old hospital sets in motion the kind of joyful, complicated homecoming that only this show can deliver with genuine emotional weight. The premise is elegantly constructed: the students have become the teachers, and the question of what that transition costs these characters personally drives the revival's best material. This is not a debut but a resurrection, arriving at a moment when the medical drama landscape is unusually competitive thanks to the breakout success of HBO Max's The Pitt. Scrubs does not compete with that show on procedural intensity; it offers something different and arguably harder to manufacture, warmth, absurdity, and emotional honesty in equal measure. For a fan base that has waited this long, the reunion carries real stakes.

Narrative Arc and Pacing: A Revival That Earns Its Reunion Rather Than Simply Staging It

The most immediately reassuring thing about Scrubs Season 10 is that it does not treat its own history as a crutch. The premiere, titled My Return, establishes J.D.'s reintegration into Sacred Heart with an elegant economy that avoids the fan-service landmines that sink most legacy revivals. Where Season 9 infamously sidelined the original cast in favor of a med-school reboot that left the show feeling like a hollow imitation of itself, this season puts J.D., Turk, Elliot, and Cox front and center from the first frame. The storytelling logic is sensible and dramatically rich: the interns now work under the supervision of doctors who were once in exactly their position, which creates an organic framework for revisiting the show's founding themes without simply replaying them.

The episodic structure across the first four available episodes is largely tight, with Episode 3 cited by multiple observers as the moment the season truly clicks into place. It is the first installment to successfully thread all its storylines into a cohesive thematic whole, the kind of episode the original series produced seemingly effortlessly at its peak. Episode 2 is the weakest of the set, spending a little too much time on necessary table-setting that feels mechanical rather than organic. These are minor complaints in the context of a revival that is still calibrating its new ensemble, and by the standards of the genre they represent entirely normal growing pains. The show does not suffer from mid-season slump in the episodes available; if anything, momentum builds with each installment.

Thematically, Scrubs 2026 is more ambitious and more melancholy than it may initially appear. The central preoccupation of these early episodes is loneliness: not romantic loneliness but the specific loneliness of middle age, of close friendships that require maintenance, of being good at a job that has changed around you, of showing up for people when you are barely holding it together yourself. The revival also engages substantively with the realities of contemporary American healthcare: patients rationing medication, insurance nightmares, the hospital mandate to see five patients per hour to maximize profits. These themes are worked in with the same subtlety the original series used for its most pointed social commentary, which is to say they arrive as emotional beats rather than lectures. The show remembers that it is a comedy first and a manifesto never.

Character Evolution and Performances: Braff and Faison Still Own the Building

Whatever alchemical property connects Zach Braff and Donald Faison on screen, it has not diminished one molecule in sixteen years. Their friendship is so deeply embedded in these characters, and so visibly real in their off-screen dynamic, that watching them share a scene again carries a genuine emotional charge that no amount of craft or clever writing could manufacture from scratch. Braff's performance as the older J.D. is a precise recalibration rather than a simple resumption of the original. He retains the character's blend of silliness and sentimentality but has shed some of the naivety, shading the performance with a very specific kind of middle-aged tiredness that reads as authentically earned. A key moment in Episode 2, in which J.D. faces a situation where the old version of the character would have immediately turned to Dr. Cox for guidance and instead realizes he no longer needs to, is the moment the revival earns its emotional credibility. Faison, meanwhile, is given significant dramatic material when J.D. confronts Turk about a serious case of professional burnout, and he handles it with the same reliable emotional honesty he brought to the original series.

Sarah Chalke's Elliot Reid is somewhat underserved in the earliest episodes, though her gift for physical comedy remains fully operational and she finds her footing in more emotionally nuanced material in Episodes 2 and 3. John C. McGinley's Dr. Cox is back in a recurring rather than regular capacity, a decision that multiple observers flag as a genuine loss for the show. When Cox is present, whether delivering a savage rant aimed at one of the new interns or sharing a quietly devastating moment with Braff in the pilot, he is a reminder that he has always been one of television's most versatile comic performers. His reduced screen time is genuinely felt. Judy Reyes' Carla is warmly welcome in the episodes she appears in, her nickname for J.D. earning the kind of emotional response that only sixteen years of affection can produce. Robert Maschio's Todd and Phill Lewis's Hooch return as well, both characters now operating with a degree of self-awareness about their behavior that the writing uses cleverly rather than apologetically.

Among the newcomers, Vanessa Bayer's Sibby is the most prominent and the most contested addition. As the hospital's wellness coordinator and effectively the institutional representative of changed cultural norms, she occupies a role that the writing has not yet fully resolved. In the first four episodes she functions primarily as what J.D. calls the Feelings Police, inserted into scenes to redirect jokes and remind characters of evolving behavioral standards. This is a dramaturgically awkward position that the original show handled through characters who were participants in the chaos rather than commentators on it. By Episode 4 there are signals of more personal depth for Sibby, which suggests the writers are aware of the limitation. Joel Kim Booster is a standout in a smaller role, bringing genuinely sharp comic line readings to J.D.'s new rival-adjacent colleague. Among the interns, Amanda Morrow's Dashana develops the most compelling early storyline through her mentorship dynamic with Turk, while Ava Bunn's social media-obsessed intern shades into more interesting territory faster than the broad premise implies.

Direction and Production Value: Sacred Heart Still Feels Like Home

Zach Braff directs the first episode, and that directorial hand establishes the visual grammar and tonal register that the subsequent episodes maintain. The show retains the visual identity of the original: the ramshackle warmth of Sacred Heart as a physical environment, the specific color palette that makes the hospital feel simultaneously grim and hospitable, and above all the surreal cutaway aesthetic of J.D.'s fantasy sequences. A joke in Episode 1 involving a uniform and a badge uses a comedic structure that the show was deploying back in 2001, and it works entirely because the execution commits to the bit with complete sincerity. This kind of visual inventiveness, the willingness to be deeply silly in service of emotional truth, was always what separated Scrubs from every other medical show. The revival has not lost it.

The production is set and shot in Vancouver, a detail worth noting primarily because it partially explains why Judy Reyes' Carla appears in a limited number of episodes rather than as a full series regular. The opening credits sequence has been updated with surgical precision: the same rapid-fire structure, the same walking-past-the-patient-bed visual rhythm, but J.D. now swipes an X-ray onto a digital display rather than pinning a film to a lightbox. It is a small detail that communicates an enormous amount about the revival's relationship to its own history, respectful of the original's iconography but honest about the passage of time. The production design of Sacred Heart itself strikes the right balance between recognizable and updated, feeling continuous rather than artificially preserved.

The dream sequences and surreal cutaways remain technically accomplished and narratively purposeful. They still function as the show's primary method of accessing J.D.'s interior life in ways that dialogue never quite could, giving the revival its most distinctive visual signature in a landscape full of procedural medical dramas that operate exclusively in realist mode. Bill Lawrence's influence as executive producer is visible in the overall production philosophy: a comfort-food warmth in the mise-en-scene that makes even the hospital's institutional spaces feel like a found-family living room. For a show that regularly deals in life-and-death stakes, the tonal calibration of the direction is consistently impressive, finding the exact register where something can be funny and heartbreaking at the same time.

Soundscape and Atmosphere: Superman Is Still the Right Song for This Show

Lazlo Bane's Superman returns as the opening theme, and hearing that familiar guitar riff again is one of the revival's most quietly affecting moments. The decision to retain the original theme rather than updating or reinterpreting it signals the show's fundamental confidence in its own identity, a confidence that is borne out by the episodes themselves. The original Scrubs built a substantial part of its emotional reputation on the way it used music, particularly the indie rock and emotional piano ballad needle drops that punctuated the biggest moments of each episode. The revival understands that this is non-negotiable. A Coldplay needle drop in the first episode is calibrated with impressive precision to evoke mid-2000s nostalgia while still serving the actual emotional content of the scene rather than simply triggering a Pavlovian response.

The overall soundscape of the revival maintains the original's tonal sophistication, knowing when to lean into comic sound design for the fantasy sequences and when to give a dramatic scene the space it needs to breathe. The show still understands how to build toward those music-scoring moments where the accumulation of small character beats suddenly crystallizes into something larger, and J.D.'s voiceover arrives to give it language. These moments were always the emotional engine of Scrubs at its best, and the revival has not lost the technique. The sound design in the hospital scenes is appropriately lived-in and grounded, providing a credible acoustic environment that makes the surreal fantasy sequences land even more effectively by contrast.

Trailer Scrubs - Season 10 (2026) TV Series

Strengths and Weaknesses

What Works:

• Zach Braff and Donald Faison's chemistry is completely intact, their decades-long real friendship giving J.D. and Turk's reunion an emotional authenticity that cannot be scripted or manufactured.
• The revival puts the original cast front and center and builds the new interns into the established ensemble rather than replacing it, directly correcting Season 9's fatal structural error.
• J.D.'s character arc is honored rather than erased: his growth since Season 8 is baked into his 2026 self, and the show rewards long-term viewers who invested in that evolution.
• Sarah Chalke's physical comedy remains razor-sharp, and her more emotionally demanding material in Episodes 2 and 3 showcases a range the show uses more confidently than in its early seasons.
• The fantasy sequences and surreal cutaways are fully restored and remain the show's most distinctive visual tool, still doing what dialogue cannot.
• The Dashana and Turk mentorship dynamic is the most promising new character relationship, offering a fresh version of the Cox and J.D. dynamic that the surgical department originally lacked.
• Music supervision is handled with the same sophistication as the original, earning its emotional needle drops rather than simply leaning on nostalgia.
• The show's engagement with contemporary healthcare realities, from insurance nightmares to per-patient quotas, grounds the comedy in the same social conscience that made the original feel valuable.

What Does Not Work:

• John C. McGinley's Dr. Cox appears in a reduced recurring capacity, and his absence from scenes that would benefit from his presence is genuinely felt across all four available episodes.
• The Sibby character in the first four episodes functions primarily as a moral moderator rather than a participant in the show's chaos, creating a structural awkwardness that the original series never had with its authority figures.
• The we can't say that anymore joke structure, used repeatedly when the show wants to acknowledge but still deploy its older humor, quickly becomes tiresome and reads as the show failing to fully commit to either the joke or the critique.
• Episode 2 is noticeably weaker than the surrounding episodes, spinning its wheels on setup material that feels obligatory rather than organic.
• Some Gen Z humor in the first episode, particularly around social media and influencer culture, comes across broader and less precise than the show operates at its best.
• Jacob Dudman's British intern Asher is saddled with a weaker storyline that leans on accent-based comedy in ways that feel incongruent with the show's usual character-driven approach.
• The absence of Neil Flynn's Janitor and Ken Jenkins' Dr. Kelso is acknowledged but not explained, leaving gaps in the ensemble that feel like incomplete storytelling rather than intentional omissions.

Final Verdict: By Episode Three, This Revival Remembers Exactly What It Is

Rating: 4/5 Stars

Scrubs Season 10 is that rarest of television creatures: a revival that has something genuinely new to say with its characters rather than merely a commercial reason to say anything at all. The show does not pretend its characters have been suspended in amber since 2010. It asks what it costs to be the version of yourself that your younger self was working toward, and whether the friendships that sustained you in your twenties still function the same way in your late forties. These are not the questions the original Scrubs was asking, and the fact that this revival is asking different questions while remaining recognizably itself is the most encouraging sign that Bill Lawrence, Aseem Batra, and their writing team understand what made the original worth continuing.

The audience most likely to be fully satisfied is the original fan base, which has waited sixteen years for exactly this: a return that honors their investment without exploiting it. Longtime viewers who remember the season finales, the musical episodes, and the moments when J.D.'s voiceover arrived at exactly the right time will find enough of that emotional register here to justify coming back. New viewers who have never seen the original series will find the show functional and charming, though they will inevitably miss the full weight of the ensemble's history. For those viewers, starting from Season 1 and working forward remains the richer option. Anyone who enjoyed The Pitt and wants a medical show operating in a completely different emotional register will find this a worthwhile companion piece.

Viewers likely to find the revival frustrating are those hoping for John C. McGinley's full return, those for whom the self-aware humor-with-caveats approach will feel like the show refusing to commit to its own identity, or those who require a revival to match its source material on every level before declaring it a success. By the imperfect standards of the genre, however, Scrubs Season 10 clears the bar with considerable room to spare. It is warm, frequently funny, occasionally moving, and anchored by performances from its two leads that remind you why this bromance was worth preserving. The song is still Superman. The heart is still there. That is more than most revivals ever manage.

Watch or Pass: WATCH

Premieres February 25, 2026 on ABC | Streams next day on Hulu | 9 Episodes | Genre: Comedy, Drama, Medical