zachbraff

On the last day of the TCA press tour, as the stars of ABC were yukking it up at a crowded party at the Langham Huntington in Pasadena, Bill Lawrence and I were out in the courtyard talking about what the new season of Scrubs -- or as I'm calling it, Scrubs 2.0 -- is going to look like.

Essentially, it's going to be like a medical version of The Paper Chase, with Turk and Cox being the professors. We'll be following the lives of young medical students who will shuttle back and forth between classes and their rotations at the "new" Sacred Heart, which is being rebuilt on the med school's campus. While in the hospital, they'll run into a lot of the characters from Scrubs 1.0, including J.D., as Zach Braff is scheduled to be in the first six episodes.

It all sounds a bit confusing, so I'll let Bill lay it out for you folks. An edited transcript is after the jump. The full transcript can be found here. And I'll be getting on the phone with Bill to talk Cougar Town sometime next week, so stay tuned. Oh, and at the end of the interview, we talk about the role Bill's wife, Christa Miller, had on Scrubs that didn't involve any acting.

As it's been speculated in the last months, Scrubs will not be the same when entering its ninth season. We know that Zach Braff and Sarah Chalke have both inked deals to appear in only six episodes and that, since Donald Faison's pilot wasn't picked up, rumors were going around that Scrubs 2.0 could revolve around Turk and medical school.

Confirmation has finally arrived and the show will indeed go through an extreme makeover that will take the action from the hospital to medical school.

Slight spoilers coming up!

What will the upcoming ninth season of Scrubs look like? Only ABC and show creator Bill Lawrence know the answer to that question.

During the network's recent upfront presentation, ABC Entertainment president Steve McPherson said Lawrence was playing with two possible scenarios for the show, one of which is "a complete rethinking" and the other a simple continuation of the format with a new cast.

Either way, things will be different. And with star Zach Braff signed on for only six episodes next season and Sarah Chalke not looking to return full-time, it seems like this might be Donald Faison's time to shine. Or bomb terribly. It could go either way, really.

It looks like we're creeping closer and closer to ABC bringing Scrubs back for a ninth season. Now comes word that Zach Braff and Sarah Chalke have both inked deals to appear in six episodes, most likely at the beginning of the season to help set up the new J.D.-less Sacred Heart. Creator Bill Lawrence said that he responded well to Eliza Coupe's crotchety Denise (the intern with no bedside manner). He didn't seem to say much about the rest of the cast, but I think this could work.

Imagine transitioning Scrubs fully into a teaching hospital show. Instead of following one batch of interns, you can bring in a new batch every year or so. We can keep some of the good ones from prior classes, like Denise, but other than that it's new interns and we focus on the "teaching" staff, which would now include Turk. Donald Faison, Neil Flynn and John C. McGinley are on board for a full season, so that direction could definitely work. It would be a different kind of show, but if Lawrence stays involved it can still be a very funny show.

(S08E18) Since I have no idea whether this is truly the end for Scrubs or not, I hedged my bets on the season vs. series finale label. I will say this, though: If this is indeed the end for the folks at Sacred Heart, they couldn't have gone out any better than they did tonight.

Tonight's finale hit on all the same themes that have carried the show for eight years: people grow and change, but life at the hospital just keeps going. Someone leaves, someone dies, someone makes a life-changing decision, and life keeps going. "It's just a day," as Cox almost-convincingly said during one of J.D.'s attempts at getting an emotional goodbye from his mentor. He's right. And as Sacred Heart didn't make such a big deal out of J.D.'s departure, neither did the show. He didn't even turn to look back at the ICU as he turned the lights off. Well, he did, but I'll talk about that after the jump...

(S08E17) After the roll the show's been on lately, it was kind of weird to see Scrubs hit a bit of a creative pothole right before the series/season/show-as-we-know-it finale. Lots of personal character movement happened during this one, but the laughs were few and far between. And, despite the upheavals, we're still dealing with some of the interns, signifying life goes on at Sacred Heart. It was just a weird mix, and it made for a decent but not great episode.

(Update: Bill Lawrence himself responds to my plea in the comments.)

Oy, not again.

First we heard, straight from Bill Lawrence's mouth, that Scrubs could get a ninth season. Then we heard it was definitely done at the end of this current eighth season. Now, The Hollywood Reporter is hearing that talks to renew the show are back on, with Lawrence and company trying to figure out how to bring back most of the cast, at least in a recurring fashion.

They have to be recurring, since Zach Braff has vowed that he's done with the show, and Neil Flynn, John C. McGinley, and Donald Faison are all attached to new pilots, with Scrubs being a second option in case they're not picked up. Heck, even Lawrence is busy on the new Courteney Cox show Cougar Town.

I'm here, as one of the show's biggest fans, to beg ABC and Lawrence to let the show die. Please. It's the best thing they can do for it.

J.D. and Turk's "guy love" may live on for at least one more year.

ABC is in talks to renew 'Scrubs' for a ninth season, and some or all of the original cast may be back -- yes, that includes Zach Braff.

In other news, 'Chuck' fans are encouraged to eat $5 Subway footlongs in order to save the show from cancellation, Lisa Rinna decides that she actually doesn't want a role on the new 'Melrose Place,' and 'Harper's Island' gets relocated to the graveyard known as Saturday night.

See more of today's TV headlines, casting scoops and premiere dates after the jump.

(S08E16) We're in the homestretch now, folks. Things are advancing in the world of Sacred Heart. And when characters who've been living more or less the same lives for eight years all of a sudden get new jobs, urges to return to old ones, or pangs to move away, you know a finale is a-comin'.

It's kind of too bad, since this season has been pretty satisfying for the most part. As Bill Lawrence and his crew have gotten down to basics, the show has gotten funnier, more personal, and more dramatic (when drama is called for). In fact, this has probably been the best season since season four, and it's good to see that the show still has hilarious episodes like this one still in them.

(S08E15) There's a reason why you don't see too many sitcoms do two-parters or one-hour episodes more than once every couple of years; the comedy momentum set in the first half-hour usually doesn't continue during the second. Although the second part of Scrubs' Bahamas adventure was still pretty good, it definitely wasn't as funny as last week's first part.

But two interesting things came out of this episode, one character-based and the other actor-based. And, even though I had an inkling the latter was coming, it still surprised me when I saw it. More after the jump.

(S08E14) As Homer Simpson might say, "The Scrubs are going to the Bahamas!"

For eight years, Scrubs hasn't ventured all that much away from Sacred Heart and it's surrounding environs. There was an RV-based road trip to Washington so J.D. can see Kim, and J.D. somehow ended up in Las Vegas during an extended fantasy/reality sequence. But other than that, the gang's lives have been confined to the claustrophobic world of the hospital.

But Bill Lawrence must have figured, what the heck, it's the last season, so he shipped everyone down to the Bahamas for a well-deserved location shoot in paradise. And, I've got to tell you, part one is the funniest episode of the season (I've seen part two, and it ain't bad either). I'll tell you why after the jump.

(S08E13) I always think that a J.D.-less episode of Scrubs would be refreshing, mainly because it's always good to get out of his head. But it's one thing to not have Zach Braff around; it's completely another when no one in the main cast but Donald Faison and Sarah Chalke is on the call sheet for the week. That's the situation we got this week, and, man, was this episode boring.

Not that Chalke and Faison didn't carry their weight in this one; jeez, just watching them do the HIV (pronounced "Hivee" by Turk) dance alone justified their presence. But in handing much of the episode over to the interns, we can see that -- for the most part -- they just can't carry the load on their own.

(S08E12) It's always fun when Scrubs takes its annual trip outside of J.D.'s head and lets us know what some of the other people around Sacred Heart are thinking. Considering we've heard from just about everyone else, it was nice to give the interns a chance in the spotlight. And, after last week's heartfelt but mostly laugh-free episode, it was good to see the show come back to the funny standard it had set for itself this year.

I'm starting to realize that if Bill Lawrence had actually taken the plunge and given us a spin-off featuring the interns, the character whose head we'd be in would be Denise / Jo. Yes, Jo's caustic. Yes, she's got about as much sympathy as a rock. But she seems to be the most well-developed character of all the interns, the one whose history we already know a little about and the one we know is ripe to go through a transformation over time. It doesn't hurt that Eliza Coupe a) does such a great job and b) is so darn nice to look at...

(S08E11) Ah, the wonders of corporate synergy. ABC has produced Scrubs since day one, but since it aired for seven years on NBC, an episode like tonight's would have probably never gotten made. Actually, it would have gotten made, but SportsCenter would only be referenced, not shown in extended sequences airing on the break room TV. And we wouldn't have gotten an opportunity to see extended shots of Hannah Storm wearing her sexy outfits (she's in her late 40s, a mom, and a respected journalist, but she still rocks those tiny dresses, doesn't she?).

This was an odd episode. Very light in tone, without a lot of guffawable moments. But the dramatic moments were spot on, and the nice easy-going vibe of the episode really reminded me of ones I used to see very early in the show's run. I mean first-season early.