Scrubs Is Back Because Nobody In Hollywood Has A New Idea

They brought back Scrubs. I want you to sit with that. A show that ended, came back, ended again, and has now — in the year of our Lord 2026 — been resurrected a third time, like a cat that the neighborhood keeps running over and the neighborhood keeps bringing inside. Zach Braff is back. Donald Faison is back. They are scrubbing in, together, for the first time in a long time, per the official logline, which reads like it was written by a guy in a Patagonia vest who just got off a Zoom with legal. Hollywood has no ideas. None. Zero. The writers' rooms are just four people and a whiteboard that says WHAT IF BUT AGAIN. And the executives love it, because the executives don't watch television. The executives watch spreadsheets. And the spreadsheet says: people liked Scrubs once, ergo, they will like Scrubs twice. The spreadsheet has never been wrong, except for all the times it has been wrong, which is most of them.

Scrubs (Hulu) — Tuesday

Here it is. The reboot. Bill Lawrence, who also made Ted Lasso — a show about how it's okay to be nice, for people who need to be told that — has returned to Sacred Heart with Braff, Faison, and Sarah Chalke. The premise, near as I can tell, is that J.D. and Turk are older now and medicine has changed. Medicine has changed! You don't say. Medicine in 2001 was a guy in a white coat and a Palm Pilot. Medicine in 2026 is an app that tells you you have three diseases and then tries to sell you a weighted blanket. Early reviews are warm, the TMDb rating is 8.1, people are crying about the theme song. Fine. I'll allow it. If you need to feel something about the passage of time and your own slow medical decline, this is your show.

DTF St. Louis (HBO Max) — Sunday

The title is DTF St. Louis. That's what they went with. Jason Bateman, David Harbour, Linda Cardellini, Richard Jenkins — an actual murderers' row of actors — in a Steven Conrad show about a middle-aged love triangle that ends in a corpse. Conrad made Patriot, which was a genuinely great show nobody watched, so naturally HBO — sorry, Max, sorry, HBO Max, they keep changing it, I can't keep up, next month it'll be called Warner and then the month after that it'll be called The Tube — gave him another swing at it. The title is a 2012 Tinder joke. The show might be great. Everyone in it is terrific. But 5.9 on TMDb out of forty-three votes is not a warm opening. We'll see. I'm rooting for it out of spite.

The Pitt, Season 3 (HBO Max)

Third season of the Noah Wyle show where he's basically playing Dr. Carter again but they changed his name and put him in Pittsburgh and this time the hospital is even more on fire. Rated 8.7. People love it. It's ER for people who have given up. Which is most of us. I watch it while I eat dinner and I feel seen and also mildly nauseated, which is the correct response to any show set in an American emergency room in 2026.

Grey's Anatomy, Season 23 (Netflix)

Twenty-three seasons. Let me repeat that. Twenty. Three. Seasons. That is not a television show, that is a geological formation. Ellen Pompeo is still there. Chandra Wilson is still there. Everyone else has either died, left, come back, died again, or become a shadow. If you're still with Grey's, God bless you, you're a lifer, and I respect the commitment. I couldn't do it. I don't have the stamina.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Season 2 (Apple TV+)

The Godzilla show where Kurt Russell and his son Wyatt play the same guy at different ages, which is the single funniest piece of casting of the last five years. Second season is here. It's a handsomely made show that exists so Apple can remind you it has a streaming service. Apple TV+ is still run like an art project by a trillion-dollar company that doesn't really need it to work, which is why the shows are weirdly good and nobody watches them.

The Law & Order Industrial Complex (Peacock)

Both SVU (season 27) and the mothership Law & Order (season 25) are back. Dick Wolf has now been making these shows longer than some of my friends have been alive. At this point Law & Order isn't a television franchise, it's a public utility. You turn on the TV, it's on. You turn off the TV, it's on. It's in the walls.

Anime Corner

Big week. Jujutsu Kaisen's new season rolls on at 8.6. Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, which is somehow the highest-rated show on this entire list at 8.8, is in new episodes — it's a gentle elf wizard drama about grief and time and if that sounds boring to you, you're wrong, it's one of the best things on television. Then there's BAKI-DOU: The Invincible Samurai on Netflix, where Baki fights a resurrected Miyamoto Musashi, which is, I will concede, a hell of a pitch.

Also Out There

The Rookie, season 8 on Hulu — Nathan Fillion still arresting people politely. Crap Happens on Netflix is a German comedy about a rapper who discovers he has a teenage son at his mother's funeral, which is a lot of plot for one weekend. The Gray House on Prime Video is a Civil War spy drama with Mary-Louise Parker that got a 4.0 on TMDb, so skip it unless you have a specific grievance with your evening.

Movies, Briefly

Werner Herzog made a documentary called Ghost Elephants about KhoiSan trackers in Angola searching for legendary elephants through ancestral trance and ritual memory. On Hulu. On Hulu! Between a rerun of The Kardashians and a Hilary Duff movie, Werner Herzog is chasing phantom elephants through the mist. That's the streaming era in one sentence. Also: Taylor Tomlinson has a new standup special on Netflix, James McAvoy has a locked-room thriller called Pose on Prime where somebody dies in a manor — it's 77 minutes, so at least it respects your time.

Pick of the Week

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End on Netflix. I'm not joking. It's the best-rated thing in the payload, it's a quiet meditative fantasy show about an elf who outlived her friends, and if you've never watched anime in your life this is the one that makes you get it. The Pitt is a very close second. Scrubs is fine. Everything else is content.

A closing thought. The only reason Scrubs is back, the only reason Grey's is in its twenty-third season, the only reason there are two Law & Orders running simultaneously, is that the streamers have realized nobody wants anything new. They want the thing they liked before. They want it again. They want it slightly worse. And we're going to give it to them, forever, until the sun explodes or Zach Braff retires, whichever comes first. My money's on the sun.

See you next week.