Resuscitation: A Q&A with the Creator of Scrubs

So how do you go about establishing such a cult following when your network doesn’t back you?

There’s only a couple ways to survive in TV. You either have to be a giant hit out of the gate, like Lost—something that grabs the public zeitgeist and the attention of everyone. And if you have that, you’re super lucky. Otherwise, the only way to survive is if you come out of the gate with people that are really loyal to you, you have to be loyal to them. And that means to feed them content, you know, make the show accessible to them in ways that normal shows are not. You know, we had the character Turk change his cell phone number and we had the cast and crew answer that cell phone number for three years. I turn the phone on now and it still rings every five minutes because the episode is on in syndication. Don’t print the number because I’ll have to answer another 9,000 calls.

Scrubs is one of the few (if only) hospital shows the medical community has truly embraced as realistic, which is somewhat ironic given all its fantastical tendencies.

Well, Zach Braff’s character is based on my friend John Doris. And my friend, the real JD, and all of his buddies aren’t hyper-serious, dramatic people, they’re really funny, they joke around and like to laugh. For whatever reason, the medical community really embraced us, shockingly, as the most realistic medical show—not because of all the silly stuff we do, but because we acknowledge that 90 percent of being a doctor is trying to stay positive, getting through it by joking around, waiting around, down time, diagnosing, scut work. But the weirdest thing about this show is that every cast member or writer has spoken at some medical school graduation. At the Surgeon’s College in Ireland, they just flew the guy who plays The Todd over there to talk, which is insane.

Eight seasons later, any regrets?

When the show works, it walks this really weird fine line between drama and comedy. When it fails, those episodes are really bad because we try to switch too quickly. I especially like the second episode of this year, because we have really goofy character stuff and then something will switch on a dime and it’ll suddenly, hopefully, be a little heartbreaking or emotional and that’s when I like the show the most. So I think we’re going to go out—not on top, because we’ve never been there, business-wise, but creatively we’re going out in a big, very cool way.

Are any of the other characters based on real people?

There is a real Dr. Cox, it’s based on my wife’s dad, who’s an incredibly scary surgeon at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. He loves that everyone thinks he was a great doctor who cared about his patients, but that everyone was scared silly of him. Turk is also based on an actual surgeon, who helped me out on the pilot. John Doris is still our medical adviser. On set everyone calls him “Real.” His wife is partly Elliot, too; he married a physician he went to med school with, and she’s a doctor out in L.A., as well.

Does that mean JD and Elliot will finally end up together?

I always pledged that the end of the show won’t be “will they or won’t they,” because it’s an ensemble show. But there was no way around addressing it, so the one teaser I will offer is that we address it early, when people don’t expect it, and then we don’t base the year around it. I never wanted to write the show like that, because I didn’t want it to be like Sam and Diane [from Cheers]. But those two [Zach Braff and Sarah Chalke] do have such chemistry in real life that people became invested in them, and a lot of people—including my wife and Zach and Sarah—wanted them to end up together, so I was sort of trapped in what I wanted to do. I stumbled on a way to make us all happy—me that didn’t want them to be together and then those guys that did.

The Janitor gets married in the Bahamas—that’s a good teaser!