SCRUBS Creator Explains How the Series Being Named "Most Realistic Medical Show of All Time" Has Impacted Him
Bill Lawrence had brought us some of the greatest TV series in the last few decades, including Spin City, Shrinking, Ted Lasso, and Scrubs. These shows are all full of heart and a comedic message of family and friendship. But not only was Scrubs a sweet and hilarious sitcom, it turns out that the medical part of the show was actually completely accurate.
During a recent interview on the podcast Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard (via CinemaBlend), the writer and producer looked back on his Scrubs years. When Shepard brought up how Lawrence and the Scrubs team won a Peabody Award, Lawrence 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.”
Among the long list of medical shows to air over the decades, from St. Elsewhere to ER the current favorite, Grey’s Anatomy, Scrubs is usually referred to as the comedy, and as such, it would be fair to assume the show didn’t worry as much about depicting the workings of a hospital as accurately as its dramatic counterparts. 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 opinion. 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.”
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. Lawrence said of his friend:
“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.”
It’s very cool that the show was so realistic regarding the medical stories it told alongside the personal and comedic elements that were already so well done. Scrubs is streaming on Hulu for fans to rewatch, as well as newbies to check out.