Donald Faison, Sarah Chalke and Judy Reyes are back in their roles as Turk, Elliot and Carla in the Scrubs revival.Jeff Weddell/The Associated Press
When Scrubs first aired in 2001, its identity was tied to its setting as much as to its characters. The cast and crew filmed inside a decommissioned hospital in Los Angeles, where the show’s cramped corridors and faded patient rooms gave Sacred Heart its texture and emotional credibility. More than two decades later, the series is back and looks almost exactly the same. Except this time, the show is filming in Canada.
In Vancouver, specifically, where the crew rebuilt the hospital from scratch inside sprawling sound stages. For Vancouver native Sarah Chalke, who played Dr. Elliot Reid across eight seasons, and returned for the role in a ninth season that featured a new main cast, stepping back into that environment – but this time, in her hometown – made the experience feel both familiar and strange.
“It was really trippy,” Chalke says. “It was quite unlike anything else that I’ve gotten to do in my career. They built 30,000 square feet of sound stages, exactly the same. We all thought it would be kind of the same. But it was exactly the same, like to a T.”
Sarah Chalke attends a red-carpet event for Season 10 of the television series Scrubs in Los Angeles, Calif., on Monday. Chalke first took on the role of Elliot Reid at 24.Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
From the beginning, the goal wasn’t to reinvent Scrubs. It was to build on what made it work in the first place, even as the production itself moved thousands of kilometres away.
Scrubs acknowledges the passage of time within and outside the story. The actors aren’t recreating old performances, but returning to the people they once knew intimately. For Chalke, it was a little like returning to high school after growing up.
Chalke was 24 years old when she first brought Elliot to life. Back then, Scrubs was her first major job, but now she has decades of experience to pull from. She says time allowed her to improve her craft and bring new skills to the job, and Elliot now is emotionally richer because of it.
“You just live life, and you have more life experience, and you have more that you can draw from,” she says. “I think you bring so much of yourself and your life into it.”
Chalke says continuity behind the scenes eased the transition back to screen. Many of the directors who worked on the original series returned, along with key creative collaborators. Original showrunner Bill Lawrence, who helped establish the distinctive rhythm of the series, however, was not available to oversee the action. Back then, he used to write in the same abandoned hospital where the series shot, and he would come to the set before every rehearsal and rewrite jokes on the fly.
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“He’ll have you laughing the one second, and then it’s like a gut punch the next,” Chalke says of her former boss.
This time around, the producer was busy with his other series, such as Ted Lasso, Shrinking, Bad Monkey and the coming HBO comedy Rooster starring Steve Carell. So he was as involved as he could be, but passed showrunning duties to Aseem Batra, who wrote and produced on the original series.
“One of the things that I love the most about Scrubs is that no two days are ever the same,” Chalke says. “You have that balance of comedy and real life-and-death situations.”
That upbeat strategy doesn’t just make people laugh. Scrubs has continued to play a role in people’s lives long after it went off the air. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chalke says she heard directly from medical workers who turned to the series for comfort.
“We heard from a ton of doctors during the pandemic that it was helping get them through,” she says. “That’s always been one of my favourite parts about television, that it can offer comfort or laughter or an escape in tough times.”
Filming in Vancouver was just a bonus. She never anticipated that one of her defining projects would eventually relocate to her hometown.
“It was about a year ago now that I got a phone call saying it might shoot in Vancouver, and I was kind of floored,” she says. “It was pretty wild to drive to work every day on Scrubs from home.”
That shift reflects broader changes in television production, where global infrastructure now allows legacy series to return in ways that weren’t possible when they first aired. Vancouver has long served as a stand-in for American cities, but in this case, it isn’t doubling for somewhere else but hosting a show as it rebuilds.
“I think we all knew Scrubs was something special. To get to recapture all of those factors again, it feels really, really lucky,” Chalke says. “The revival really is bringing light. Everybody really needs to laugh right now, and I really hope the show brings that to people.”
The two-episode series premiere of the Scrubs revival airs Feb. 25 on CTV, and streams the next day on Disney+ and Crave.