'Scrubs' Greatest Episodes To Watch Before Season 2, According to the Cast

Image via ABC Published Sep 25, 2026, 10:01 AM EDT Greer Riddell is a London-based culture journalist and critic writing on film, television, audience behaviour, and the wider media industry. She is a Writer and Social Media Coordinator at Collider and TV Editor at FILMHOUNDS. Her recent collaborations include Netflix, Warner Bros., DC Studios, Hulu, and Disney+, producing features on titles including Saturday Night Live UK, Severance, Sitcoms, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Stranger Things. Her recent reviews include Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85’, Scrubs Season 10, and The Boroughs. Her work has also included coverage of UK film festivals and features published in Film Stories Magazine. Sign in to your Collider account With the second season of the Scrubs revival on its way, there's no better time to head back to Sacred Heart and revisit some of the episodes that made the series endure. Who better to guide the rewatch than the people who actually lived it? Zach Braff, Sarah Chalke and Donald Faison share with Collider their picks for the episodes fans should return to ahead of the new season dropping on Disney+ — and you're in for a roller-coaster of emotion. Braff recommends early, expository episodes from Season 1, while Faison points to the patient storylines that still hit hard today — think Brendan Fraser's Ben and Nicole Sullivan's Jill Tracy. Chalke shares the two-part finale as essential viewing, while all three look back at the moments when Scrubs turned the conventions of a sitcom on their head. So get ready to dive back into musicals, fantasy sequences, heartbreaking human stories and, of course, the Janitor's (Neil Flynn) practical jokes. "My First Day" Season 1, Episode 1 Image via NBC There's no better place to start than the beginning. Airing on October 2, 2001, "My First Day" introduces us to J.D., Turk and Elliot as they start their internships at Sacred Heart, where they meet Nurse Carla Espinosa (Judy Reyes), Dr. Perry Cox (John C. McGinley) and Chief of Medicine Dr. Robert Kelso (Ken Jenkins). Fresh out of medical school, John "J.D." Dorian arrives at the hospital ready to become a doctor, only to be hit with a series of complicated requests from a nurse and the immediate realization that, despite all those years of schooling, he doesn't "know jack." It's also the episode that begins J.D. 's feud with The Janitor — thanks to a lost penny. That moment becomes the main event that sets The Janitor on a mission to pick on J.D. that isn't resolved until the end of Season 8. According to the Fake Doctors, Real Friends podcast with Braff and Faison, Neil Flynn wasn't originally intended to be a regular on the show, but he delivered his lines so well and improvised "I'm watching you" in the pilot so effectively that he was made a regular. Although in Season 1 he was only allowed to speak to J.D., because if the show had been canceled, The Janitor would have turned out to be a figment of J.D.'s imagination. "My Old Lady" Season 1, Episode 4 Image via NBC Airing on October 16, 2001, the fourth episode of Scrubs' first season follows J.D., Turk and Elliot as they each take on a patient and are forced to confront for the first time that sometimes there is nothing they can do to save them. J.D.'s 74-year-old patient, Mrs. Tanner (Kathryn Joosten), needs dialysis to prolong her life, and J.D. tries to convince her to start the treatment. Turk becomes friends with David Morrison (Travis Wester) after they watch a football game together, before having to perform surgery on him, while Elliot's patient, Mrs. Guerrero (Esther Mercado), only speaks Spanish, prompting her to learn the language from Carla so she can communicate. J.D. points out in his internal monologue that, statistically, one in three patients admitted to Sacred Heart will die, but sometimes life can be crueler than the statistics suggest. Mrs. Tanner passes away peacefully, David dies on the operating table, and Elliot's patient's new treatment doesn't work. J.D. comes to realize that if a doctor can't save their patient, the best they can hope for is to learn from the experience. Turk begins making an effort to get to know his patients, Elliot becomes more self-confident, and J.D. takes the time to relax and think about everything he still wants to do with his life. This is also the first time J.D. has seen the Grim Reaper in his fantasies. Here they play Connect 4 with the Grim Reaper, winning diagonally — "pretty sneaky." "My Occurrence" Season 1, Episode 22 Image via NBC If there's one early Scrubs episode that demonstrates just how effectively the show could hide a devastating story underneath its silliness, it's "My Occurrence." Airing on May 7, 2002, the 22nd episode of Season 1 introduces J.D. to Dr. Cox's best friend and Jordan Sullivan's (Christa Miller) brother, Ben Sullivan (Brendan Fraser), a charming photographer who quickly becomes one of the most memorable people to walk into Sacred Heart. J.D. immediately likes Ben and wants to spend time with him and Dr. Cox, although he has trouble accepting the bad news that is eventually waiting for him. After an injury goes on bleeding for longer than it should, Ben is diagnosed with leukemia. The entire second half of the episode is actually a fantasy, beginning when J.D. walks into Ben's room and cannot tell Cox the bad news. J.D. is unable to come to terms with Ben having leukemia, but the illusion falls apart when Ben asks for a posed photograph with the whole group as previously in the episode he says he hates posed photos. "My Occurrence" is one of the first examples of Scrubs using fantasy away from joke sequences, and it does it again with more devastating consequences in Season 3. "My Screw Up" Season 3, Episode 14 Image via NBC "My Screw Up" is Brendan Fraser's second outing in Scrubs and includes the show's most devastating twist. In Season 3, Ben Sullivan returns to Sacred Heart, but it soon becomes clear that he hasn't had any follow-up visits to check on his cancer for the past two years. Ben's successful chemotherapy treatments have put his cancer into remission, after which he embarked on a two-year worldwide sightseeing trip called the "World Leukemia Tour." Dr. Cox is furious that his best friend has been out of contact for so long and hasn't seen a doctor to check whether his illness has returned so sends him for an examination. There is plenty of other chaos going on at the same time — it's Jack Cox's (Andrew Miller) first birthday, and Jordan has organized a first-birthday party for their son, so Cox leaves to work on the festivities. When he returns, J.D. regretfully tells him that a patient has died, and an angry, devastated Cox blames J.D. for the death. The episode then appears to follow Cox and Ben as they walk through a park, presumably on their way to Jack's birthday party, only for the park to be revealed as a cemetery: Cox and J.D. are actually attending Ben's funeral. "My Screw Up" is tied with "My Lunch" as the highest-ranked Scrubs episode on IMDb, with a rating of 9.8, and it received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. On the special features of the Season 3 DVD, Bill Lawrence reveals that the episode was written as a homage to The Sixth Sense. Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey's Anatomy · House · Scrubs Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong. 🚨The Pitt 🏥ER 💉Grey's 🔬House 🩺Scrubs FIND YOUR HOSPITAL → 01 A critical patient comes through the door. What's your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are. AStay completely present — block everything else out and work through it step by step, right now. BTriage fast and delegate — get the right people on the right problems immediately. CTrust my gut and move — I work best when I stop overthinking and just act. DAsk the question everyone else is ignoring — what's the thing that doesn't fit? ETake a breath, make a joke to cut the tension, and then get to work — panic helps no one. NEXT QUESTION → 02 Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you'd give in an interview. ABecause I wanted to be where it matters most — right at the edge, when someone's life is actually on the line. BBecause I wanted to help people — genuinely, one patient at a time, in a system that makes it hard. CBecause I was drawn to the intensity of it — the stakes, the drama, the feeling of being fully alive. DBecause medicine is the most interesting puzzle there is — and I needed a problem worth solving. EBecause I wanted to make a difference — and also, honestly, I didn't know what else to do with my life. NEXT QUESTION → 03 What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are. ACompetence and calm — I need people who don't fall apart when things get bad. BTrust and reliability — I want to know that when I pass something off, it's handled. CConnection — I want colleagues who become family, even if that gets complicated. DIntelligence and the willingness to be challenged — I have no interest in people who just agree with me. EFriendship — people I actually like spending twelve hours a day with, because those hours are going to happen either way. NEXT QUESTION → 04 You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who's worked a long shift has had to answer this question. AI carry it. All of it. I don't look for ways to put it down — that weight is part of doing this work honestly. BI process it and move — you have to, or the next patient suffers for the one you just lost. CI feel it deeply and lean on the people around me — I don't think you're supposed to handle that alone. DI go back over every decision — not to punish myself, but because I need to understand what I missed. EI grieve it genuinely, find some way to laugh about something unrelated, and try to be kind to myself — imperfectly. NEXT QUESTION → 05 How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image. AIntense and completely present — no small talk during a shift, but exactly who you want there. BSteady and dependable — not the flashiest in the room but never the one who drops something. CPassionate and occasionally chaotic — brilliant on the hard cases, prone to drama everywhere else. DBrilliant and difficult — right more often than anyone else, and everyone knows it, including me. EWarm and self-deprecating — not the most intimidating presence, but genuinely good at this and easy to like. NEXT QUESTION → 06 How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice. AProtocol is the floor, not the ceiling — I follow it until the patient needs something it can't provide. BI respect it — the system is broken in places, but the structure is there for a reason and I work within it. CI follow it until my instincts tell me not to — and my instincts are usually right, even when they cause problems. DRules are for people who haven't thought hard enough about when to break them. EI try to follow it and mostly do — with a few memorable exceptions that still come up in meetings. NEXT QUESTION → 07 What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What's yours? AEverything outside these walls — I've given this job my full attention and the rest of my life has gone around it. BMy idealism, mostly — I came in believing the system could be fixed and I've made a complicated peace with that. CStability — my personal life has been as chaotic as the OR, and that's not entirely a coincidence. DMy relationships — I am not easy to know, and the people who've tried to would probably agree. EMy sense of gravity — I use humour as a coping mechanism, which not everyone appreciates in a hospital. NEXT QUESTION → 08 At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you. AThe fact that it's real — that nothing else I could be doing would matter this much, right now, today. BThe patients — individual human beings who needed something and got it because I was there. CThe people I work with — I have walked through impossible things with these people and I'd do it again. DThe next unsolved case — there's always another puzzle, and I'm not done yet. EBecause despite everything — the exhaustion, the loss, the absurdity — I actually love this job. REVEAL MY HOSPITAL → Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for. The PittYou are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn't let you look away. You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics. You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it. You've made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name. Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else. ERYou are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential. You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is. You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through. You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough. ER is television about endurance. You have it. Grey's AnatomyYou came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door. You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with. Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves. You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection. It's messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way. HouseYou are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn't fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one. You're not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you'd deny it. You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong. Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they're smart enough to keep up. The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do. ScrubsYou understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time. You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field. You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that's not a flaw, it's a survival strategy. You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here. Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right. ↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ "My Last Chance" Season 4, Episode 8 Image via NBC When Collider asked which Scrubs episodes fans should revisit, Zach Braff singled out "The Heather Graham quest," where Elliot gives J.D. permission slip to sleep with Heather Graham's character Molly and he and Turk embark on a drive to find her, calling it "one of my favorite ones by far." Airing on October 12, 2004, the eighth episode of Season 4, Molly tells Elliot that she has accepted a psychiatric fellowship in Milwaukee and will be leaving the hospital, which leaves Elliot upset enough to throw her a goodbye party. Everyone eventually leaves until only Molly and J.D. remain, and they spend the rest of the evening making out. The next day, Molly tells Elliot what happened, and although Elliot insists that it doesn't bother her, she later tells J.D. that she will make him pay. Before leaving, Molly states the only way the two can be together is if he gets Elliot's permission and she does write a note. When the boys finally catch up with her, Molly reads it and hands it back before getting into the cab. Confused, J.D. unfolds the note and discovers that Elliot has actually written, "Now we're even!" "My Last Chance" is also notable behind the scenes because it was the first time Braff directed an episode of Scrubs and his first time directing for TV. Donald Faison has made the episode a recurring joke on the Fake Doctors, Real Friends podcast, due to the amount of times Braff has bought up the episode. "My Way Home" Season 5, Episode 7 Image via NBC Zach Braff also picked "The Wizard of Oz episode," adding, "I'm not just saying because I directed it!” And he has a pretty good reason to be proud of it. "My Way Home" is the seventh episode of Season 5, the 100th episode of Scrubs overall, and originally aired on NBC on January 24, 2006. The episode pays tribute to the Judy Garland musical with parallels running through the entire episode. The four main characters each search for their own version of what the characters in The Wizard of Oz want: Carla is looking for the courage to be a parent; Elliot is looking for the brains to give her endocrinology lecture; Turk is searching for a heart to be used in a transplant; and J.D. simply wants to find his way home. They even follow a yellow line painted on the hospital floor, an allusion to the Yellow Brick Road! J.D. also begins the episode listening to the band Toto, the same name as Dorothy's dog. "My Lunch" Season 5, Episode 20 Image via NBC If there's one Scrubs episode that epitomizes how the show's comedy can quickly turn into something devastating, it's "My Lunch." The Season 5 episode follows J.D. as he tries to achieve having lunch with Dr. Cox, who predictably rejects him and heads to the grocery store instead. J.D. follows him, and the two run into former patient Jill Tracy (Nicole Sullivan), who has been stood up for a date. A few days later, Jill is admitted to the hospital and dies, with everything initially pointing towards suicide by drug overdose, and J.D. feels guilty that he failed to recognize the signs. Jill's organs are donated to three of Dr. Cox's patients who desperately needed transplants. Jill's autopsy reveals that she died of rabies, meaning that all three of Dr. Cox's transplant patients have now been infected. Despite everyone's best efforts, all three patients die. J.D. tells Cox that he would have made exactly the same call but Dr. Cox completely breaks down. He tells J.D. that this patient hadn't actually been in critical need of a kidney and that the transplant could have waited another month, meaning that, in his mind, this death was entirely avoidable. He starts to leave the hospital before the end of his shift and fails to return to work again for a very long time. "My Lunch" is listed as the highest-rated Scrubs episode on IMDb, with a 9.8 rating. "My Musical" Season 6, Episode 6 Image via NBC If you want to see Scrubs completely commit to one of its strangest ideas, "My Musical" is the episode to revisit. The Season 6 episode begins when J.D. and Elliot are in the park and a woman named Patti Miller (Stephanie D'Abruzzo) faints behind them. When Patti wakes up, she discovers that everyone around her is singing, even though, in reality, they're having completely normal conversations. She is taken to the hospital, where the musical numbers continue from her perspective, and J.D. starts running tests to work out why she is experiencing them. The majority of the episode is technically a semi-fantasy because we are experiencing the world through Patti's perspective. Even the Janitor gets his own number, "The Rant Song", in which he sings about how much J.D. annoys him and how, ever since the penny-in-the-door incident in the first episode, he has wanted revenge. That makes the episode particularly significant for long-time viewers, because it marks the first time the Janitor explicitly confirms what had been suspected for years — his hatred of J.D. really does stem from that fateful penny in the door. "My Princess" Season 7, Episode 11 Image via NBC Donald Faison's recommendation of "My Princess" comes with an important warning: "That was controversial because it confused the fans." As he explained, "They thought it was a finale, and it wasn't meant to be." "My Princess" is the eleventh and final episode of Scrubs' seventh season and the last episode to air on NBC, as well as the show's 150th episode. The 2007–2008 writers' strike meant series creator Bill Lawrence never got to complete Season 7, so the episodes were rearranged. After watching "My Princess," it's easy to understand why viewers thought they were watching a genuine series finale. After a particularly bad day at the hospital, Dr. Cox goes home and discovers that he has to tell his son Jack a fairy tale, so he retells the events of his day as a medieval story set in the land of Sacred Heartia. In the fairy tale, one of the Princess's (Elliot) handmaidens, Marian, has fallen under the control of a monster, so the Princess calls upon the village idiot (J.D.) to help her. Together with the Giant (Janitor), the two-headed witch Turla (Turk and Carla) and the knight (Dr. Cox), they have to defeat the monster before it is too late. The Princess Bride influence is central to the whole episode, turning the familiar Sacred Heart characters into fairy-tale versions of themselves while allowing the real events underneath the story to remain surprisingly bleak. According to the Fake Doctors, Real Friends podcast, Christa Miller wanted an episode that her children could watch, so Bill Lawrence ordered a fairy-tale episode. "My Finale, Part 2" Season 8, Episode 19 Image via ABC Sarah Chalke recommends Collider readers revisit the series' original finale — the one in Season 8. The episode follows J.D. through his final day as an employee at Sacred Heart. He spends the day hoping to discover the Janitor's "real" name and finally find out how Dr. Cox really feels about him. When J.D. finally leaves, he starts thinking about just how many people he has encountered during his time there, including family members such as Dan Dorian (Tom Cavanagh), co-workers such as The Todd (Robert Maschio), lost loves such as Jamie Moyer/T.C.W. (Amy Smart) and patients who passed away such as Jill Tracy and Mrs. Wilk (Michael Learned). As he walks down the hospital hallway towards the exit, he sees all the people who helped turn him into the doctor he became, standing in a line to give him their sometimes very strange farewells. It's a classic J.D. fantasy, though, because when he reaches the door and turns around, he realizes none of it was real. After walking through the door one final time, J.D. sees his future projected onto the "Goodbye J.D." banner, including marrying Elliot, having another child, spending Christmas holidays with the Turks and Coxes, and eventually watching Turk’s daughter Izzy and his son Sammy get engaged. As J.D. drives away, he says, "Who's to say my fantasies won't come true, just this once?" "My Finale" is also the only hour-long episode of Scrubs, although it has been split into two parts on streaming and in syndicated reruns. The two-episode premiere of the Scrubs revival airs Wednesday, Sept. 30, at 8:00 p.m. EDT/PDT on ABC and streams the next day on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+. Scrubs Release Date February 25, 2026 Network ABC Cast Donald Faison Christopher Turk Showrunner Bill Lawrence Directors Chris Koch, Gail Mancuso, Ken Whittingham, Michael Spiller, Randall Keenan Winston, Zach Braff Writers Aaron Lee, Amy Pocha, Aseem Batra, Breanna Porter, Christopher Eddins, Mark Stegemann, Mathew Harawitz, Michael Hobert, Seth Cohen, Sophie Zucker, Tim Hobert Creator(s) Bill Lawrence, Aseem Batra, Tim Hobert Main Genre Comedy Seasons 2 Producers Kip Kroeger, Jesse Schiller Executive Producer(s) Aseem Batra, Bill Lawrence, Donald Faison, Jeff Ingold, John C. McGinley, Judy Reyes, Liza Katzer, Sarah Chalke, Tim Hobert, Zach Braff