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“I did not expect to have career renaissance in my mid-50s,” says Spin City, Scrubs and Cougar Town creator/co-creator Bill Lawrence, who has four series: Apple TV+’s Shrinking and Bad Monkey, an upcoming HBO comedy starring Steve Carell, as well as Jason Sudeikis’ Apple TV+ phenom Ted Lasso which has been plotting a Season 4 return.
Add to that the long-rumored reboot of his NBC/ABC medical comedy Scrubs. In Part 1 of Deadline’s interview with Lawrence, he speaks about the Season 1 finale of Bad Monkey and teased a likely second season. Here, Lawrence addresses the status of the Scrubs revival and the prospect of more Ted Lasso as well his new series with Carell and its connection to Bad Monkey.
The main obstacle for the Scrubs follow-up has been working out an agreement with Warner Bros TV, where Lawrence is under an exclusive overall deal, for him to be able to work on the reboot as Scrubs is produced by Disney’s 20th Television.
“I think it’s getting really close to being figured out, and I think in a good way,” Lawrence said. “Big chunks of the creative team behind the camera, and most of it from in front of the camera, are all super invested and excited, so very close.”
Lawrence envisions Scrubs 2.0 as a hybrid between a revival, revisiting original characters a decade and a half after the original series ended its run, and a reboot, revamping the concept with new characters.
“We’ve been talking about a lot, and I think the only real reason to do it is a combo,” Lawrence said. “A: people wanting to see what the world of medicine was like for the people they love, which is part of any successful reboot. But B: I think that show always worked because you get to see young people dropped into the world of medicine, knowing young people that go there are super idealistic and are doing it because it’s a calling. There’s no cliché ‘rich doctors playing golf’ anymore,” — that’s not what it is anymore. So I think that, no matter what it is, it would be a giant mistake not to do as a combo of those two things.”
The original cast have all said that they would be happy to come back. That includes star Zach Braff, who recently reunited with Lawrence for a guest stint on Bad Monkey, based on Carl Hiaasen’s novel, as a doctor whose involvement in a medical fraud scheme has tragic consequences.
“I wanted Zach to be in this because he’s been directing mostly lately, and I think people forget he’s a really, really good actor,” Lawrence said. “And for a while, it just tickled me for him to be playing a doctor again. I’m like, what is J.D.’s life — that’s straight from the book — what if J.D.’s life had taken a bad turn.”
The role came with a Scrubs Easter egg: the son of Braff’s character on Bad Monkey is named Sam, after the son of Judy Reyes’ Carla on the medical comedy.
Bad Monkey also features Scrubs and Cougar Town alum Bob Clendenin as well as Lawrence’s daughter Charlotte Lawrence, whose mom is Scrubs, Cougar Town and Shrinking actress Christa Miller. Lawrence dismisses social media criticism over so-called nepotism casting.
“So many people who write things about nepotism or even just whatever friendatismfriendotism? is. My personal feeling is, I’ve been saying a lot lately, if you are lucky enough to get to hire your friends or people you love and they’re talented, I think you’re crazy to not do it,” he said.
While talking about how the role of Yancy in Bad Monkey was adjusted to fit star Vince Vaughn, Lawrence recalled doing the same on Scrubs for Sarah Chalke with a fun anecdote about the pilot.
“My most horrifying moment on Scrubs still is Elliot was written based on girl I knew from Greenwich, Connecticut, cold as ice and super severe and edgy,” he said. “I think we shot one scene that was like that, and to try and help her character, there’s one scene of Scrubs in the pilot where she’s wearing really harsh black glasses to try and look edgy. We’d already shot that scene, I remember realizing, Sarah Chalke is so clumsy, she gets in her own way, she blows her hair out of her eyes all the time. And we changed the character, but that scene is still there, and gives me nightmares.”
As Deadline reported exclusively in August, Apple TV+ and Warner Bros TV have taken a major step toward a fourth season of Ted Lasso by picking up the options on several key UK cast members.
There has been little information beyond that, and Lawrence made it clear, there is only one person who should provide that.
“Jason Sudeikis, is the voice, heart, driving factor behind the show, not only professionally, but on a personal level, that’s the dude whose life gets upended and who would be making the biggest sacrifices,” he said. “The only sure bet in Hollywood is that nobody involved with Ted Lasso will ever, ever speak about it until Jason makes his decision of who he wants to talk to and what he wants to tell.”
It’s been almost three decades since then-twentysomething Lawrence landed his first series, ABC’s Spin City.
“The coolest thing for me is getting a chance to work with actors and actresses that were fantasies. If I had told you 20 years ago that I’m going to be going over to Harrison Ford’s house to talk about how to do jokes and stuff, I’d be like you’re crazy,” Lawrence said about working with the Shrinking co-lead.
One of those fantasies-turned-reality is Lawrence’s upcoming HBO college comedy starring Carell, which he is co-creating with frequent collaborator and Bad Monkey EP Matt Tarses.
“Steve Carell is such an inspiring comedic guy to me. For what I do, someone has to be able to be funny and goofy and silly and then turn on a dime, and he used to do that in The Office. That was a ludicrous character that would still make me sometimes well up at the end,” Lawrence said. “So super duper excited and definitely feeling both the pressure and the opportunity at HBO, because for writers like me, it was always the gold standard type channel. And I’m well aware that Curb’s gone and Barry’s gone, their wheelhouse comedies are not around.”
The writers room on the series starts this week, with filming likely to begin early next year.
And in another Bill Lawrence universe link, Carell’s character “is loosely based in our heads” on Bad Monkey author Carl Hiaasen, he said of himself and co-creator Tarses.
“Carl is such a self-effacing everyman, author, man of the people, real humble, and Steve is playing a very similar character that lands in the world of academia by accident,” he said.
