Zach Braff is onboard for a Scrubs sequel, but are revivals ever a good idea?

What’s your initial reaction to the news that Zach Braff is now set to reprise his role as J.D. in the revival of Scrubs?

Are you excited? Did you roll your eyes? Or are you deeply ambivalent, if such a contradiction exists.

A Scrubs revival was confirmed in December and there was always a strong possibility that some if not most of its original cast could be persuaded to return.

The medical comedy was a cultural force during its 2001 to 2010 run, especially at the start when its zany sense of humour and occasional push into farce and absurdity were fresh. At a time when there were a slate of medical dramas, Scrubs felt like nothing else around.

But it was of a specific time, and even towards the end of its nine seasons, it felt long in the tooth, as if TV culture (with the likes of Flight of the Conchords, Mad Men and Breaking Bad) was moving away from it, not with it.

Look, a Scrubs revival could be awesome, and you never want to write off something before you’ve seen it. Bill Lawrence, who created the original series, will be involved, and he has been doing some excellent work recently, including Ted Lasso, Shrinking and Bad Monkey.

So, Scrubs could evolve in the same way Lawrence has. But then, would it still be Scrubs? That’s the eternal challenge – make the show people loved in the first place, but then also make a series that’s contemporary to the moment in which it’s coming out again.

Sometimes, most of the time, the disconnect between the two is too strong and it doesn’t work.

For a while, it was all about rebooting old favourites – new versions of Hawaii 5-0, Gossip Girl, Lost in Space and MacGyver – but now the nostalgia is multi-layered, now it needs the original cast members to be involved.

Ask yourself this: Do you really want to know what happened to the characters you used to hang out with? Do you really want to know what happened to J.D., Turk, Elliot, Carla and Dr Cox?

Chances are, their lives are ordinary and nothing a revival will write will match any version you imagined for yourself, if you did at all. Are you really interested in how J.D., now with at least two teenage kids, is juggling parenting and work or if he’s still married to Elliot?

Or what about Cher Horowitz, our favourite Clueless teenager? Alicia Silverstone is slated to reprise the role in an upcoming TV sequel to the 1995 movie.

Clueless is iconic and a lot of that is because of its influence on western youth culture in the mid-1990s when everyone started throwing out whatevers and phat, dressed in tartan miniskirts and made their own fluffy pens.

It was so specific to its era, not because it belonged to it, but because it shaped it. Could it do that again? Unlikely, especially given how fractured culture is in 2025. It will never be able to match its former relevance, so it becomes a footnote to own its lore.

Also, what is a 46-year-old Cher doing? Is she on the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, getting into beefs with a shoe entrepreneur? Is she having a mid-life crisis after three divorces and making herself over again?

Or is she working for the UN, bettering people all over the world with her well-intentioned ideals?

Is there a version of forty-something Cher that long-time fans of Amy Heckerling’s movie would accept? Or would you rather remember the character as she was, forever in that moment.

No matter if you want it or not, whether your initial excitement turned to scepticism or vice versa, we’re about to get a lot of these revivals with the original stars attached.

Malcolm in the Middle is coming back for a four-episode special with all the original cast, except for the actor who played the youngest brother, Dewey, because he’s now a regular person and no longer in the business. Is it still even possible to see Bryan Cranston in the same role after we’ve seen him embody so many other characters in the time since?

The Happy Gilmore sequel lands in July and last year we had Eddie Murphy playing Axel Foley again.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is in development on a pilot with Sarah Michelle Gellar picking up the stake again to dust the evil undead. There’s a new slayer in the mix, to be played by Star Wars: Skeleton Crew’s Ryan Kiera Armstrong, as part of the new generation of demon hunters.

There’s certainly a curiosity factor. Buffy, the character, was never supposed to live more than a few years in a job with a short lifespan (in fact, she died twice during the run of the show) so the idea of a battle-hardened slayer now almost 30 years into her gig would be rich narrative territory.

But anyone who’s been fighting at the front of a war with the undead for that long is going to be pretty depressing to be around. So, what do you prioritise? The quippy Californian hero we loved or the realism of a tired soldier. Neither feel right.

We’ve seen how it can go wrong. Dexter hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory since reviving the character. What was then subversive (a serial killer as the hero!) is now run-of-the-mill, and the legacy loses its impact.

Sex and the City did almost everything wrong with And Just Like That. The characters didn’t feel true to themselves, the hijinks became more frivolous and it failed to really evolve with a version of New York City that could actually exist.

Those characters were groundbreaking for the time, but if they stay the same when the world has moved on, it’s just sad.

When it has worked, most notably Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy and the earlier seasons of Cobra Kai, it’s because those projects were grounded in not the world of the originals but in the now.

You can always call back or plant a few Easter eggs as harmless fan service, but revivals have to be about the present, and some writers really struggle with separating their creations from the original context.

Most things are better left in the past, as if they’re tableaux inside a snowglobe, preserved in a moment.