TV review

No calming bedside manner can get around the cold, hard truth: There is little life to be found in the 10th season of “Scrubs.” An occasionally funny yet mostly forced reboot of the excellent 2000s medical sitcom that ran for eight seasons (let’s all continue to pretend the ninth pseudo-spinoff season didn’t happen), it halfheartedly attempts to play around with how much time has passed. Only, instead of bringing the same self-effacing humor and sharp joke-a-minute pacing that defined the show decades ago, this reboot is trapped in the shadow of its better days. It’s like an adult going to a college party: silly, though mostly just sad. 

Lead Zach Braff has shown he can merge the silly with the sad into a charming enough comedic cocktail. His uneven 2004 romantic dramedy “Garden State” remains an effectively earnest and emotional look at the way a certain generation of people became stuck in their pasts. The unfortunate thing is that Braff himself has increasingly seemed like he, too, is stuck in his past; his recent film efforts, the wearisome “Wish I Was Here” and the abysmal “A Good Person,” are merely sad imitations of his more impactful work.

Braff reheating the leftovers of his beloved “Scrubs,” with his dorky man-child J.D. still at the center, plays like an extension of what seems like a creative midlife crisis. His character still loves his appletinis, but his show just leaves a sad, sour taste in the mouth.

Picking up with J.D. returning to Sacred Heart, the teaching hospital where he worked years prior though has not been to in some time, “Scrubs” awkwardly attempts to settle back into familiar rhythms. It speeds through significant updates with all of the show’s main characters (Donald Faison’s Turk, Sarah Chalke’s Elliot, Judy Reyes’ Carla) while introducing us to a scattering of underdeveloped new ones.

Most of the show lives in the shadow of J.D. returning to his past while taking on a new role, one that Braff lacks the comedic range to ever live up to. It’s so centered on him trying that it leaves a shallow sense of how the medical field and those in it have changed beyond many eye-rolling asides about how the youths are too sensitive now. So-so jokes about new technology reshaping the hospital and sudden relationship drama never feel properly set up or paid off. Instead, “Scrubs” makes cloying attempts to bridge generational gaps that are more painfully saccharine than they’re ever incisively funny or emotionally potent. 

But surely “Scrubs” remains adept at breaking the fourth wall through self-aware jokes and fantasy sequences, right? Not really. In the course of its first four episodes, the stiff season is strangely grounded and the fantasy sequences, a standout of the original series, feel like an afterthought. Instead of “Scrubs” skewering the tropes of other medical shows, which the original did with razor-sharp comedic wit by taking shots at everything from “House” to “Grey’s Anatomy,” this incarnation plays it oddly safe. It leans into the standard beats and formal structure of these types of shows rather than poke fun at them. Where the original had a whole host of clever sight gags and a greater visual texture, this reboot is inescapably flat. It looks and feels just like the thing “Scrubs” was once trying to have a go at. 

There are some welcome additions — the great former “Saturday Night Live” star Vanessa Bayer steals every scene she gets as a chaotic hospital admin — though the rest of the new cast rarely get any moments to shine.

“Scrubs” was the series that launched Braff’s career, and it’s easy to see why when you look back on any of its episodes. The show had a genuine sense of unpredictable fun to it, where this reboot and Braff remain stuck trying to reclaim their glory days or, at one low point, hopelessly pander via a bizarre cameo of one of the most unfunny “comedians” out there today.

Rather than inject this new incarnation of “Scrubs” with something approaching new life, it gives the game away, revealing how it’s run out of ideas. No matter how much this lifeless reboot tries to re-create the rhythms of its past, it never finds a comedic pulse.