Scrubs Season 7’s second episode, Zach Braff’s J.D. and Elizabeth Banks’ Kim welcomed the birth of their son, Sam. Viewers got to see the infant a handful of times that season and in Season 8, but it was also mentioned in the latest episode of the Scrubs revival to air on the 2026 TV schedule that he and Sarah Chalke’s Elliot had a son together. While that by itself isn’t a surprise, it does create a continuity issue with Season 9, and now showrunner Aseem Batra has clarfified what’s going on with J.D. and Elliot’s son, Ollie.
In “My Poker Face,” which can be streamed now with a Hulu subscription, J.D. mentions to Elliot, now he ex-wife, how he recently built a bunk bed for Ollie ahead of getting him the next weekend. However, Elliot was pregnant in Scrubs Season 9’s first episode, which aired towards the end of 2009. So why would J.D. be building a bunk bed for a child who’s now roughly 16 at this point? Well, Batra told TVLine that the revival is disegading that moment from Season 9, meaning that Ollie was born many years after J.D. left Sacred Heart in the Season 8 finale.
Although Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence will never badmouth Season 9, the fact is this is just the latest example of that particular season being sweeped aside Scrubs revival. Originally Season 9 was intended to be a separate spinoff show, but ABC decided to keep it branded as the main series instead. That 13-episode season was met with mixed reviews and led to the original Scrubs ending for good.
So the revival has been acting as though Scrubs truly ended with 2008’s “My Finale” and ignored both when Sacred Heart was a medical school and, as Aseem Batra has now shared, Elliot’s earlier pregnancy. Additonally, she revealed that we won’t see either Ollie or Sam in this nine-episode season, although though there were originall plans to include them. As Batra explained:
In these nine, we had put some in and then ended up cutting for time... Being able to bring people back into this world of the hospital was extremely important to Bill [Lawrence]. [The goal was to avoid making the show feel] somehow split between like a family show and a medical show. It's kind of like 'Everybody Loves Raymond.' It's not about the kids.
Aseem Batra also mentioned that if/when Sam is ever featured on the revival, she’d love to bring back both Kim and Scott Foley’s Sean, who used to go out with Elliot and was revealed to be in a relationship with Kim in Season 8, thus making him Sam’s stepdad. So that provides extra incentive for ABC to renew Scrubs, which ideally stands a good chance of happening given how well the first three episodes performed. Bill Lawrence has also said that if the revival is renewed, we’ll reunite with Ken Jenkins’ Bob Kelso.
New episodes of Scrubs air Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on ABC. I was already keeping my fingers crossed that the show will return in the 2026-2027 TV season, but now they’ll be even more tightly intertwined if that means we’ll also see how a now-college-aged Sam is doing and what J.D. and Elliot are like co-parenting their much-youger son.
