Naturally with the Scrubs revival that’s premiering on the 2026 TV schedule, longtime fans are most excited about reuniting with Zach Braff’s JD, Donald Faison’s Turk and a handful of other familiar faces from one of the best sitcoms of all time. But there also plenty of new faces along for the ride, including Saturday Night Live alum Vanessa Bayer. CinemaBlend learned from John C. McGinley and Judy Reyes, two of the OG Scrubs actors, what it was like working with her on this new season.
Bayer stars in the Scrubs revival as Sibby, an administrator at Sacred Heart who runs a wellness program for the faculty and staff. As seen in the Scrubs trailer, she is also committed to making sure the employees are interacting with each other in a civil and professional manner, which results in her having some hilarious moments with McGinley’s Dr. Perry Cox. So when I spoke with McGinley and Reyes, who’s reprising Carla Espinosa, I asked him what his experience was like working with Bayer, and he told me:
There was hardly any character for her on the page, and she's such a genius. She cultivated one on the fly, which is the biggest compliment I can pay anybody because on television, there's no time for anything. And for her to come in and be that nimble and turn on the writers so much that they've now integrated her full force into the ensemble is the stuff of fantasies that just doesn't happen. There's no time. You have all these principals who are already established, the five new young actors, and then Vanessa comes in and just crushes. So I think she made the writers' lives a lot easier.
Anyone who’s seen Scrubs, whether it was during its original run on NBC and then ABC, or streamed it years later with a Hulu subscription, knows that Dr. Cox doesn’t mince words and hold back on his opinions of people. His rants were one of the main sources of humor on the original Scrubs, and these days more than ever, his brand of bluntness is frowned upon in the workplace. In the trailer, when Sibby tells him to tone down his criticism of one of the interns, he asks about whether he gets three strikes, to which she says, “You have 900 strikes.”
Without going into spoilers, Sibby’s sensitivity clashing with Dr. Cox’s brashness is one of the highlights of the Scrubs revival for me. So I was glad to hear John C. McGinley praise Vanessa Bayer about how she fleshed out her character. Then Judy Reyes chimed in to say about how Scrubs has a history of actors improving their characters beyond what’s written in the script:
It's the stuff that Scrubs does. They bring in recurring characters, we get to know them really well, they're part of the family. They call them comedy assassins where they write for them, and then they see what they can do with it and, say, try something else. So it's an invitation. Our days are really long on the show, but it's an invitation for people to try their own thing, and it's constantly moving because the commitment is the relationships and the funny. Which they do better than anybody I've ever worked with.
Like McGinley and Reyes, Bayer is recurring in the Scrubs revival, so we won’t see her in every episode. Regardless, I look forward to seeing how Sibby meshes with the show’s other characters, particularly JD, who also values sensitivity. Between Scrubs and her voice role as Diane in the upcoming 2026 movie Hoppers, Bayer has a lot going on over the next few weeks.
The first two episodes of the Scrubs revival air Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET on ABC, and they’ll be available to stream in Hulu the day after. CinemaBlend also spoke with Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence about why he refuses to speak ill of the original show’s polarizing ninth season.
