Category: Entertainment

Sixteen years after Scrubs came to an end, Zach Braff and Donald Faison are scrubbing in yet again as the comedy returns for a revived 10th season.

The return comes after years of buzz — as well as the stars’ rewatch podcast Fake Doctors, Real Friends and their hit T-Mobile commercials — but even Braff is shocked at the result, admitting at the L.A. premiere on Monday, “I never thought [a revival] would be primetime ABC, 8 p.m., I thought maybe we’d do a little movie or a miniseries or something. This is the most glorious incarnation of it that I could have daydreamed about.”

Bringing back the show was no straightforward task, though, because of the complicated way it ended. The first seven seasons aired on NBC, but moved to ABC for season 8. That was expected to be the show’s last season, even closing with an episode titled “My Finale;” it then ended up coming back for a controversial ninth season, with many new characters, a new setting and Braff appearing in only some of the episodes.

Braff confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that for the revival, “we decided we would pick up where we left off with season 8,” and disregard the storylines in that ninth season, which “[creator] Bill [Lawrence] says all the time it was meant to be a spinoff, it wasn’t really in the canon of O.G. Scrubs.”

Faison noted that he and Braff’s rewatch podcast ended up becoming research for the new show, and “We really realized what we liked; the fans told us what they liked, told us what they didn’t like. We were very honest with ourselves about the things we were watching and how we were performing. Season nine was like, ‘What the heck were we doing?’ And towards the end of Scrubs, the original run, we kind of got off the rails, and we brought it all back to reality and grounded the show quite a bit,” with the revival.

Fellow original stars Sarah Chalke, Judy Reyes and John C. McGinley are also back, with Chalke noting “one of the craziest parts of this experience was stepping onto set,” with the Sacred Heart Hospital set having been recreated exactly as it was for the original. And as for if they’ve got another eight (or nine) seasons in them this time around, Braff mused, “I think that’s all up to the powers at be at Disney, so we’ll see. We hope so, we’d love to do it. We’re having a blast.”

Scrubs premieres Wednesday on ABC, streaming next day on Hulu.

Amazon Web Services has developed new AI-powered tech meant to help TV networks and Hollywood studios more effectively compete in the vertical video space.

AWS on Tuesday launched AWS Elemental Inference, a service that transforms live and on-demand video into vertical formats in real-time, allowing for live vertical streaming of sports, news, and other types of programming with minimal latency (AWS says it only expects a 6 to 10 second delay).

AWS expects media companies to use the tech to stream on social platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where vertical video rules, as well as to create vertical formats for use on their own streaming platforms. Fox Sports and NBCUniversal have already signed on to use the tech.

“By processing content during encoding rather than post-production, broadcasters can publish social-optimized clips and highlights while live events are still in progress—turning speed into a competitive advantage for audience engagement,” explains Regina Rossi, head of product for AWS Media Services.

“For vertical video creation specifically, we use fully managed foundation models optimized for video workloads, including capabilities for saliency mapping, object tracking, and speaker detection,” Rossi adds. “These models analyze each frame to identify subjects, track movement across scenes, and intelligently determine the right vertical placement — keeping athletes centered during plays, speakers in frame during interviews, and key action visible regardless of aspect ratio. We apply smoothing algorithms so the viewer experience feels natural, similar to a cameraman panning across a scene.”

Major streaming platforms have experimented with vertical video (Netflix, Peacock and ESPN all have some actively available right now), but the process for converting conventionally shot content into vertical content is a bit more complex than it may appear at first glance. Live programming like sports is even more complicated. AWS is betting that its tech will make it vastly easier, enabling more vertical video on streaming platforms to reach consumers when they aren’t at home, and on social platforms where they are spending a lot of their time.

“In speaking with our customers, they have use cases for both distribution channels,” Rossi says. “Putting live vertical streams and clips on social platforms helps with content discovery and captures viral moments in real time — reaching audiences where they’re already engaged. Having more vertical content in their existing apps also provides viewers with an experience that feels more mobile-friendly. Fox Sports identified that nearly 90 percent of their digital content is consumed vertically, and this is a growing expectation for viewers across all mobile platforms and apps.”

“Automatic vertical conversion is essential because the vast majority of Fox Sports Digital’s audience consumes content on mobile, within platforms built for vertical viewing,” added Ricardo Perez-Selsky, senior director of digital production operations for Fox Sports. “By leveraging AWS technology, we can automatically reformat live action into optimized vertical highlights in near real time, dramatically accelerating turnaround. This allows us to scale premium, editorially sound content across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, as well as our owned and operated platforms like the Fox Sports App and Fox One, without sacrificing quality. Going forward, this technology enables an always-on, faster, and more personalized highlight engine that meets fans wherever they watch.”

StudioCanal, part of the Maxime Saada-led Canal+ Group, has acquired a 51 percent stake in Italian distribution, production and sales company Lucky Red, according to sources familiar with the situation.

The Rome-based Lucky Red also has a TV production business, which has produced the likes of Belcanto for RAI and Netflix, Gigolo per Caso for Prime Video and Christian for Sky.

The company was founded in Rome in 1987 by Andrea Occhipinti (Il Divo, Everybody Knows), who will continue in his role and control the remaining 49 percent stake. Financial terms weren’t immediately clear.

StudioCanal, led by CEO Anna Marsh, and Lucky Red previously worked together on the releases of such movies as We Live in Time, starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, and the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, starring Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, and John Goodman.

The two companies recently also teamed, together with LD Entertainment and Magnolia Mae Films, on Elsinore, a film based on the life of Ian Charleson, the Scottish star of the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire, whose final role was Hamlet in a celebrated London theater production. As exclusively revealed by THR, Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers, Ripley, Pressure) and Olivia Colman (The Favourite, The Crown, The Lost Daughter) will star in the movie. Written and executive produced by Stephen Beresford (Pride), it will focus on how Charleson “faced incredible odds while preparing to give the performance of his life in Hamlet at the National Theatre in London.”

Lucky Red’s recent releases have included Sentimental Value, Emilia Pérez, The Boy and the Heron, and Nouvelle Vague. The company’s own productions include the likes of Robin Campillo’s Enzo, Christophe Honoré’s Marcello Mio and Netflix’s On My Skin: The Last Seven Days of Stefano Cucchi.

Together with Italy’s Indigo Film, Lucky Red also operates the sales company True Colours.

Ilya Rozanov’s coming to the cottage? No, we’re all coming to the cottage.

Fans of the Crave–HBO Max series Heated Rivalry can now stay at Shane Hollander’s Canadian cottage, Airbnb announced Tuesday. Located in Muskoka, Canada, the cottage will be available to book on Airbnb starting on March 3 at 9 a.m. PT.

Reservations for the lakeside home are priced at $248.10 per night, in local currency. The price being a nod to the hockey numbers for the show’s two main characters — Hudson Williams’ Shane Hollander and Connor Storrie’s Ilya Rozanov.

The cottage became a central part of Heated Rivalry thanks to the show’s heartfelt and swoon-worthy finale, which takes place entirely at the cottage, and thanks to Storrie’s now-iconic line — “I’m coming to the cottage” — from the show’s fifth episode.

Heated Rivalry, produced by Bell Media for Canadian streamer Crave, airs on HBO Max in the U.S. It centers on the fictional hockey universe found in Rachel Reid’s Game Changers book series, focusing on two rival professional players — Canada-born Shane Hollander (Williams) of the fictitious Montreal Metros and Russia-born Ilya Rozanov (Storrie) of the fictitious Boston Raiders. The series follows the pair as they navigate an increasingly complicated yet deeply romantic near-decade long secret affair.

Crave renewed Heated Rivalry for a second season, and HBO Max confirmed it will continue to air the series. Jacob Tierney — who created the series for television, serving as the sole writer and director for the show’s entire first season — has confirmed that he’ll return to direct season two. However, he told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of Heated Rivalry’s finale that he was considering the possibility “that other writers will come in to help” him out for the next season, but that he wasn’t sure yet.

Reid has announced that she’ll be publishing her seventh book in the Game Changers series, Unrivaled. The book is slated to be the next chapter in Shane and Ilya’s story. It was expected to hit shelves on Sept. 29, however, Reid announced Tuesday that the novel has been pushed to June 2027.

It’s guild season! While Kumail Nanjiani already has his hosting gig for the DGA Awards under his belt, Kristen Bell, Atsuko Okatsuka and Roy Wood Jr. are currently gearing up for their entertaining duties. Bell will host the Actor Awards (formerly SAG Awards) on March 1, while Okatsuka is hosting the L.A. show of the Writers Guild Awards and Wood is hosting the New York show on March 8. The three hosts divulge their preshow rituals, if they still get jitters and how much rehearsal is involved.

What’s your preshow ritual?

KRISTEN BELL Beta blockers.

ROY WOOD JR. This is my third time hosting the Writers Guild Awards and the second time I’m doing it back-to-back. I did it once before, before COVID, and I learned a lot from that first time before COVID. There’s no real preshow ritual. My day is pretty normal. If it’s my custody week with my son, I do dad stuff till the babysitter arrives and I get to the hotel in time for rehearsal. I usually get to the hotel about an hour before a rehearsal just to meet the crew and speak to all the people. I like to just talk and see what their perspective is on the world and what they think. I more so have a postshow ritual. I’ve hosted the Webbys a couple of times, and I really enjoyed just sitting and looking at everybody. After the show ends, you can mingle and hang and everybody’s happy and you’re just a fly on the wall.

ATSUKO OKATSUKA For hosting or presenting, I’m mostly going over the words and jokes out loud to myself beforehand. Getting this language that is not my first going on in my mouth!

Have you been watching other awards shows to prepare?

OKATSUKA Yes. What’s cool is that awards shows are hosted by my fellow comedian buddies. So to know them personally and watch how they deliver the jokes, what they chose to joke on, has been really cool. I just saw Conan O’Brien workshop some of the Oscars jokes the other night, too, and it’s just so inspiring to know we can bring our own personalities to a night of celebration and bring levity to what actually could be a stiff, nerve-racking night for many.

WOOD I don’t really watch other awards shows. I’ve learned over the years that you really can’t learn anything from watching other people because they’re just doing their version of themselves. You can learn a little bit from watching someone host the same award show as you. For the Correspondents’ Dinner [that I hosted in 2023], I probably watched 15 years’ worth of performances before me. For Writers Guild, I watched one or two. But honestly, once you’re up there, it’s just you. You’re just being yourself.

Growing up, would you watch awards shows and say, “I’d love to host one of these?”

OKATSUKA Growing up, I did not have that self-esteem. I’m still learning to find it, but it makes it all the more special that me, an immigrant kid who was never supposed to be in the U.S., who lived in a garage undocumented with her mom and grandma, would be hosting the WGA Awards. Thank you to all those who believed and continue to believe in me.

WOOD I never watched an awards show and thought that I’d never host one.

How many writers do you plan on working with? Or if you’re already deep in prep, how many writers are you working with?

BELL I’ve been working with my dear friend Monica Padman. She knows how to write for my voice better than anyone.

WOOD Well, for previous Writers Guild award shows, I think we’ve had about eight to 10 people. For Correspondents’ Dinner, I had six writers. For the 2025 MLB Awards, I had two. For last year’s Peabody Awards, I had two.

OKATSUKA I’m working with Sophie Buddle. She’s an incredible comedian and friend and worked at After Midnight as the head monologue writer.

How much rehearsal is involved?

BELL A lot. Like … a lot a lot. We rehearse the scripts, the beats, the walk-ups, the walk-aways, the camera marks. I practice reading a teleprompter, I practice pretending to not read a teleprompter even though I absolutely am. By show day, it’s basically muscle memory.

OKATSUKA I’m currently in the process of it. Currently starting to gather the jokes and will be starting to workshop jokes at local lineups in Los Angeles. When I’m prepping for something, I will repeat the jokes to myself at home to my trees on the porch for a while before I go out to try it out in front of people.

WOOD We’ve already started ideating, and that happened at the end of January. We were already having preliminary thoughts on what the topics would be, but the actual performance on the day, you rehearse it on that day, but by then, you know the jokes like the back of your hand.

Are you going to do a song and dance?

BELL I always try to incorporate music when I can, so you’ll have to tune in to find out.

WOOD No, no, no, no. Though I did rap last year at the MLB Awards. I don’t think I’ll rap this year.

OKATSUKA I am known to dance … but there’s also something to be said about stillness. And letting the jokes do their thing.

Nikki Glaser rehearsed her jokes at stand-up sets ahead of her Globes hosting gig — on whom do you rehearse your jokes?

BELL My kids. If a joke survives that room, it can survive anything.

WOOD I run the jokes with the writers. I’ve done enough monologues at enough awards shows now, and I’ve done enough hosting to know whether or not this joke is going to work.

OKATSUKA To the gorgeous trees outside of my house, my amazing assistant Zoe, my husband at home first. … I like to workshop in the privacy of my own place first before I try it out in front of a crowd. I’m very wary of performing in public with notes in hand. I want to give the best version of myself every time I’m on a stage because people made the effort to come out and see a show.

Where do you draw the line in terms of poking fun at nominees?

BELL I don’t roast people. I want to keep it happy and fun. If I’m going to roast anybody, it’s going to be me.

WOOD My comedy in general, I don’t talk about people, so I don’t really plan to poke fun at nominees. I never have. And if I do, the joke is a reverse show-of-respect type thing, but I’m not out there to insult anybody.

OKATSUKA Just punch up. Always punch up. Be silly-forward, not entitled, and talk about what you genuinely would laugh about, which for me is absurdist, existential and relatable everyday stuff, so I’m good. There’s no “line” I’m afraid I’d cross, at least.

What is the most stressful part about hosting?

WOOD Remembering the jokes, not going too fast. And then, sometimes, there are curveballs on the day where this person’s supposed to be coming, but they aren’t. But that’s what makes it exciting is when you have a presenter who wants to do a joke or do something silly with you, that’s always a load off because it’s a place to get a free joke.

OKATSUKA This is my first time hosting an awards show. But as I prep, the most “stressful” aspect would probably be having to make jokes about current events, being up to date with the zeitgeist at the same time you’re trying to bring fresh, unique, unheard takes.

This story appeared in the Feb. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

Backrooms revealed its spooky first footage for the horror feature that adapts Kane Parsons’ YouTube series.

A24 releases director Parsons’ film theatrically May 29. The project stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell and Avan Jogia.

Backrooms centers on two people who find a mysterious door in the basement of a furniture showroom.

“I found something,” Ejiofor says in voiceover during the teaser trailer. “I found a place. It’s massive in there and just goes on and on and on. All these rooms — this place builds them. Actually, more like it remembers them, and the more times it remembers something, the less it does.”

Parsons helmed the movie from a script by Will Soodik. A24 and The North Road Company’s Chernin Entertainment co-financed the movie and serve as co-studios for the film that counts 21 Laps Entertainment and Atomic Monster as producers.

Kori Adelson, Dan Cohen, Chris Ferguson, Dan Levine, Shawn Levy and James Wan serve as producers.

Backrooms is inspired by Parsons’ viral YouTube horror series that has amassed more than 190 million views. The 20-year-old Parsons becomes the youngest filmmaker in A24’s history.

The movie’s release follows the recent success of Iron Lung, an indie horror film that filmmaker and YouTube content creator Markiplier self-distributed theatrically earlier this year, with the video game adaptation having surpassed $43 million at the global box office. During a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Markiplier explained that numerous studios and distributors had rejected his project.

“There still is a stigma against YouTube,” Markiplier said. “It’s not like I’m going to topple the mountain by myself. It has to be toppled and then toppled again, until it becomes normalized. Once it becomes normalized, then it can become boring, and it’s like, ‘Of course a YouTuber can do this,’ and there’s nothing to question about it.”

Fine. I’ll be the guy who defends the ninth season of ABC’s Scrubs (2009-2010).

No, it isn’t a perfect season, but let’s not pretend it’s some reputation-destroying embarrassment, best ignored or discussed with sad-faced pity. It isn’t the Netflix seasons of Arrested Development.

What it represented was an attempt for the Scrubs brand to move forward without (for the most part) Zach Braff‘s J.D., an effort to mature and evolve and adapt. The writing didn’t necessarily have a purposeful driving imperative, but the show’s new cast was exceptional, and there were worse things to do than watch Kerry Bishé, Eliza Coupe, Dave Franco and Michael Mosley executing Bill Lawrence’s dialogue and wild tonal shifts. It felt like a fresh start, even if it wound up being an end.

This, then, becomes the prism through which one must view the tenth season of Scrubs, or the first season of the reboot of Scrubs, premiering on ABC on Wednesday (February 25).

If you want Scrubs back, but want it back the way it existed through its first eight seasons — with acknowledgement of the passage of time, but no real maturation — then the first four episodes of the reboot deliver roughly what you want. Definitely not more. But probably not less.

If, however, you thought the way Scrubs concluded after eight seasons was close to ideal, and that the need for a major paradigm shift was the reason the ninth season remained valid, then the reboot feels like a regression — a creative step backwards.

And again, this revival isn’t a Netflix-seasons-of-Arrested-Development-level embarrassment. It’s just a museum piece: still funny in bursts, still boosted by the chemistry of the core cast, but hampered by all the elements that frequently tripped the show up in its closing seasons — or at least the biggest offending element, namely that J.D. keeps treading water and slowing down everybody and everything in the show that’s trying to grow.

ABC wants critics to treat some silly plot points as secretive, which hardly matters in the long run. The only thing that matters is that through some set of circumstances, J.D. (Braff), Turk (Donald Faison), Elliot (Sarah Chalke) and Carla (Judy Reyes) are reunited at Sacred Heart; that Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley) is in the first of four episodes sent to critics; that Hooch (Phill Lewis) and The Todd (Robert Maschio) pop up occasionally; and that nobody acknowledges anything related to the ninth season.

We find out very early on the status of J.D. and Elliot’s marriage, as well as the state of Turk and Carla’s relationship. Some things have changed. Other things haven’t. I’m not going to pretend that the specifics matter.

There are some absent faces from the past, but plenty of new faces to give the impression that the practice of medicine goes on at Sacred Heart. Vanessa Bayer plays Sibby, who is in HR or mental health or some amalgamation of elements that let her be a general wet blanket, restricting some of the same old behaviors — Todd’s sexism, Cox’s abuse, J.D.’s everything — as if to suggest that society hasn’t changed, but one smiling administrator has.

Joel Kim Booster plays Dr. Eric Park, a surgeon who immediately becomes J.D.’s adversary, even though Dr. Park is correct about absolutely everything and J.D. is wrong about absolutely everything. That’s kinda the way Scrubs has always worked, and there’s no evidence that the show is aware that Park is right about everything and J.D. is wrong about everything.

Then there are a bunch of fresh-faced young doctors, including Asher (Jacob Dudman), who is so thoroughly a sitcom version of Whitaker from The Pitt that my notes just call him “Huckleberry” throughout. Then we’ve got Dr. Tosh (Ava Bunn), whom everybody makes fun of because she uses social media a lot; Blake (David Gridley), who’s very attractive; and surgical interns Dashana (Amanda Morrow) and Amara (Layla Mohammadi).

The first episode hinges primarily on machinations to bring J.D. back into the fold at the hospital, a process that’s bafflingly ill-considered. Scrubs is a show that needed barely any contrivances at all, and yet they’ve chosen to lean into details that are frustratingly dumb and not in a “I can let it go because it’s a sitcom so there’s no requirement that the medical stuff make sense” kind of way. It’s dumb in a “This makes no sense and everything that follows makes no sense, and I’m now rooting for all the adversarial characters because they’re clearly right (even if they aren’t written well enough to be rooted for)” kind of way. It isn’t just Dr. Park who gets swiftly annoyed at J.D. for reasons that he’s right about. Elliot, Turk and several other characters spend the four episodes I’ve seen being exasperated at J.D.; they, like Dr. Park, are completely correct, and the show doesn’t understand why.

And if you’re saying, “So nu? Isn’t that what the show has always been?” Yes! But in giving the voiceover narration to Bishé’s Lucy, the ninth season — whether you liked it or not — endeavored to explore what was universal about breaking into the medical profession, presenting a version of naïveté that was recognizable, but not recognizably J.D. Restoring the narrative to J.D.’s perspective, only limitedly matured over 25 years, is a bore. If J.D. was a man-child when the show started, back in 2001, what is he now if his privilege has allowed him to skate through live generally unweathered?

Faison, Chalke and McGinley all have truly effective dramatic beats as we see the strain their lives have suffered over these three decades. Nothing impacting them adjusts the stakes in a way that is inappropriately melancholic or melodramatic. They’re just grown-ups. I was so impressed, especially with Faison, that it became vaguely depressing watching the next three episodes and being reminded that, even if you can hope that a half-hour here or there will give the other cast members deserved opportunities, the show is not and never has been an ensemble. It’s Braff’s show. He even directs the pilot. The show’s gravity pulls everything toward him and negates the necessity to follow through with anybody else.

The cutaway fantasy sequences are as amusingly whimsical as they’ve always been, but they again show that J.D.’s version of the fantastical remains exactly what it always was. The substance and execution of the fantasy sequences were both fairly innovative for a broadcast sitcom in 2001, and largely remain so. What has changed is that the rest of the Bill Lawrence sensibility, which he kept in the broadcast space for so long, has moved to Apple and Netflix and across the streaming landscape, capitalizing on expanded running time and loosened tonal restrictions to become the dominant voice of the half-hour (or more) comic format. Shows like Ted Lasso and Shrinking have proven how, with five to 10 extra minutes per episode, zaniness and seriousness can go hand-in-hand. In this new season of Scrubs, the seriousness goes back to being an occasional condiment.

Was the medical material in Scrubs ever good? I would argue that it really was fine at the show’s peak. I don’t require all medical comedies to be somewhat pointed satires, but there’s a newfound toothlessness when Scrubs tries to tackle the high cost of prescription drugs or … actually, nothing else. None of the medical plots stick.

Whatever my complaints or disappointments, I still love Faison, Chalke and the little bit of McGinley we’re treated to. The new stars are all fine, with Morrow, Mohammadi and Dudman the standouts. Bayer is always good at playing characters who are so chipper you assume there’s something wrong with them, and these episodes are beginning to show the cracks in her cheery veneer.

And it isn’t exactly Braff’s fault that I don’t find J.D.’s hijinks as funny at 50 as they were at 25, because Braff is still participating gamely in the silliness.

In the original series, Cox took to calling J.D. “Bambi,” because he seemed so wide-eyed, wobbly and unformed. Sticking with the Disney references, J.D. has become more of a Peter Pan figure, and the show around him, which looked ready to move forward 15 years ago, is back to refusing to grow up.

If that’s what you want from Scrubs, you’ll be pleased.