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SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the Season 2 first two episodes of the “Scrubs” revival, which aired Wednesday night on ABC and will stream next day on Hulu.

When ABC’s “Scrubs” returned earlier this year after a nearly 16-year break, fans were quite divided on one major change in character dynamics: J.D. (Zach Braff) and Elliot (Sarah Chalke) had divorced. In Season 1 of “Scrubs” 2.0, J.D. returned to Sacred Heart as chief of medicine, which put him back in the same workplace as his ex.

And that was the point. If Season 1 was about setting up that new dynamic between J.D. and Elliot, Season 2 is about seeing how they’ve adapted to this new reality. And that includes seeing your ex start to date other people. As the Season 2 premiere episode (“My First Time in a While”) opened on Wednesday, J.D. is smitten by Charlie (Rachel Bilson). But is this just a rebound?

Meanwhile, along with Episode 2 (“My Mentee”), also shown on Wednesday, viewers get an update on Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley) and his autoimmune disease. And we see some cracks continuing to form in Turk (Donald Faison), while J.D. and Elliott adjust to their roles as mentors to the fresh crop of faces — including new arrivals Grant (John Higgins) and Mimi (Keyla Monterroso Mejia).

Besides McGinley, other OG cast members making appearances include Carla (Judy Reyes), Jordan (Christa Miller) and The Todd (Robert Maschio). And later in the season, expect to see more from the Janitor (Neil Flynn) and also Elliot’s ex-flame Sean (Scott Foley).

Variety spoke with “Scrubs” exec producer and showrunner Assem Batra about the premiere episodes’ revelations, and where we go from here — including whether Dr. Cox will be OK, and if J.D. and Elliot’s child Ollie will be seen.

You kick off the season digging deep into Dr. Cox’s disease, and how it impacts J.D. and the others. What made you decide to spend so much more time on that?

We focused a lot on that because we set up this very sort of dire, serious feeling last season. We wanted to put our audience at ease that we aren’t in any way putting Dr. Cox in such jeopardy that he might not be with us. We feel like it’s a way of making the audience know that he’s always going to be part of this family. When we were reading comments, people were like, “Is he gonna die?” This is a comedy. We don’t want to go that far with it. So part of it was just showing their continued journey to help Dr. Cox stabilize this particular autoimmune disease that we gave him. With the kind of medications they have these days, people can do very well on them. So it’s just a matter of now finding the right treatment.

I mean, people do die on “Scrubs!” So it was within the realm of possibility that something could happen to Dr. Cox.

Absolutely, of course. That is always open and in the air, but we just wanted people to at least feel like our family is back together, and we’re not only playing into the jeopardy of that. That’s why we wanted to focus on treating him as opposed to putting him in jeopardy.

How much do we see Dr. Cox throughout the season? Obviously John has his other job in the Bill Lawrenceverse.

I know, we would have loved to see him more. But what we could get with his ‘Rooster’ schedule was about four episodes, so that’s about what we’re going to see him for this run.

We also got to see Judy Reyes as Carla in the season opener, but she also has a day job on “High Potential.” I’m sure it’s been a challenge finding ways to get familiar faces back.

We have to give a lot of love to our line producer Mike Livanos, because he’s always going back and forth, trying to figure out how. It’s not just the days we get them to shoot, but they have to fly up to Vancouver. So we really can eke out sometimes a very small amount of time for people who are doing more than one project.

Christa also makes an appearance as Dr. Cox’s wife, Jordan, and she too has another job on Bill’s “Shrinking.” It is nice to see you managing to find ways to get folks in, so they’re still part of the universe.

Yeah, everybody’s been so kind about giving their time and coming back to do the show, and we thought it would just be a really fun opener to have her reacting to Perry’s illness because we haven’t seen her point of view on it more than her finding out. We saw her find out, but this is her reacting to what happens when somebody you care about that much is so sick.

Things seem to be going OK so far with J.D. and Charlie. What are the plans with those two?

I always call these post-divorce relationships the “first pancake” relationships because it’s like you make that first pancake, it’s all weird, and not the most beautiful one, and then you try again. It is a little bit his rebound relationship where he’s finding himself again. And like we see in the early episodes, he’s doing too much and overthinking it. He’s almost reverting back to when he was younger. And so, he does stabilize with her a little bit more as we see them together. But this is very much trying to show that first relationship after a big breakup.

And there’s the moment where he hires Joey Fatone to do a Cameo for her.

That was going to be an off-screen joke, and then we found out Joey Fatone was OK to come do the joke. So it was great.

How would you describe these first few episodes in terms of storylines that will evolve as the season goes on?

We really want to explore who J.D. and Elliot are now that they aren’t together as a couple. What’s their new normal? We don’t have that many episodes to tell the stories of them outside of the hospital, but we do want to see them a little bit as parents and who they are to one another now that they’re back in the friendship zone of post-divorce.

Are we going to see their child?

If I’m allowed to do that as a spoiler, we will. We will see their kid. We don’t have a lot of time, as we’re telling these stories and wanting to get all of our new cast in as well. But where we can sprinkle it in, even if it’s a mention, we try to keep that whole world alive, that they are parents now.

Donald has talked in other interviews about how you’re exploring Turk’s mental health a bit more this season. It was hinted at briefly last year. How will you dive in a little more on that?

It’s important for us to not just let it drop. We’re a comedy, and we want to show our relationships and the fun dynamics between friendships. But it is important for us to mention that these things don’t just disappear for people. We do hit on that a little bit, and what is J.D.’s take on it for his friend.

And then we know Scott Foley is coming back. Can you tease what’s going to be happening with him and with Elliot?

What was great was how when he came back in, it just felt like he had never left. It felt like he was such a part of it. What happens when somebody you’ve always had chemistry with, but never could quite work it out, comes back into your life. Do you say? Do you give it another shot? That’s Elliot’s dilemma. She’s in a very different place, and what does that mean for them?

Sounds like there’s a lot on J.D. and Elliot handling the fact that they’re both moving on. What does what does that mean for the two of them?

They don’t even really know. As we, the writers, explore it, you can see that they’re on their own journey, which is one of the reasons we chose to not have them stay married. We kept Turk and Carla married, but there are so many fun, interesting things to explore with J.D. and Elliot. What’s it like to see your ex date when you’re also working with them, and you have to know everything about their personal life? How does that make you feel? What does it mean to now be a friend again and not a partner. We get to explore all of those very organic things that happen to people after a breakup, and because they’re working together, it’s intensified for them. This season is a little bit more about J.D. and Elliot in those terms of who they are to each other now.

Another story you left hanging last season was the janitor and the janitor’s son, and the renewal of that rivalry.

We have a little bit of fun coming up with them and picking up on this sort of bizarre idea that this is the janitor’s son, or is it really? What’s going on with this? It gives Neil a good reason to come back if his son is in the hospital. So we play a little bit of that in an episode as well.

With Joel Kim Booster departing and both Dr. Cox and the Janitor only guest starring, does J.D. need another foil?

We have John Higgins as sort of a frustration for J.D. Whereas J.D. was always so needy, wanting Dr. Cox to be his mentor, now he’s still kind of needy, wanting Grant, the character played by John Higgins, to be his mentee. He’s like, “Why don’t you like me more?” That color on J.D. was always so fun — the neediness, and it gives him a way to play that still. Grant may not be a foil in terms of stopping him from accomplishing what he wants in the hospital, but he’s not accomplishing that mentor-mentee relationship that he craves, that he had with Dr. Cox or believes he had.

Yeah, I noticed there’s already sort of a generational thing going on with the two of them, with JD willing to bend the rules to help Dr. Cox, and Grant saying, absolutely not.

It’s funny that you pick up on that, but that is a very Gen Z thing of how they don’t look at things the same way. Something that he learned from Dr. Cox, and we always think of as metaphorical parents, is that you’re going to pass down what you learn, and it’ll be easy. But the interesting thing about so-called parenting or being a mentor, it’s never easy. There’s always something you didn’t see coming. Grant’s personality is so different. He’s an ethical person, but J.D.’s an ethical person too. They just see whatever that means in two different lights. It’s a fun dynamic for us to play with.

Elliot is also doing her own mentoring and also seeing those limitations too.

And that’s another fun Gen Z thing to play. The thing I love about this generation is, they don’t see age as a limitation the way Gen X was taught to see it. That’s a cool thing to play between Tosh (Ava Bunn) and Elliot, where Tosh is just kind of like, “it’s not too late to do what you’ve always wanted to do.” That’s just like a new thing for Elliot to hear.

I know you’ve been asked a lot about Ken Jenkins returning as Dr. Kelso. Any hope of an appearance?

What I tell everybody is, we have to remember that people have their stuff going on in their lives. They can’t always do these things, and it doesn’t mean they don’t want to. It’s just whatever limitations they’re having in their own life or schedule. He knows that the door is always open. He could call me today and say I can fly in next week, and I would write him in. So it’s really just a matter of if he could make it happen, we’re here for him.

Any other themes you want to tease for this season?

There’s mentorship. I think honestly, the J.D./Elliot of it all. I hope our audiences can be excited about that because I think people have questions about why we broke them up. That’s one of those cool relationships where you’ll always wonder why they couldn’t work. But that’s just one of the complex things we get to play between them.

Laura Benanti is out of the woods and into a thicket that is very different from her initial Broadway base: the world of stand-up comedy. Officially, “Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares” is a “one-woman show,” but she says the only reason she shies away from calling it stand-up at all is because she respects the people who practice that on a weekly basis too much to want to claim she’s mastered that craft as an interloper. But whatever the comedic equivalent of belting is, that’s a natural skill that Benanti is also turning out to have in her wheelhouse, as she carries the art of quip-riddled personal storytelling as well as she carries a tune.

“Nobody Cares,” which plays at the Wallis in Beverly Hills Thursday through Sunday and moves to Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory the following weekend, is not tuneless, so anyone who first came to love Benanti as a Broadway songbird needn’t worry her vocal cords have been clipped for this production. But the handful of songs she works into this current show are all original numbers, conceived in the same mostly irreverent vein as the spoken-word parts that dominate the show. Zero knowledge or prior appreciation is required of her rich history as the breakout starlet powering shows like “The Sound of Music,” “Nine,” “My Fair Lady,” “She Loves Me” and “Into the Woods.” The so-called reformed ingenue is now prepared to tackle middle-aged topics like divorce (in multiples), postpartum depression and the tricky art of balancing self-deprecation and personal pride, via deft writing that suggests maybe she ought to be co-writing her own musical comedies, if she takes a pause from this confessional vein.

Variety spoke with Benanti about why “Nobody Cares” has been so rewarding for someone who has already received two and a half decades of applause for her stage work… and also, in a peculiar wrinkle, a lot of love (well, from some) for her portrayal of Melania Trump on “Late Night With Stephen Colbert.” The show has been a hit in New York and London,

Most people would see “Nobody Cares” and think that you were a very practiced stand-up comedy person, which was never your history prior to conceiving this. it’s been something that was buried latent in you for a long time. Not that this strictly counts as stand-up comedy, but certainly a lot of it is in that sphere or involves those skills.

Yeah, I would say this show is most akin to stand-up, for sure, and with some good musical comedy in there as well. We have five original songs that I co-wrote with Todd Almond, who’s on stage with me. It’s certainly comedic storytelling. Something I talk about is, I really want people to understand that this is not like a cabaret. This is not Broadway songs or Broadway music in any way. It’s 16-plus (age-wise). There’s adult content; there’s foul language. It’s not what people might expect of me if they only know me from my roles on Broadway.

Looking at previous interviews you’ve done when you went out with this show, you get those disclaimers in pretty early toward the start of most interviews. You really want to get that message out. That must come from having had a few surprised customers.

Yeah. I still always have, I’m gonna say, at least 15 people in the audience who are like, “Where am I? Why isn’t she singing ‘The Sound of Music’?” And it does take a little while to win them over, because they don’t want to hear me sing a song about dicks. They’re just like, “What’s going on?”

Have you had any walkouts over the dicks, and/or the lack of “Into the Woods” content?

Nobody has left. Well, at least that I could see. Maybe the people in the back have. But nobody’s left. But they certainly have scowled.

Presumably the scowlers come around eventually? But not everything is for everybody.

I mean, even the most reluctant husband or boyfriend who got dragged there, by the end of the show, I do feel like I’ve won them over. And for whatever reason, this makes me really happy. My audiences have been, for the most part, really intergenerational, from teenagers to women in their 20s and 30s and 40s all the way through to people in the audience who are in their 80s, and likely they are the people coming knowing me from Broadway. But everybody seems to really enjoy it, and it’s really nice to see all of those people in one place at the same time laughing at the same things.

You’ve been doing other things where people discover your sense of humor. But the people who know you most for the ingenue characters you talk about having been put it early in your theater career, they wouldn’t have reason to naturally make that leap, like, “I can just tell that lady has a really wicked sense of humor.”

Right. That’s been sort of an uphill battle. But certainly I think even in the ingénues I’ve played, I’ve always tried to pepper in humor wherever I can find it, and to mine humor at any moment, even if it’s not on the page. I’ve done that since I was 18, playing Maria in “The Sound of Music.” That was always a big goal of mine. But I do think that the repertoire certainly that I had till I was 30 was for the most part ingénues. But I think “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” even though that closed early and wasn’t a big hit, educated a lot of people in the Broadway community to the fact that I’m a clown. And I always have been. I’m sort of like a clown that was in an ingenue leading lady’s body.

And I think doing Melania really helped with that. People realized that I could do sketch comedy and impressions. But I know I’m not the only performer who feels that you just have to sort of keep showing people who you are. Because if you do a lot of different things, like musicals and plays and comedy and drama… it’s harder for people to put you in a box of, this is what you do… I constantly have people be like, “I didn’t know you were funny.” It used to piss me off, and now I’m like, “Yeah, you didn’t, and it’s my job to show you that I am.”

This show came about from Audible asking you to write and perform an autobiographical piece. So did wanting to do something like this come out of that assignment, or were you always like, “Someday I’m gonna put my own voice out there, whether it’s with a comic sensibility or something else, where I will be as great being myself as I’ve been being an interpreter as I’ve been of other people’s voices”?

Well, you know, I’ve done these Broadway concerts since I was 22, all over the country, where I would go to wherever and sing Broadway music and then do stories in-between. And the feedback I would often get is people saying, “I loved the stand-up. The stand-up was actually my favorite part.” But I think I was always just too scared to do that outside of the context of the career I had already had — the safety of singing songs that people expect of me. Then I started hosting a bunch of (events) and writing the monologues and and a lot of the bits, and it was so fun. I love the puzzle of a joke. Especially if it’s something that is a serious topic, I love figuring out how to talk about it in a way that makes people laugh and disarm them. So when Audible reached out to me about commissioning a show, I immediately said yes, because I had already been wanting to do that. But then as I started writing it, I just kept thinking, “Nobody cares. Nobody cares what a middle-aged white lady has to say. This is not the voice that we’re clamoring for.” But they paid me, so I had to keep writing.

And slowly, I allowed myself to feel the joy of the puzzle. And I have some really wonderful girlfriends who would come to my makeshift garage and listen to me do jokes and give feedback. And they were like, “I need to hear this, actually. You can be as self-deprecating and as insecure as you want, but what you’re saying is something I actually really need and want to hear, even outside of my friendship with you.” So that gave me courage and solace as I continued to write it. Now that I’m touring with it, I’m seeing that, and that’s still the feedback that I’m getting from audiences, which is really, really gratifying.

You know what’s so weird is, before X was X, when it was just Twitter and it was fun instead of just the dumpster fire of misogyny that it is now, I really got into it, because the puzzle of having to deliver a joke in 140 characters was really fun for me. I do think that’s where a lot of people started to realize I was funny. I noticed a lot of comics started following me, and I started having back-and-forth bantering with them. People who did not know anything about me at all started following me on Twitter. In some ways, that helped me more than anything, weirdly. And now, I get to do it.

And I still feel self-conscious about calling it stand-up because I have so much respect for stand-ups, that they have such a hard job. They work so hard, and I do sometimes worry that they’re gonna be like, “Oh, OK, Miss Broadway, Miss ‘I’ve never played a small club.’ You’re a stand-up comic. OK.” But I don’t know how better to describe what I’m doing than that, especially when I’m trying to set expectations for the audience of what it is.

Were you ever tempted to work more inside-baseball theater stories into the show? Because in interviews you have some hilarious stories about old-timers you’ve worked with and stuff like that. But that’s not the theme of this show. This is about pretty common experiences, or at least exaggerated versions of experiences that have actually happened to you. So you’re talking about perimenopause when you could be sharing theater anecdotes. But you’ve prioritized the most universal stuff.

Yeah. My intention with this show is to broaden my audience. Of course I want to keep my core musical theater fans; I owe my career to them. But I want to broaden my fan base, and the thing I always say is, you don’t have to know anything about Broadway. You don’t have to like Broadway. One of the lines in my show is, “I want to give a very special welcome to those of you who were dragged here by someone who said, ‘I know you don’t like Broadway, but I think you’ll like her.’” And so my goal with this show is to use it as almost a Trojan horse of, “Hey, everybody, this is what I’m capable of…” And when I do my more Broadway-style concerts, I definitely have theater anecdotes because that’s what that audience really wants to hear. But for me, I want this to be more universal, and not that I’m an actress doing a comedy show. I’m a person telling you stories about my life — which, unfortunately, are not actually that exaggerated. The stories you hear in my show, sadly, are true.

There are moments in the show where you’re very deadpan about how you do the lead-in to the punchline, and the punchline is you delivering the really terrible thing that happened to you, or the shocking secret. And there’s a great comic rhythm to it, even though what you’re talking about is not inherently funny. You’ve actually said that a lot of this is about the worst experiences of your life. Did you have any questions with yourself about whether to go sort of full vulnerability as far as dealing with everything — from beimg twice divorced and making the third time the charm, to breaking your neck, perimenopause and postpartum depression? The lightheartedness of it doesn’t really stop, even though you’re getting into heavy material.

You know, that’s like my mom coming through…

Whose approach to finding levity in everything you have talked about. You once described your mother’s approach to finding laughter in the worst circumstances as “giggles at a funeral.”

And I will say that a lot of these stories have the benefit of hindsight. At the time they weren’t funny, but in retrospect they are. I think that challenging topics feel more accessible to people when they’re laughing, and can make a greater impact, because laughter opens our hearts, and then once a heart is open, you can sort of slip in the message.

But, like when I was in London, I definitely felt this sense of how my open-hearted, “I wear my heart on my sleeve” (attitude), especially as it pertains to my children, was not as welcome as it is in the States. Which was interesting to feel. There’s a song on my show called “Mama’s a Liar.” The first two sections of the song are comedic, and then the last one is very genuine. And I could almost feel people’s discomfort in London, that during a comedy show I’m singing something emotional. But in the States it’s people’s favorite song. So it’s been interesting to me to see who is ready, willing and able to go on a journey with a comedy show that occasionally has some heartfelt moments. You know, Mike Birbiglia does that in such a masterful way. One of the reasons why I’m such a big fan of his is not only am I laughing, but he’s making me feel something and think about things.

Do you have a final feeling you want to leave people with, when they come out?

Hmm. I’ve spent a lot of my time feeling a lot of shame about the stories I talk about — and what a waste of time. So I want to make them laugh, and I want them to walk away being like, “Yeah, I’m fine.”

Let’s talk about your Melania Trump, which oddly enough is something through which a lot of people have learned about you for the first time. Will you find a place to do it again, or was that specific to the Colbert show?

I mean, it’s so synonymous, (so) I do it a little bit in my theater concerts. I do a medley, as her. And I’ve done it a bit on my Instagram, but I’m not sure where else I would do it, you know? I’m not sure where I’d go with it.

MAGA was kind of mad at you…

Uh, yeah.

But at the same time, you got a huge aount of very positive response for doing that. So how did that work out for you, with this whole world applauding you for this, and then knowing people are pissed off too? Because a big component of the show you’re doing now is that you have always been a people pleaser.

Exactly. I was just gonna say that, the people-pleasing thing. And then I was like, “You know what? Fine. I don’t want these people to feel comfortable with me.” You know, I had some followers be like, “Stick to singing. I liked you, now I don’t.” And I’m like, “I’m sorry I ever made this a safe space for you. Goodbye.” So I do not shy away from my belief system. If that loses me followers, if that loses me fans, I feel like I’m on the right side of history. But it certainly was scary at times. But that’s for the most part died down. And look, it makes me practice what I preach in this show, which is: Not everybody’s gonna love you, and that’s fine.

That recurring bit helped set up for people that you have these comedic chops, and you might be exercising them, with a comic sensibility that might be off the beaten track.

Exactly. And for the people who know me, or have a preconceived notion of who I am, my hope is that they open themselves to this version of me that’s the real part of me. And I hope that people who don’t know me at all will come and enjoy themselves, and I can introduce myself to them as the person I’ve always been. You know, as the recovering ingenue, not the ingenue.

I may be a little strange, but I’m watching the show and thinking, “Oh, I liked her opm Broadway, but she’s so good at this. She should just do this. She should just do comedy all the time.”

I’d love to do that!

WIll you continue touring this show into next year and beyond?

Yeah. But we did film it, in London, and so my hope is that we’ll be able to get a distributor for it, and it’ll be out in the world in some capacity. And frankly, like, I would like to do this forever. I love theater — I’ll always do theater — but my goal with this show is to show people that I’m funny, and especially in L.A., get [00:27:00] people to hire me for comedy. My absolute dream is to be on a television comedy and just get to go to work and laugh all the time, and continue to write more of these shows and tour them. I really love it. It brings me the most joy of anything I do.

Any quick synopsis of what else is happening in your professional life? You’ve done so much television.

I’m on “Mayor of Kingstown,” which is coming back; I’m not sure when. But I am a free agent, so anyone who would like to hire me is welcome to hire me.

This would not be the first time that pronouncement has been made in Variety.

Yes, please. Exactly. “Dear Hollywood.”

“Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares” will be performed five times at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, located at 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd. in Beverly Hills: Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights at 7:30 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday afternoons at 2 p.m. Tickets and other information can found online at thewallis.org or 310-746-4000. Following the Beverly Hills engagement, Benanti will also perform at Orange County’s South Coast Repertory from Oct. 8-11. Tickets for that run are available at scr.org.