Scrubs Star Judy Reyes Looks Back as the Cast Reunites at ATX TV Festival
"I can't even get over the fact that it's been 20 years"
By Richard Whittaker, Fri., June 3, 2022
October 2, 2001. Medical comedy Scrubs debuts on NBC, mere weeks after 9/11, and over nine seasons its mixture of surreal comedy and sensitive drama, pratfalls and pain, leave an indelible mark on television. "I can't even get over the fact that it's been 20 years," said star Judy Reyes.
A reunion of the Scrubs cast was originally scheduled for the 2020 ATX TV Festival, and when that was canceled due to COVID it was transferred to be part of the ATX TV … From the Couch! online event. However, then the crew decided to delay the event in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. Two years on, with the festival returning as an in-person event and the Scrubs panel finally re-rescheduled, Reyes said, "I think we're all really ready and excited to reunite."
It also feels like the reunion is more timely than ever. After all, Scrubs was a comedy about life and death, its lead characters either doctors or medical students at Sacred Heart teaching hospital. Every lead character, that is, except Carla Espinosa, the young nurse who becomes a friend to the fledgling medics. Reading the pilot script for the first time, Reyes recalled, "[Carla] felt like me. She felt like somewhere I came from." She also turned the TV trope of the wise old nurse on its head by being a contemporary to the student docs. While they'd been learning, she'd been doing, and in her Reyes saw "this bored kindness. This, 'I've done it, I get it.'" There's also a trace of cynicism that she saw as "a self-protective kind of thing, where I can't care too much, but I care."
Over time Carla became an important figure for nurses who finally saw themselves, and the vital work they do, represented in a rounded way on television. Reyes was recently working in Cincinnati on new HBO adaptation of John Green's novel Turtles All the Way Down. "There were four couples, male and female, all nurses, who saw me and were just losing their shit. They said, 'You don't understand,' and that's usually what I get. 'That show got me through med school.' 'That show did this for me.' 'If it wasn't for that show …'" There was an idea in the writers room to have Carla become a doctor, and Reyes pushed back hard. "I was like, 'Why? What's wrong with being a nurse?' I got very protective and defensive."
However, there was a risk of Carla becoming too serious. When series creator Bill Lawrence talked to the Chronicle when the panel was originally scheduled (see "Laughs, Deaths, and Scrubs," Screens, June 5, 2020), he recalled that Reyes was concerned that Carla was becoming a killjoy, the straight-laced character who delivers that episode's moral, and only existed to service the story of the doctors. "She's there to remind them, 'You're human, you're normal, you're just like me,'" Reyes said, and sometimes that started to overshadow everything else about her. "[Lawrence] would say, 'She has the gravitas,' and I go, 'Can I be funny? Can I wear a costume? Can I fall from the sky?'"
Being able to bring such issues to Lawrence and the creative team was part of what made Scrubs so important for Reyes, in no small part because Carla was also a landmark character in terms of representation. At a time when Latina characters were "Mexican or Cuban, maybe Puerto Rican," Carla, like Reyes, was the child of Dominican migrants, and that became a significant issue both onscreen and behind the camera. In one script, Carla was described as Mexican, so she went to Lawrence and told him, "If I'm going to speak Spanish, I'm going to have to do a certain accent. I don't want the entire Latino community giving me shit because I did it wrong.' He was like, 'Oh, no, you're right, I'm sorry.'"
Those conversations fed into one of Reyes' most memorable moments in the series, the season 6 episode "My Musical," in which she and her husband, surgeon Chris Turk (Donald Faison), sing the duet "For the Last Time, I'm Dominican," in which she sings her frustration about his inability to remember her heritage. It was also an in-joke at the writers' own expense. "There was a self-awareness, and a sense of humor that just brought me an enormous amount of joy," Reyes said.
It's also a moment that almost didn't happen, due to – of course – a medical mishap. Reyes recalled, "I'm obsessed with musical theatre, and I just couldn't wait. So I get this song and I go, 'Oh my god!'" Then performance day came, and she fell out of the shower and fractured her hip so badly that she needed surgery and a steel rod implanted. "The first thing that I said was, 'My tango!' And I just cried. Bill was amazing. He went, 'Don't worry. We'll do it when you're recovered, we'll move it later, don't worry, it's OK.' And that was the vibe on the show. If there was anything that got in your way, that interfered or that messed you up, it was always so supportive."
