Cast scrubs up well for podcast

JD and Turk were best mates on Scrubs. Now in their podcast, actors Zach Braff and Donald Faison have taken one of TV’s bromances to the next level. Emily Yahr reports.

Zach Braff and Donald Faison will never ‘‘release the fight’’. What does that mean? If you listen to their hit podcast Fake Doctors, Real Friends, you would know that earlier this year one episode taping quickly ended because the two Scrubs stars got into an argument.

They joked that it got so heated that their producer, Joelle Monique, and editor and engineer, Daniel ‘‘Danl’’ Goodman, wondered whether the show might be over.

‘‘Well,’’ Braff said during a recent Zoom interview, ‘‘Donald and I have known each other since –’’

‘‘Day one,’’ Faison said.

‘‘For 21 years,’’ Braff continued.

‘‘Like any best friends, we have our fights. We certainly weren’t intending to have it in front of Danl and Joelle. But it was time.’’

They both laughed at the memory – and while they may never release the recording of their spat, they were more than happy to tell listeners what happened in the following week’s episode.

Some celebrity-hosted podcasts may have held back on those details, but it would never occur to Braff and Faison not to share almost everything.

After all, their best-friend dynamic is part of what has brought an enormous number of listeners to Fake Doctors, Real Friends, the iHeartRadio podcast (available on every podcast platform) that launched last year.

The show features Braff and Faison rewatching each episode of Scrubs, the beloved – if eternally underappreciated – medical comedy that ran from 2001 to 2010.

Fake Doctors is now one in a series of popular early 2000s rewatch podcasts hosted by the show’s actors, from Office Ladies to Welcome to the OC,

and West Wing Weekly.

The surge of these podcasts has led to new opportunities for its stars, as well. Braff and Faison are achieving one small dream this weekend, as they – as well as Monique and Goodman, integral personalities on the podcast, and Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence, who has become a fan-favourite guest – will appear on Celebrity Family Feud on ABC on Sunday night.

They’re all longtime Family Feud fans, and Braff was desperate to give an answer so terrible that it would result in host Steve Harvey’s classic deadpan stare to the camera. (Instead it was

Goodman who offered one such answer.)

But Faison, best known as Dionne’s boyfriend Murray in Clueless and football player Petey Jones in Remember the Titans, said that he has been offered more roles than usual in the past year.

‘‘I’m very grateful for how my career has switched a bit. Since we started this podcast, I’ve got a bunch of offers for things which hadn’t necessarily come before.

‘‘And I sold something for the first time, which I had never done,’’ he said.

‘‘I think it’s appealing to other people in the industry, where they might have said, ‘You know, I don’t know if I want to go with Donald Faison.’ Now they’re like, ‘We listen to his podcast, and he’s funny, so why not?’’

The appeal of these podcasts banks on our culture’s early-2000s nostalgia obsession, but Scrubs fans probably flock to Fake Doctors because of Braff and Faison, whose characters’ friendship mirrors their real-life relationship.

Braff may not jump on Faison’s back and yell ‘‘EAGLE!’’ like JD the doctor would to Turk the surgeon. But the pair, who met on set, finish each other’s sentences, constantly crack each other up and have an endless list of inside jokes and memories from working together for a decade.

They tell countless stories from Scrubs and their lives during the podcast, and have let in fans in a way they never did before.

‘‘I do think that this is really the most honest version of who Donald and I are as people, and I don’t think we’ve ever broadcast that out before. I mean, why would you? When would you? You see us on a talk show, it’s all sort of prepared anecdotes,’’ said Braff.

‘‘I think people are responding to how this really is our friendship. We’re silly, we love to laugh. We really have big hearts and really have a lot of empathy for people and for our fans.’’