Best friends, after a fashion: Disney+ UK spotlights J.D. and Dr Cox's complicated Scrubs bond
A new Disney+ UK video calls J.D. and Dr Cox "best friends" and jokes about walking out of the office on a final day — a title any Sacred Heart regular will read with a raised eyebrow. Here's why the joke lands, and where to stream Scrubs.
The short answer: A new Disney+ UK video calls J.D. and Dr Cox "best friends" and jokes about walking out of the office on a final day — a title any Sacred Heart regular will read with a raised eyebrow. Here's why the joke lands, and where to stream Scrubs.
Disney+ UK has given J.D. and Dr Cox a label that Scrubs spent years complicating: best friends. A video on Disney+ UK's YouTube channel, published on 16 October 2026, is titled "J.D. & Dr. Cox Are Best Friends" and captioned "How we've always imagined walking out of the office on our final day". Anyone who spent time at Sacred Heart will recognise the raised eyebrow the line invites.
The video puts Zach Braff's J.D. and John C. McGinley's Dr Cox front and centre in its title, and its description points viewers to Scrubs on Disney+.
"Best friends" is doing some heavy comic lifting. In the original run, Cox was Sacred Heart's authority figure, a man who spoke very fast and very meanly to the residents. J.D. was the young doctor who kept seeking his guidance anyway; in one scene, with first-year residents under his wing, he made the mistake of asking the dreaded Cox to give them a pep talk. The show had already given J.D. a best friend, too: Turk, his fellow resident and friend since college, played by Donald Faison. The joke in the Disney+ UK title is that Cox was the last person J.D. would have called a best friend. That is exactly why the revival's role reversal lands.
The joke has a real-life echo. Braff has said he was intimidated by McGinley when they first worked together, much as J.D. was by Cox, and that the two actors became closer friends over the years. In his telling, that parallel became tangled up in the revival, particularly in its eighth episode.
He was a very accomplished actor, and he was someone I looked up to. I was definitely intimidated by him, as was JD. And then all these years later, in the intervening years, we've become closer friends. That very special Episode 8 of the revival of Scrubs, it was so moving. The relationship between J.D. and Dr. Cox, and the relationship between Zach and Johnny C. were all mixed up into one. Zach Braff, in a 2026 interview with Variety
The roles keep reversing
The revival starts with that relationship under strain. Cox is still chief of medicine at Sacred Heart — "one of these guys who found his lane", as McGinley puts it — while J.D. has left hospital medicine to work as a concierge doctor in the suburbs. Braff says the move leaves J.D. "a bit dispirited", because Cox trained him to be an exceptionally good doctor, and that Cox harbours some resentment about it. McGinley reads his character differently: Cox "totally gets it and, probably deep down, is quite envious. But you lose your street cred when you leave the battle." The first season then reverses their positions. By its penultimate episode, Cox is described as Sacred Heart's former chief of medicine, and after a difficult diagnosis he has to lean on the intern he once tormented.
By the second season, J.D. is the one in a position to mentor the next generation. He expects history to repeat itself, Braff has said, but the new chief resident, Grant, played by John Higgins, is not looking for his own Dr Cox. "He's certainly not J.D.-esque," Braff says. "J.D.'s trying to recreate the relationship he had in his mind with Cox, but this guy doesn't really want a mentor." Which is the point: the original relationship was never tidy either. Scrubs is streaming on Disney+.