In 2023, an opinion piece titled “Is the Cure to Male Loneliness Out on the Pickleball Court?” appeared in The New York Times. The headline has since been remixed again and again in online memes, with edits such as “Is the Cure to Male Loneliness Being in the Roman Legion?” and “Is the Cure to Male Loneliness 14 Beers at Chili’s?” The tweaks poke fun at a couple of things: the media’s hand-wringing over the state of modern masculinity, and commentators’ desire to look for one simple solution to the difficulties of friendship.The seriousness of today’s male-loneliness predicament and the silly ways it sometimes gets discussed is a conversation that the rebooted version of Scrubs—the medical sitcom starring Zach Braff and Donald Faison as colleagues and best friends—is well aware of. At the end of the first episode of the new series, which premiered in February, more than 15 years after the original went off the air, the two men sit on the roof of Sacred Heart Hospital, having a beer. John Dorian, known as J.D. (played by Braff), brings up an actual New York Times article from last year about men calling their friends to tell them goodnight, and how that ritual could combat loneliness. “Do you think it would be cool if—” J.D. starts to propose. “Not a shot in the dark,” the surgeon Chris Turk (Faison) replies, cutting him off. But after a beat, Turk relents: “Maybe once a week.”The scene is a perfect example of what Scrubs has always done well. With humor and lightness, it acknowledges the sometimes fraught dynamics of straight male friendship, and imagines something better at the same time.[Read: An unlikely model for male friendship]As any good pilot should, the first episode of the original Scrubs, which debuted in 2001, quickly set up what the show was about. J.D., a medical intern just starting his gig at Sacred Heart, proclaimed in a voice-over 90 seconds in: “Chris Turk’s my best friend.” The show explored many kinds of relationships—J.D.’s hero worship of his mentor, the acerbic Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley); his on-again, off-again romance with his fellow doctor Elliot Reid (Sarah Chalke)—but the friendship between J.D. and Turk gave the show its emotional core.Their connection continued to resonate in the culture well after the show wrapped. Braff and Faison are friends in life as on TV, and since 2020 they’ve hosted a Scrubs-rewatch podcast called Fake Doctors, Real Friends. They also co-starred in a series of T-Mobile ads. Faison was married in Braff’s backyard; Braff is the godfather of two of Faison’s kids. They’ve said that the line between themselves and their characters can be blurry and that Scrubs’ creator, Bill Lawrence, would sometimes incorporate anecdotes from their real-life friendship into the show.In the new version of Scrubs, much has changed. Turk, Sacred Heart’s chief of surgery, is still with Carla, a nurse played by Judy Reyes whom he married in the original series, but he has four daughters now. J.D., who married Elliot, is divorced and has become a concierge doctor for wealthy patients. But J.D. and Turk’s bond remains the show’s anchor.J.D. and Turk have been pals since college, and through flashbacks and clever writing, both versions of the show create a believably lived-in friendship, complete with old resentments, shared references, inside jokes, and growing pains. Their default mode is silliness—coordinated dances; J.D. jumping on Turk’s back and riding off shouting, “Eagle!”—but beneath the man-children facade is an intimate, affectionate, deeply committed friendship of the sort rarely depicted between men, in the 2000s or now.[Andrew McCarthy: Are they still your friends if you never see them?]In this way, Scrubs was ahead of its time. The show’s original run came several years before Hollywood fell in love with bromances and the term entered the mainstream lexicon. (Superbad, a comedy about two young friends trying to lose their virginity, came out in 2007; I Love You, Man, about a friendless man’s quest to find a best man for his wedding, and The Hangover, with its bachelor-party misadventures, both came out in 2009.) Back then, the depiction of intimate male friendship in fictional works was a rarity. And the wider culture seemed equally unconcerned about the quantity and quality of men’s friendships. (A search in the Times archive for mentions of male friendship or male loneliness returns very little from the early 2000s.) Over the past 25 years, that has changed drastically: Scrubs has returned to a culture that is both more conscious of the importance of men’s friendships and more anxious about their lack.The statistics on male loneliness are grim. Over the past couple of decades, isolation has increased while socializing time has decreased among American men and women, but both of those trends are steeper for men. According to a report published last year by the Pew Research Center, men tend to communicate with their friends less frequently than women do. Young men in the United States are “uniquely lonely” compared with young men in other rich countries, a Gallup Poll from last year found. And articles bemoaning the state of male friendship abound, asking “Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?” and proclaiming “Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden.” In this context, seeing J.D. and Turk again, still friends after many life changes, still capable of depth and silliness, is refreshing—and still a bit radical.Turk and J.D.’s friendship defies the norm that men should not be affectionate and emotional with one another. (That same Pew survey found that men are less likely than women to turn to their friends for emotional support.) The two have very different personalities—Turk often hides his emotional constipation behind bravado, whereas J.D. lets his feelings flow. J.D. calls himself a “sensie,” short for “sensitive guy”; Turk sometimes mocks him, but when they’re together, Turk becomes more willing to talk about his emotions. In the 2001 pilot, for instance, J.D. struggles with insecurity in his new job while Turk acts totally confident. But toward the end of the episode, Turk admits to J.D., “I’m scared every second” working in the hospital.Though they’re already close at the start of the show, their friendship deepens as time goes on. No topic is off-limits: They discuss faith, their fear of death, Turk’s burnout after a long career in medicine. The two love each other openly and exuberantly. When Turk gets back from his honeymoon with Carla, he abandons her curbside in front of the hospital to sprint inside into J.D.’s arms, both of them screaming. As Turk runs off, his wife says wistfully, “Maybe someday he’ll love me like that.”Scrubs is also quietly subversive in not relegating the men’s friendship to the sidelines. J.D. and Turk are each other’s first call for all of life’s milestones. In a scene where Turk proposed to Carla, J.D. was there, running through traffic with sparklers, shouting, “Honk for love.” When J.D. found out that his girlfriend had lied about having a miscarriage, he told her he needed some alone time. Smash cut to him sitting on the couch with Turk, saying, “Thanks for being alone with me.” In the reboot, J.D. leaves his concierge job and returns to Sacred Heart to take a job as the chief of medicine. Naturally, Turk has his daughter make them friendship bracelets that say Two Chiefs, which they wear on J.D.’s first day back.[Read: How the passionate male friendship died]Like any relationship that matters, their friendship isn’t always easy. The men work through conflicts big and small—J.D.’s annoyance at Turk’s competitiveness; tension between prioritizing each other and their romantic partners. When the hospital tokenizes Turk for a publicity campaign, J.D. realizes he’s been insensitive to Turk’s experience as a Black doctor, and apologizes. In an episode of the reboot, Turk flakes on a poker night with J.D. to spend time with his wife, which kicks off an argument about whose problems are worse: Turk, who has so many family responsibilities that he rarely gets to be alone, or J.D., who’s single and lonely. The show doesn’t pretend there will be an easy resolution to this, but each character makes small adjustments to try to be more understanding of the other’s situation.Often, it seems, the only way the show knows how to convey the depth of their friendship is by comparing it to a marriage. (In interviews, Braff and Faison have also compared their real-life friendship to a marriage.) Season 6 of Scrubs featured a musical episode, during which Turk and J.D. sang a ballad to each other, “Guy Love,” which included the line “We’re closer than the average man and wife.” In another episode, they discussed how they’d long planned to raise their kids—with Turk in charge of sports, and J.D. in charge of “emotional crap.” “Our kids?” J.D. said. “Turk, we’re not married.” “Dude, we’re a little married,” Turk said. “I know; I love it,” J.D. replied. In the reboot, referring to his divorce, J.D. says to Turk: “Our marriage would’ve lasted.” Though their closeness sometimes gets played for laughs—the show is a sitcom, after all—it also provides a rarely seen model for straight male intimacy. In between the jokes, Scrubs demonstrates how much richer life is for both men because of their friendship.The show hasn’t always gotten everything right. Even as it elevated their platonic life partnership, the original series frequently felt the need to clarify that Turk and J.D. aren’t gay—reflecting both the homophobia that can plague straight male friendships and the limited cultural imagination for what affection between two men can be. “There’s nothing gay about it in our eyes,” they sing in “Guy Love.” The show was also not immune to the raunchy guys-being-dudes ethos that fueled so many on-screen male friendships of the 2000s. Many of J.D. and Turk’s conversations revolved around getting laid and objectifying women, such as the spouse of a patient on life support, whom they refer to as “Tasty Coma Wife.” These moments may have been realistic depictions of toxic masculine norms—but they haven’t aged well.The reboot is aware of how times have changed. And it has baked in that self-awareness in the form of a new character, Sibby, played by Vanessa Bayer, who runs the hospital wellness program and is always cautioning the doctors to tone it down. (J.D. refers to her as the “feelings police,” though, as a sensie, he approves.) No bullying the interns the way Dr. Cox used to do; no giving people nicknames based on their appearance. Although intra-hospital hookups still occur, Turk cautions J.D.—who as chief of medicine has newfound power—not to date any subordinates.Yet the new show hasn’t fully quit all of its chauvinist crutches. When Turk gives the above advice, for example, he seems more concerned about keeping his friend out of trouble than about actually preventing potential abuses of power. And a recurring cheap bit, then and now, involves J.D. or Turk making some promise to the other, only to bail when given the chance to have sex with a woman. Given how much the show gets right about male friendship, these moments can be frustrating to watch.At the same time, it’s compelling to see men who are not always completely enlightened, who aren’t completely free of masculinity’s harmful norms, still trying their best to be good men and good friends. I have to imagine that’s the place most men find themselves in. Amid all the think pieces about pickleball and phone calls goodnight, Scrubs presents a different vision of the cure to male loneliness—no quick fix, no one correct path, just two friends choosing each other over and over again.