As the proverb goes, nothing is certain but death and taxes, and that includes shows ending when they had intended to end. Two comedy series co-created/executive produced by Bill Lawrence, Apple TV’s Ted Lasso and Shrinking, are doing fourth seasons having both been originally conceived as three-season arcs.
Jason Sudeikis’ Ted Lasso is returning three years after the Season 3 finale, which wrapped the adventure of affable American Ted Lasso as the coach of English Premiere League men’s soccer team AFC Richmond.
Season 4, which features the bulk of the core original cast, kicks off a planned new three-season arc chronicling Ted’s next challenge, coaching Richmond’s second division women’s football team. While driven by Sudeikis, the comedy’s return has been welcomed by fans, Apple TV and producing studio Warner Bros. TV. They all have been campaigning for more Ted Lasso, which, years after its finale, remains one of the most popular titles on the streamer globally.
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Meanwhile, Apple TV recently announced a surprise early Season 4 renewal for Jason Segel’s Shrinking, co-starring Harrison Ford. That show also had been conceived as a triptych, with each season tackling a different theme — grief, forgiveness and moving forward, respectively — as Segel’s therapist character has been dealing with the death of his wife.
In 2008, Lawrence’s Scrubs received a pickup for an eighth and final season, which ended with what was written as a series finale. The medical comedy was revisited once when it was renewed for a ninth season, which went in a new direction with a largely new cast of interns, including Eliza Coupe, Michael Mosley, Kerry Bishé and Dave Franco. Now it’s been brought back again with a revival featuring the OG stars, which premieres February 25 on ABC.
In an interview with Deadline tied to the return of Scrubs, Lawrence addressed the three series carrying on beyond their original finales with new multi-season runs.
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“I’ve tried to figure out how to navigate this,” Lawrence said. “Everybody who has been talking to me lately, goes oh, Shrinking just got picked up for fourth season, it was a three-season story, and Ted Lasso is going, and Scrubs is rebooted.”
He wanted to draw a clear delineation.
“Scrubs is different. We made 1100 episodes of Scrubs. It’s an old-school model, and it’s fun to see those characters again,” Lawrence said. “But when people are saying, Hey, you said Shrinking was a three-season story. Well, first of all, we made 36 episodes of Shrinking, that’s a season and a half of Scrubs.”
Airing between 2001 and 2010 on NBC and then ABC, Scrubs produced a total of 182 episodes. For its first six years, it delivered between 22-25 episodes a season.
“Secondly, what’s cool about streaming television is when you pitch a story for Ted Lasso that has a beginning, middle and end, you can do that story and be done with it,” Lawrence continued. “And then, anybody that’s seen the pictures can tell that Jason and his gang are telling a brand new three-season story with Ted Lasso.”
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Recently released first-look images for Ted Lasso Season 4, which will premiere in the summer, show Sudeikis’ character with his new team and assistant coach.
“The same way that Shrinking, if the fourth season started and Jason Segel woke up and went, ‘you know I’ve been thinking about it, and I was still super sad about my wife,’ everybody would be like, What are you doing? We saw that already,” Lawrence added. “But as a writer, he told 36 stories with these actors and actresses. We have a new story to tell, and that’ll either be, two- or three-season story or it won’t. I never find that stuff daunting.”
As for Scrubs, the new arc will follow the original’s intended series finale, not the actual one.
“We picked up this year as if the eighth year was the finale, and we’re starting now,” Lawrence said.
Given the backlash Season 9 received, are we pretending that it never happened?
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“I’ll never pretend Season 9 never happened because, if I ever write my own Hollywood story, it was a fascinating thing because it was sold as a spinoff, it was supposed to be called Scrubs Med and be about med school,” Lawrence said. “And when I look back, I’m like, oh, as the ninth year of Scrubs, it didn’t work, but as the first year of a show about Michael Mosley and Eliza Coupe and Kerry Bishé and Dave Franco, it was interesting. I thought the writers that did it did a pretty good job.”
The Scrubs revival marks Lawrence’s return to broadcast TV where he spent the bulk of his career until switching to streaming with the 2020 Ted Lasso. In addition to Scrubs, he created ABC’s Cougar Town and co-created the network’s Spin City. Readjusting to the demanding network TV production schedule has not been easy.
“I shoot shows now that you shoot them and there on a year later,” he said of his current streaming slate that also includes Bad Monkey for Apple TV and Rooster for HBO. “And this one, they’re like, Hey, you want to watch a cut? It’s on in like, eight days. It’s very fast-paced and crazy.”
Lawrence joked that, at 57, he may be too old for that grueling pace.
“If I was running the show, I would have already postponed the air dates,” he said about the Scrubs revival, run by Aseem Batra. “I have officially reached the age that in writers rooms now, if we are writing late at like 930 [PM], I get so grumpy they lead me out of the room like an old man and go, Why don’t you come back tomorrow and see what we did?
Scrubs debuts February 25 on ABC.
