On this very special episode of Fake Doctors, Real Friends, Zach Braff and Donald Faison are very excited about their “fancy guest,” Dr. Jonathan Doris, the real J.D. Besides being the whole inspiration for creator Bill Lawrence to write Scrubs, he’s also the “Dr. Kelso” of the Kaiser Permanente in Los Angeles and the co-chief of their Covid Command center. They have a hilarious conversation reliving the days on set when Dr. Jon was the medical advisor for Scrubs, running back and forth from his rounds at the hospital to the set to advise the writers on various scenarios, teach the actors how to perform procedures correctly, and insert the appropriate jargon where needed, before they get some serious inside information about the virus, the vaccines, and when we might expect life to go back to normal.
Zach knows Bill is an exaggerator, but did Jon actually hide in a closet during his first code as a resident, like J.D. did on the show? There was no closet, but Jon admits to feeling out of his element: A code is when a patient is in a life-threatening situation, and every resident is supposed to go immediately to their room to do what they can. Jon realized that he’d be the first person to the room, “so I totally did that thing where you stop and pretend your shoe needs tying,” he laughs. He got busted by his senior resident, who never let him live it down, and of course Bill loved the story too. Zach says that scene is special to him because it’s so much what the show is about: Trained doctors who want to help, but are still kids and still terrified of messing up.
When they ask about his Covid experiences, Donald impresses them both with his incisive questions, which Zach says is because “Donald finally did his f**king homework this time!” They get into the case numbers and precautionary measures, what we can learn from other countries, and everything about the three vaccines: whether or not kids or people who already had Covid need to get them, whether it keeps you from spreading the virus or just not getting sick, whether it’s safe for autoimmune disorder or immunocompromised patients, and when an average, 46-year-old guy like Zach might expect to get a dose. There’s still a lot we don’t know, but no one explains it better than the real J.D. Hear all this great information and so many hilarious stories about Bill’s ultra-competitive basketball games, how Jon met his wife through the power of citrus, the weirdest thing he’s pulled out of someone’s butt, and so much more on Fake Doctors, Real Friends.
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