One of the few bright spots in the otherwise tumultuous time we are in has been the number of projects that otherwise bored celebrities have started in order to fill their own time and kill time for us. John Krasinski, for instance, started a cute video show devoted to good news, and he had his The Office co-star Steve Carell on his first episode. Chrissy Teigen has been settling other people’s disputes on Twitter, Reply/All is doing weekly podcasts at the moment, and Courteney Cox and her daughter are now making TikTok videos.
The project I have been most excited about, so far, however, is the Scrubs rewatch podcast that Donald Faison and Zach Braff launched this week called Fake Doctors, Real Friends. Scrubs is my all-time favorite sitcom, and we here at Uproxx are enormous fans of the series. We even appreciate the inadvertent PSA on social distancing from a heartbreaking episode of Scrubs that went viral last week.
In this week’s first episode of Fake Doctors, Real Friends, Zach Braff and Donald Faison cover the pilot, their audition stories, Braff’s huge crush on Sarah Chalke, and how otherwise fond they are of the entire cast. There were also a couple of interesting facts, like that Sam Llloyd (who played Ted) is the nephew of Christopher Lloyd of Back to the Future fame and that Matt Winston (who played Dr. Jeffrey Steadman in the pilot and a couple of other episodes before being phased out) is the son of the famous special-effects wizard, Stan Winston. (Sam Lloyd, by the way, has been battling brain cancer).
Maybe the most interesting thing we learned from the first episode of the Scrubs podcast, however, is why Donald Faison had to wear braces on Clueless. It comes up, actually, because Donald Faison’s teeth are different in early episodes of Scrubs than they are in later episodes. Why?
“I had baby teeth when we started shooting,” Faison says, exasperatingly, because Braff is making him talk about it. “I don’t have baby teeth anymore. I spent a lot of money on new teeth. There it is. That’s the story.”
Braff then teases him about the evolution of his teeth, starting with the fake braces he wore on Clueless.
“Yes,” Faison says. “Because they were trying to hide my small teeth!” Not only that, Faison continues, but there was a reason he also wore hats so much in that movie. “They shaved my head in Clueless,” Faison says, “because my hair was receding at 18.” Because of his early receding hairline, he said, his friends called him George Jefferson.
“But I never knew,” Braff says, “that your braces in Clueless were because of your f**ked-up Chiclet teeth!”
“Yes, and then the hats that I wore in Clueless were because of my hairline.”
This story will apparently lead to another story later on in the podcast series, about the time that Faison decided — on his own — to get braces on the back of his teeth, and there were apparently a stretch of episodes of Scrubs where he spoke with a lisp because of it.
One episode in, and this podcast is already amazing.