What “Scrubs” teaches us about male friendship

This article was originally published by the American Enterprise Institute.

Every semester I have the same quiet moment of recognition.

I look across my classroom at a group of college students—bright, thoughtful young people still figuring out who they are—and I’m reminded how much of adulthood is learned in real time. Competence, judgment, resilience: none of it arrives fully formed. It develops through experience, responsibility, and, often, through the people beside us.

That thought came back to me while watching the new “Scrubs” revival. At its core, the show captures something essential about how people grow into adulthood: through friendship, mentorship, and shared responsibility. Those forces shape everyone. But in today’s cultural conversation, their absence has become especially visible among young men.

The relationship between J.D. and Turk—the show’s medical and surgical heads, respectively—has always been the emotional center of the story. They tease each other relentlessly. They make mistakes. They occasionally drive one another crazy. But underneath the humor sits something deeper: a friendship defined by loyalty, admiration, and mutual growth.

Their bond is affectionate without being sentimental and competitive without being hostile. They celebrate each other’s successes, challenge each other’s mistakes, and push each other toward maturity. In other words, their friendship is formative.

Much of the public conversation about men today focuses on crisis. Young men are falling behind in school. They are less likely to graduate from college. They report higher levels of loneliness and social isolation than previous generations.

Those trends are real and concerning. But the discussion often misses an equally important question: What kinds of relationships actually help young men grow up?

“Scrubs” offers a compelling example.

The show is fundamentally about apprenticeship: about what it means to grow into responsibility within a demanding profession. J.D. and Turk begin as young doctors who are uncertain of themselves and overwhelmed by the moral weight of medicine. They face death, uncertainty, and professional failure long before they feel ready.

But they do not face those challenges alone. Their friendship provides something increasingly scarce: a space where men can be emotionally open while still expecting excellence from one another. They support each other, but they also hold each other accountable. That balance matters.

Sociologists have long observed that friendships formed through shared work tend to be among the strongest and most enduring forms of social connection. When people confront difficult tasks together—whether in the military, the trades, or the professions—their relationships develop through common purpose rather than constant self-examination.

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued in After Virtue that practices like medicine, law, and engineering cultivate virtues precisely through participation in communities with shared standards of excellence—where younger members learn not just technique but judgment, and where that learning depends on relationships with those who have already achieved it. Growth, on this account, is never merely individual. It is always apprenticeship.

In “Scrubs”, that structure is everywhere. Dr. Cox, an older mentor in the original series, pushes J.D. toward competence with brutal honesty. The hospital itself becomes a moral classroom. Young doctors learn not only technical skill but judgment, responsibility, and humility. Within that environment, friendship becomes part of the process of formation. J.D. and Turk steady each other through uncertainty while pushing each other toward higher standards.

This combination—mentorship, shared responsibility, and peer friendship—has historically been one of the most powerful engines of male development. For generations, young men encountered those relationships in institutions that demanded something from them: apprenticeships, professional training, military service, civic organizations, and workplaces where younger members learned directly from older ones.

Robert Putnam documented the erosion of precisely these bonds in Bowling Alone. The civic and professional associations that once structured American life—and that gave young men in particular a context for shared purpose and mutual obligation—have steadily hollowed out. The consequences show up not only in declining voter participation and weakened institutions, but in the loneliness data: Men who lack the kind of workplace and civic ties Putnam tracked are also the men most likely to report having no close friends at all.

Young men may still have peers, but their friendships often lack the shared purpose that once gave those relationships depth and durability.

That is why the dynamic at the center of “Scrubs” still resonates.

The show captures a simple but often overlooked truth about how adults are made. Growth rarely happens in isolation. It happens through demanding work, steady mentorship, and friendships that challenge people to rise to the responsibilities placed before them.

Those relationships—in hospitals, classrooms, and workplaces alike—remain one of the most reliable ways societies turn young people into capable adults. And when they function well, friendship itself becomes one of the most powerful institutions of formation we have.

Samuel J. Abrams

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.