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After three Scrubs episodes that featured blackface were removed from Hulu last week, creator Bill Lawrence is speaking up about the decision to take them down. In a new interview on the Scrubs podcast Fake Doctors, Real Friends, Lawrence elaborated on his choice to edit the episodes, and addressed his show’s use of blackface in the past, TV Line reports.
On June 24, Hulu took down “My Fifteen Seconds” from season 3 and “My Jiggly Ball” and “My Chopped Liver” from season 5, which each feature Zach Braff‘s character and Sarah Chalke‘s character in blackface. At the time, Hulu removed the episodes, but now Lawrence says they are “probably” returning to streaming with edits. In an interview on the podcast hosted by Braff and his Scrubs co-star Donald Faison, Lawrence explained why he took the full episodes down last week instead of editing them.
“Twitter is like, ‘Why did you pull the whole episodes? Why didn’t you just edit those moments out and put them back on?’ And I said to one person, ‘It’s a pandemic. I don’t really have an editing facility up right now,'” he explained. “I’ll probably do that, but the first thing I wanted to do was get them off TV because it bummed me out personally. It just made me feel shitty.”
Lawrence also apologized to Braff, Chalke, and Faison, taking responsibility for the blackface incidents.
“The reason why that word ‘showrunner’ exists in television is because you’re the gatekeeper, and anything that gets allowed on a show you ultimately have to take responsibility for,” he said. “So, first off, super sorry that any of you guys had to deal with any stuff… Even though we’re all friends and it was a super creative and reciprocal environment, you guys still, at the end of the day, did and were receptive to doing whatever stuff we told you [to do].”
The Scrubs creator said his “ignorance” was to blame for the use of blackface. “It starts with ignorance. We were so fucking proud of ourselves for doing a very diverse show…[We had a] great black-and-white friendship that exists as a real black-and-white friendship,” he said, referring to Faison and Braff’s onscreen and offscreen bond.
“It was almost a block of arrogance where we were like, ‘We’re so good at what we’re portraying and doing and showing that we could never venture into muddy waters,'” he continued. “And even now, with that same ignorance, we never really connected the two of those things until now. You do the reading, and it’s not any different.”
