I have resisted writing this post because I didn’t want to admit the news was true. A week ago, Zach Braff posted something on his Facebook page that I fully expected, but dreaded.

Many of you have asked, so here it is: it appears that “New Scrubs”, “Scrubs 2.0”, “Scrubs with new kids”, “Scrubbier”, “Scrubs without JD” is no more. It was worth a try, but alas… it didn’t work. zb

Like I said, no one could have realistically expected ABC to pick up the show. The network has not commented and creator Bill Lawrence has said he has not been told of a cancellation, but he fully expects the show has met its end … for the third time.

Part of me actually welcomes this news. The show’s future had started to get worse than the Ross-and-Rachel story lines of “Friends.” Someone had to make up their mind eventually so the finality is refreshing.

But I think the new version of the show didn’t really get a fair shake. First of all, the presence of Braff really hamstrung the creativity. He seemed to take up too much space, which didn’t allow us to really get to know the new cast. Since the main narrator mirrored the J.D. character in too many ways, that really left for some herky-jerky episodes in the first half of the 12-episode order.

So many comedies need time to find the personalities of the characters. When they are meshing with an existing cast, that’s hard enough. Putting one member of that old cast front and center with the character’s worst traits turned up to 11 (they really wrote the annoying version of JD this time around) makes the process even harder.

Combine that with the usual time-slot BS that the show deals with – I thought the move to ABC was going to end that – and Lawrence’s baby had no chance. I have no idea why they just didn’t toss it into the 8 p.m. slot on Wednesday’s after “Hank” flamed out. I know the other three comedies that night have done exceedingly well, but adding a re-run of one of them really made no sense to me. I don’t think it would have solved all of the show’s problems, but it might have helped ABC get a better sense of the show’s potential audience.

My biggest problem with the whole scenario is that I don’t think Lawrence, who was understandably focused on the development of “Cougar Town” this season, followed through on his promise that the new version of “Scrubs” would fail in a spectacular way if it didn’t make the grade. The opposite happened: the Med School version of the show went out with a whimper simply because the writers never got a chance to get a hold on the characters because they had to make too many connections to the show’s predecessor.