Zach Braff
The 2000s' designated sensitive everyman: J.D. on Scrubs for nine years, writer-director-star of Garden State, and the guy whose iPod playlist a million college kids quietly adopted as a personality. For one decade, Zach Braff's daydreaming, monologuing, indie-scored inner life was the inner life of the culture.
Zach Braff grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, and in 2001 — at twenty-six — landed the role that defined him: John "J.D." Dorian, the daydream-prone narrator at the center of Scrubs. The show's fantasy cutaways and voiceover ran on Braff's particular register, boyish sincerity with a whiff of melancholy, and it earned him an Emmy nomination and three Golden Globe nominations across the decade. He played J.D. from 2001 to 2010, leaving as a regular after eight seasons and appearing in a handful of episodes of the show's final season.
Then came the swing that turned a sitcom lead into a generational figure: Garden State, which Braff wrote, directed, and starred in during his Scrubs tenure, premiering at Sundance in 2004. The film made him indie cinema's unlikeliest auteur — and the soundtrack he personally compiled won a Grammy and turned his music taste into a cultural force. For a few years, liking The Shins because Zach Braff told you to was one of the most common ways a young person acquired an identity.
He was simply everywhere in the mid-2000s: voicing the title chicken in Disney's Chicken Little in 2005, starring in The Last Kiss in 2006, getting famously Punk'd in 2005 when the show tricked him into chasing down and swinging at a supposed vandal caught spray-painting his Porsche — with Scrubs co-star and real-life best friend Donald Faison in on the setup. The Braff-Faison friendship, on screen and off, was its own beloved artifact, the era's reigning bromance.
When Scrubs ended, the ubiquity faded, and Braff's later chapters — including the 2013 Kickstarter campaign for his follow-up film Wish I Was Here, which hit its $2 million goal in three days and stirred a debate about celebrities crowdfunding — never recaptured the moment when his sensibility and the culture's were the same thing. But that's what makes the peak so nostalgic: for the length of one decade, being a person with big feelings and good headphones felt like being Zach Braff.
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