Janelle James plays the delightfully loopy principal of Abbott Elementary, Ava Coleman.
This article appears in the October 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
It’s kind of funny that Abbott Elementary quotes The Breakfast Club. The last episode in the first season of Quinta Brunson’s ABC series echoes the last scene of John Hughes’s 1985 coming-of-age film about a bunch of suburban Illinois high schoolers—some rich, some poor; some popular, some not—forced to sit together in Saturday detention.
“We think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are,” the titular Hughes collective writes. “You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions.” In Brunson’s version, a handful of elementary school kids, who have been left with the crackpot custodian because they don’t have permission slips for a zoo outing, produce an updated take on that letter. But because it’s 2021, their assignment is to write about their favorite superheroes. “We think it’s bananas to make us write about ‘what superhero is our favorite,’” they write, “because our real heroes are our teachers.”
The kids in Hughes’s teen movies are always insisting in various ways that when you grow up, your heart dies. Brunson turns this tradition on its head by distilling the teachers in Abbott Elementary to nothing but heart. “What if we took the approach that teachers are real people instead of heightened stereotypes?” she asked herself. In the 13-episode sitcom, which swells to 22 for the second season premiering September 21, a documentary crew embeds itself amongst the staff at Philadelphia’s underfunded and predominantly Black Willard R. Abbott Elementary School.
With little pay and even fewer resources, most of the faculty burns out fast. But enthusiastic, wide-eyed second-grade teacher Janine Teagues (Brunson) and gay wannabe-ally and history teacher Jacob “Ta-Nehisi Quotes” Hill (Chris Perfetti) soldier on. Alongside them are the lifers who have been making the best of it for years, like stern veteran kindergarten teacher Barbara Howard (a pitch-perfectly imperious Sheryl Lee Ralph) and street-smart second-grade teacher Melissa Schemmenti (Lisa Ann Walter). They are joined by bubble-headed principal Ava Coleman (a delightfully loopy Janelle James) and the guy who should have gotten her job, first-grade substitute Gregory Eddie (Tyler James Williams, expert fourth-wall breaker).
Launching in December 2021 amidst pandemic-fueled discourse around teachers being undervalued in American society, Abbott Elementary was praised by educators for its realism. Its wider audience (close to three million on average per episode) made it a hit and the face of ABC’s prime-time lineup, causing it to be hailed many times over for rejuvenating the network comedy. Unfortunately, at the same time, the conflict around vaccinations and mask mandates in schools, along with debates over critical race theory and what children are being taught, marked a renewed politicization of public education.
Hughes took a stance against authoritarian adults on screen, but off-screen he voted Republican, the same party that these days accuses teachers who educate kids about sexual orientation and gender identity of grooming, and claims they are poisoning those same kids’ minds by addressing systemic inequality and racism. Hughes bought into the American dream, and the continued dominance of white conservatism, even though it was as much of a fantasy as superheroes.
Show creator and star Quinta Brunson, seen here with co-star Tyler James Williams, believes that the show took off precisely because it isn’t overtly political.
The irony of Abbott Elementary’s success is that the show took off, Brunson believes, precisely because it isn’t overtly political. In fact, she was aghast when, in the wake of the Uvalde elementary school tragedy, someone suggested an episode on school shooters, which she considers a matter for politicians, not pop culture. Her characters are too busy for such big conversations anyway, which is why she thinks they struck such a chord. “They don’t have time to sit down and have an articulate debate,” Brunson told The New York Times. “I think that was refreshing for people—because the debate stuff entered television, but it’s rarely how people outside of New York and Los Angeles are talking.” Abbott Elementary’s fictional teachers aren’t at odds with their students but with the crumbling institution in which all of them are embedded. That is highlighted by Brunson choosing to set her show in an elementary school, where the kids need their teachers to survive.
“I’d say the main problem in the school district is, yeah, no money,” Janine says in the pilot. “The city says there isn’t any, but they’re doing a multimillion-dollar renovation to the Eagles stadium down the street.” Abbott Elementary makes it very clear that there is no such thing as fairness. Ava, the ineffectual, doomsday-prepping, social media–savvy principal, who brought in the documentary crew in a tribute to her own vanity, nabbed her job by blackmailing the superintendent, and is constantly misappropriating funds. This educational system is not a Hughes-style meritocracy; the wealth is being systematically distributed improperly. And when you look at the fact that wealthier white school districts—like the one where the students from The Breakfast Club matriculate—get over $1,000 more per child than others, it stops being a mere punch line. “It’s a bigger commentary on America’s treatment of lower classes,” Brunson told The Los Angeles Times of the series, adding, “our funding should definitely be going more into the pockets of these schools than it is a billionaire’s venture.”
The tagline for Abbott Elementary—“Working their class off”—is a clever play on these kinds of built-in hierarchies, suggesting that the teachers ultimately need to pull off the impossible and transcend their social status. But the difficulty of disrupting the system is also embedded into the show. Janine writes a letter complaining about Ava spending $3,000 earmarked for supplies on an exterior sign for the school, only to have the email bounce back to Ava, because the administrators in power are derelict in their duties. Jacob, meanwhile, starts growing vegetables on school property to improve the cafeteria food, only to be told that the cooks have no time to fit the new ingredients into their workflow. Then there’s the successful social media campaign to secure Barbara supplies (a common activity for teachers at poorly funded schools in our age of inequality), which Ava based on falsehoods, showing how even minor advances can be corrupted.
The series depicts a generational divide between the younger and the more seasoned staff. Barbara regularly guffaws at the fortitude of the junior teachers with an understandable but outdated cynicism. She works with what she’s got so she’s never let down. Instead, she is resourceful, like when she sets a parent-teacher meeting at a nail salon. Her Italian colleague Melissa calls in various borderline-illegal favors (“I got a guy for everything”); both she and Barbara take the easier route to keep breakdowns at bay (“More turnovers than a bakery,” Barbara quips of the school’s rotating staff). Brunson has talked in the past about the “constant day-after-day support you get” from teachers like Barbara and Melissa that can’t be quantified; they are able to provide this support by managing their expectations. As Melissa says, “We care so much we refuse to burn out.”
Brunson only hired writers who had some experience with the education system, and her own past is threaded through much of the show.
Brunson is too smart to be unaware that the generational divide is a meta-reflection of Abbott Elementary’s existence itself: a network show with huge reach that is peppered with subtle social messaging. Brunson was inspired to create the series after watching and more importantly experiencing her mother, who was a teacher for years, in action. She wanted TV audiences to have an inside look at the school system like she did. “It’s one thing to laugh at teachers, it’s another thing to laugh with them,” she told Deadline.
Brunson only hired writers who had some experience with the education system, and her own past is threaded through much of the show. In the pilot, Janine bends over backwards trying to replace a rug in her class—which she refers to as a “huge Xanax for kids to sit on”—that has been soiled by one of her students. Brunson had seen her mother pay for her own rug (it was that important) because it was so filthy by the end of the year. The creator and star even modeled elder stateswoman Barbara on her own mother (as Janine, Brunson even “mistakenly” refers to her as mom), and has Barbara’s daughter observe her at work, just like Brunson did. Even the school is named after one of Brunson’s particularly inspiring sixth-grade teachers, Mrs. Abbott.
“Even with no help from the higher-ups and no money from the city, I can get things done,” Janine says. “Money would still be nice though.” We are no longer in John Hughes’s Reagan era, decrying welfare queens and praising up-by-your-bootstraps self-reliance. Abbott Elementary is firmly situated in the 2020s and is an inherently socialist show, if not quite an exercise in full activism.
In one episode, Janine, realizing she is inadvertently challenging her smart kids by enlisting them to grade the other students, suggests an enrichment program involving hatching chicken eggs. The problem is that all of the kids in her class really want to be part of it. Without the money to teach all of them the same way, the school ends up getting cut-rate eggs that turn out to be for snakes (a biblical symbol if I ever saw one). In a separate scene, Gregory explains to Janine that being told he was dumb eventually turned him away from school, and that there are many ways to be gifted—special treatment always ends up working against the collective student body. Who knew an ABC sitcom would be such a convenient vehicle for Marxist instruction?
The first season of Abbott Elementary consciously remained, for the most part, in the school. “I have a very firm belief that workplace comedies should take place in the workplace,” Brunson said in Deadline. It was appropriate to initially drive home the systemic mandate of the series. But now firmly established, Abbott Elementary’s second season plans to venture outside and who knows where else. Brunson told Elle she has plans for as many as nine seasons.
Perhaps like The Breakfast Club, one of those seasons of Abbott will explore the life of Mr. Johnson, the not-all-there custodian who keeps popping up, and who was recently promoted to a series regular. “You guys think I’m just some untouchable peasant? Serf? Peon?” Carl the janitor tells the teens in Hughes’s film. “Well, maybe so. But following a broom around after shitheads like you for the last eight years, I’ve learned a couple of things. I look through your letters. I look through your lockers. I listen to your conversations, you don’t know that, but I do. I am the eyes and ears of this institution, my friends.”
Abbott’s custodian Mr. Johnson could produce a similar memorable monologue. Except this time around, he would be talking not to the kids, but to the teachers, and they would be right there beside him.
