Some of the Abbott Elementary teachers are starting to worry about the kids. Are they on their phones too much? And what are all those weird clapping games they play? The Daily Beast’s Obsessed has your exclusive first look at the latest episode of the ABC sitcom, in which the kids are getting cult-y.
“It’s too peaceful in here,” Melissa (Lisa Ann Walter) whines to Barbara (Sheryl Lee Ralph), surrounded by silent kids in the cafeteria.
“That’s because these children spend all their time on their phones,” Barbara says. “They barely interact with each other,” she continues, giving Ava (Janelle James)—who is glued to her phone screen—a snide look. Ava, understanding that she has some unavoidable principal duties, snaps back into reality.
Someone’s got to detach these kids from their phones. Ava suggests: Why not play a little pat-a-cake? Barb and Melissa launch into the “Miss Mary Mack” hand game while the students watch.
It turns out that all that TikTok consumption has led these kids down the same pat-a-cake lane, because—even several generations after their teachers—the kids are absolute experts at this game. In fact, they’re so good that Barbara and Melissa are afraid of their talent. Their new slogan goes a little like this: “Girls rule, boys drool, we use too much fossil fuel!” There’s a young Shakespeare amongst the Abbott kids, I swear. Then conspiracy theories joined the rhyme: “Don’t call me sir, don’t call me miss, because aliens do exist. He’s too short, she’s too tall, when will this country fall?”
When it came to filming this scene, Abbott Elementary director and EP Randall Einhorn said the kids immediately knew what to do when it came to the hand games.
“Honestly, I had to tell them nothing,” Einhorn exclusively tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “I sat back and watched. We rolled on take one and I thought, ‘They know exactly what they’re doing.’”
Einhorn adds: “Working with kids is so much fun because they know exactly where the funny bits are. I just empowered them to be great—the less you do the better people can be,” he says. “We keep the set under control, but if it isn’t fun with the kids on the day it isn’t going to be funny on screen.”
This episode, titled “Alex,” follows Gregory (Tyler James Williams) as he tries to assist a former student named Alex (Mason Renfro) out of a rough patch in learning.
“It’s always incredibly fun to write comedic bits for our kid performers,” Abbott Elementary EP Justin Halpern adds. “We are blessed at Abbott to have a group of incredibly talented and hilarious kids and it allows us to show the reality of how much comedy happens naturally with kids at school every day.”
As for the rest of this week’s latest episode of Abbott Elementary, writer Justin Tan teases that it “is a culmination of a couple of seeds we’ve planted earlier in the season.”
Abbott Elementary airs Wednesday night on ABC at 9 p.m. ET, and will be available to stream on Hulu the next day.
