Abbott Elementary just aired a perfect season of TV.
Who would have predicted that an ABC sitcom about teachers would be this exciting? Or that it would somehow become the buzziest comedy of the season? Not a Netflix dark comedy. Not a bingeable Hulu series starring some major movie star. It’s what we once thought was going extinct: a network comedy series that everyone is talking about.
Tuesday night’s season finale of Abbott Elementary on ABC had the school going on a field trip to the zoo, and everyone contemplating change and the future.
Sheryl Lee Ralph’s Barbara Howard started off the day noting how different kids have become. “I blame Real Housewives. The kids watch with their mothers and every season a new beast is created.” But the real marker of time moving on comes when she takes her students to see Duster, the tuatara reptile that arrived at the zoo the same year she started teaching. Duster, it turns out, has been “retired,” making Mrs. Howard wonder if it’s about time she do the same.
Then there’s Quinta Brunson’s Janine Teagues, who receives news that her boyfriend’s career as a rapper who makes educational songs about the dangers of drug use is actually taking off. He gets offered a job in New York City and wants to take Janine with him. At a time when her potential as a teacher seems to be meeting her passion, she’s forced to decide whether to move to New York or continue to grow at Abbott Elementary, where she seems to be thriving.
The episode, like all episodes of Abbott Elementary, was a delight.
There was a deft balance of heart and humor that has come to define the show. (I particularly loved the line about Mrs. Howard getting better with age “like good wine and Stanley Tucci.”) Janelle James and Lisa Ann Walter continued to give TV’s best scene-stealing performances, while Ralph’s nuanced work as the formidable, yet vulnerable Mrs. Howard cemented her status as the best new comedy character of the year.
It’s the rare The Office-inspired series to make the mockumentary earnestly work, compared to something like What We Do in the Shadows, which succeeds because it’s such an outrageous spoof. What made The Office so great is that you really felt like you were a fly on the wall witnessing people’s lives, and, more, the characters’ relationships vibrated in a way that felt real—kooky and annoying as they might be, your coworkers are the people you spend most of your time with, and they do start to function like a family. Abbott Elementary even manages to have its own Jim and Pam will-they-won’t-they relationship without it feeling cliché.
But it’s not just that Abbott Elementary is good that made its first-season run feel remarkable. It’s the rare show that is “cool” and “buzzy” in online circles that typically prefer to obsess over line readings in Succession or theorize about plot points in Severance. What people actually watch—Young Sheldon is in Season 5, folks, while Yellowstone is the most-watched show on TV—and what is considered “hot” by the media and influencers has typically been so extremely divergent that it’s the press that can seem out of touch.
This is a series that is not only incredibly popular—it’s the most-tweeted comedy of the year, and ABC’s biggest comedy hit since Modern Family—but also has the kind of online “cred” that’s typically reserved for a Fleabag or Mad Men. This isn’t The Big Bang Theory being a smash and social media snobs rolling their eyes. It’s an earnest, heartwarming broadcast comedy watched by most of America, but also the coolest show on TV.
It’s tempting to compare its success to the recent rises of Schitt’s Creek or Ted Lasso: that it’s nice to have a show that makes you feel good while times are as dark as they are. But I think there’s something more to Abbott Elementary breaking through at this moment.
A TV show about teachers is hardly new. But this feels special.
I love that Abbott Elementary doesn’t split time between storylines about students and the teacher characters. The students are always around, and the show never lets you forget what it’s like to have a day in service of their needs. But this is a show about the teachers. It is about the people who have made the choice to devote their lives to an indispensable profession that still requires so much investment on their part, financial and emotional. We’re learning about what motivates them to do this job, what it takes to get through a day, and, more, what they themselves receive from it.
Janine and Barbara have a special relationship. James’ Principal Coleman has some of the funniest observations on TV. But in the background of all those moments and arcs are the children, a constant reminder of how they are always thinking about the students.
The show is illuminating about the reality of how underfunded and underappreciated teachers are. What’s beautiful about Abbott Elementary is how blunt it is about that situation, but never pedantic—there’s no “Very Special Episode” here. The reality is that teachers have to be clever and energetic about doing their jobs with the limited resources they have, and that is baked into every episode of the series. The fact that the show doesn’t get preachy about it, instead just displaying at face value what it’s like for people in this profession, is incredibly powerful.
The last two years have made us finally start to realize what teachers mean to us. Remote learning illuminated some parents to what it takes to be an educator. We were reminded just how crucial schools are to a functioning society. There was a despicable, disgusting discourse when schools were closed for COVID safety reasons where some parents criticized teachers for being too lazy to get back to work. While that ridiculous argument should not be validated, it did have the effect of galvanizing rational, empathetic people around what a critical role teachers play in our lives and an appreciation for the sacrifices they make on a daily basis.
When I think about the TV this year that has been the most memorable, or made me laugh the most, it’s a montage of moments from the first season of Abbott Elementary. It’s Principal Coleman retreating from a zombie scare. “They eat the hottest ones first. Let me back my tasty ass up.” It’s the flawless scene where the teachers meet Jacob Hill’s boyfriend (Chris Perfetti) for the first time and are shocked that he’s Black. It’s how much my heart soared when Barbara invited Janine to dinner after a taxing Parent-Teacher Night.
It’s not easy to be a “nice” show. To do the touching and meaningful thing while still wielding a sharp sense of humor. There’s been a tenor underscoring much of Abbott Elementary’s success of it being an “underdog” of sorts, and that’s true. It’s a series created by and starring a Black woman, and the cast is so diverse that the only white male character is gay, itself an important commentary about how minorities are often the people who go into this line of work. That’s why the last moments of the season finale were so lovely.
Custodian Mr. Johnson (William Stanford Davis) asks the students who stayed behind from the field trip to write an essay about superheroes, and they choose to write about their teachers. There’s a different show on which this is corny, and a different audience that would find it unbearable. But Abbott Elementary earned that moment. It had done such an impressive job drawing these dynamic characters and subtly working its politics into its stories that a scene that emotional and that inspiring worked.
The only question now is, what are we going to do on our Tuesday nights without this show?
