How ‘Abbott Elementary’ gives exhausted teachers the respect they deserve

When Quinta Brunson, 35, launched Abbott Elementary nearly five years ago (Disney+), she had one clear request. The set didn’t just have to look like a school — it had to be a school. That was something the creator and star was obsessed with. So much so that the very first episode — the 2021 pilot — was filmed in a real school in Los Angeles (even though it’s set in Philadelphia, Brunson’s hometown, on the opposite coast). But that proved too complicated. So to bring to life the stories of half a dozen teachers and hundreds of students, the decision was made to recreate the closest thing to a real school at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California.

There, in Stage 16, which in its 90-year history has seen productions such as Giant, My Fair Lady, Ghostbusters, Jurassic Park, Batman Returns, The Perfect Storm, and Wild Wild West, an entire school was installed to capture what matters most: authentic stories that make people laugh out loud.

Just a few meters beyond Stage 16, in front of the trailers for the filming of The Pitt’s second season, Brunson and her co-stars gather to explain how humor and relatability remain their strengths five seasons and nearly 80 episodes later. In fact, it’s possible that combining both elements amplifies the impact of each. That’s how they describe it in a relaxed press event: Brunson and her fellow cast members Lisa Ann Walter (who plays Melissa Schemmenti), Tyler James Williams (Gregory Eddie), Sheryl Lee Ralph (Barbara Howard), William Stanford Davis (Mr. Johnson), and Chris Perfetti (Jacob Hill). Because, as they all agree, they may not have been teachers themselves, but they’ve all been students and have spent time in classrooms at some point in their lives.

“It’s something Lisa [Ann Walter] used to say when this series first started,” Brunson recalled. “When she first came on, she said: ‘Everybody, truly, you either were taught by a teacher or you are a teacher.’ And that’s literally true — it might be one of the only things in the world where every single person has a direct connection to a teacher."

“So we lead with that,” she told EL PAÍS, sitting at a desk on the Warner Bros. studio. “From the beginning of the series, I really wanted to hire writers who had an appreciation for teachers, didn’t laugh at them or think it was something to punch down to. And it wound up being that most of the writers had a teacher in their immediate or nuclear family.”

Every year, they speak with teachers that Brunson herself seeks out —friends, acquaintances… In fact, she reveals they have a sort of chat with “the real Gregory, in Philadelphia.” At the start of the school year, they hold a video call with many of these educators “to hear how people are feeling, what really are the issues they’re facing,” Brunson explains.

Tyler James Williams, who plays Gregory in the ABC series, confirms this: “You were very specific about finding heart-first writers,” he reminds Brunson. “I think that’s the key to any version of relatability or good storytelling. If you’re walking into it heart-first, you’re going to be able to connect with anybody else who has access to their heart on the other side.”

“As long as that’s what the focus is, I think you can flow a lot of different types of stories through that lens,” he continues. “But I think that’s also where you get into this place of we’re not just telling the story of teachers, we’re loving them as we’re telling it, and we’re not punching down at them, we’re trying to make fun of their plight.”

That authentic vision, free of mockery or humiliation, is fundamental to the plots, the writers, and the actors — even though the show is a comedy, and they admit laughing at themselves on screen months after filming the scenes and jokes. None of that conflicts with giving true voice to the teachers’ stories.

“I think we get a new perspective of what’s going on, the real perspective of what really is impacting them day to day, and we try to pull from that experience. And then we also try to be mindful that we’re not making a drama,” says Williams. “We are making a comedy, so while some of the realities are going to be harsh, and they’re real, we want to make sure we’re taking the material that we actually can have fun with. We don’t want you to come home and watch what you just went through in the day and feel sadness, so we add a bit of fictional fun to it just to make sure it stays a comedy.”

Lisa Ann Walter — known to 1990s kids for her role in The Parent Trap alongside Lindsay Lohan — recalls that her mother was a public school teacher in Washington, D.C., and even taught her. She remembers soaking in her mother’s stories.

“She loved her kids and she would fight and kill for them,” the actress fondly recalls. “She also didn’t take any guff from anybody. So anybody that thought they were going to get one over her, she shut that down real quick... and those were my friends. So it was wild. But she went to bed early, so everybody still partied at my house.”

The diversity of the faculty is well reflected in the show. There are men and women of all colors, ages, and backgrounds.

“For me, the point is that you don’t have to look like us to love us, or to appreciate us in our entirety as a class, as a cast,” explains Sheryl Lee Ralph, four-time Emmy nominee and 2022 winner for her role as the school’s veteran teacher — the first Black woman in over 35 years to win the award.

“People connect with the show,” she explains. “They connect with the people. It’s not connecting with the color of the people, it is the people that they are connecting with, and for us, that’s made all of the difference.”

For Brunson, that diversity is inevitable. “I think the better the stories are, the more you’re naturally going to get the diversity,” says the creator of the show, which streams on Disney+. “We’re always going to need our industry to appreciate the storytelling of people of color, to not write it off because it’s people of color. But a good story is a good story.”

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