“Abbott Elementary” teaches reading, writing and roll camera
Willis Kwakye has attended the same school since 2021. He’s 13 now, an eighth-grader, a veteran, someone who knows his way around the classrooms and the cafeteria. And sometimes, when he’s in his uniform with a math worksheet in front of him, “I can even think it’s real school for a little bit,” he said.
His classmate Arianna White, also 13, knew just what he meant. “It feels a lot like school, except we’re just filming and there’s a lot of cuts,” she said.
Kwakye and White were speaking, via video call, from a classroom on the set of “Abbott Elementary.” (They were in one of the real classrooms, where child actors complete their mandated three hours of instruction per workday.) The Emmy-winning ABC sitcom mockumentary has recently matriculated for a third season and already been renewed for a fourth. Set in a fictional K-8 school in Philadelphia — though actually filmed in Los Angeles — it requires the presence of about 150 school-age children each season.
In any given episode, those kids can be seen raising their hands in class, scurrying past one another in the hallways, giggling at their teachers’ antics. But “Abbott Elementary” diverges from most scripted series involving children in two significant ways: The show uses its child actors sparingly, giving them a handful of lines per episode and only requiring their presence one or two days each week. And for the most part, it lets them be kids.
“Having kids just be themselves actually looks really good in our world,” Quinta Brunson, the series creator and star, said in a recent phone interview.
Years ago, when Brunson was conceiving the show, she had already decided that it would center on the teachers, not the students. “When kids are carrying a show, that’s a lot of work,” she said. “And it’s not the most natural work for kids to do.”
But the show still needed child actors. (A school without them would be … strange.) The casting director, Wendy O’brien, was tasked with finding children who were not too practiced, not too fidgety, who could realistically represent classrooms full of bright, curious public school students.
“We just try to look for real kids that you would see in a real elementary school,” she said. “What we often say to parents is ‘Don’t coach them. Just let them be.’ ”
Still, Brunson had worried about how these real children would behave. The show is committed to casting children whose ages align with their characters. So, the actors in the kindergarten classrooms are actually 5-year-olds, and most 5-year-olds struggle with sitting still from take to take.
“What was daunting was the idea that, oh, my goodness, maybe they won’t act exactly right,” Brunson said. “But I’ll tell you what, you can get that from adults.”
What she discovered was that letting children act like themselves, right or wrong, helped make the show feel textured, grounded. Their from the base version to expansions and, timed to the release of “Dune: Part 2,” the new Dune Imperium: Uprising, which can work as a standalone game but
They dealt badly with drift by adding months. He was also navigating a vast array of calendars starting in a vast array of ways in the vast Roman Empire.
He introduced his Julian calendar in 46 BCE. It was purely solar and counted a year at 365.25 days, so once every four years an extra day was added. Before that, the Romans counted a year at 355 days, at least for a time.
But still, under Julius, there was drift. There were too many leap years! The solar year isn’t precisely 365.25 days! It’s 365.242 days, said Nick Eakes, an astronomy educator at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
Thomas Palaima, a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said adding periods of time to a year to reflect variations in the lunar and solar cycles was done by the ancients. The Athenian calendar, he said, was used in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries with 12 lunar months.
That didn’t work for seasonal religious rites. The drift problem led to “intercalating” impromptu reactions — yawning, stretching, making faces — nudge scenes toward greater realism. And the cameras are there to capture it all, as quickly as possible, so that the children can return to their mandatory schooling or simply take a break.
There are always many child actors on set together and they’re encouraged to talk to one another, help one another, form friendships. Often, classroom scenes are blocked so that children aren’t needed for more than an establishing shot, and those classrooms are designed to resemble real classrooms as closely as possible.
“When we were filming the first season, a lot of them didn’t understand that I wasn’t a teacher, because everything felt so organic,” Brunson said.
an extra month periodically to realign with lunar and solar cycles, Palaima said.
The Julian calendar was 0.0078 days (11 minutes and 14 seconds) longer than the tropical year, so errors in timekeeping still gradually accumulated, according to NASA. But stability increased, Palaima said.
The Julian calendar was the model used by the Western world for hundreds of years. Enter Pope Gregory XIII, who calibrated further. His Gregorian calendar took effect in the late 16th century. It remains in use today and, clearly, isn’t perfect or there would be no need for leap year. But it was a big improvement, reducing drift to mere seconds.
Why did he step in? Well, Easter. It was coming later in the year over time, and he fretted that events related to Easter like the Pentecost might bump up against pagan festivals. The pope wanted Easter to remain in the spring.
He eliminated some extra days accumulated on the Julian calendar and tweaked the rules on leap day. It’s Pope Gregory and
The writers aim for ageappropriate dialogue and limit the amount of it to make memorization easier. Directors will often bring children behind the camera or over to the monitors to help them understand what a scene requires. And crucially, the children also have their own catering, heavy on the chicken tenders.
“It’s very good,” said Justin Tan, a writer and director on the show. “Sometimes I want to dig into that.” Tan also noted that the show never makes a child the butt of any joke. “I don’t want to be laughing at a kid,” he said.
Tyler James Williams, a star of the show, was a child actor in “Sesame Street” and “Everybody Hates Chris,” and he often found the experience stressful. “Part of
his advisers who came up with the really gnarly math on when there should or shouldn’t be a leap year.
“If the solar year was a perfect 365.25 then we wouldn’t have to worry about the tricky math involved,” Eakes said. being a child actor comes with a certain amount of trauma,” he said. “It just does. It’s a child, working an adult’s job.”
He was determined that “Abbott Elementary” would be different. He has encouraged the producers to make time on set feel less like a job and more like an afterschool activity, something that a child might do just for the fun of it. He also advocated for coaches who could communicate a director’s desires to the children. He believes that these efforts are working; to him, the children seem relaxed, happy, curious.
“They ask questions,” he said approvingly. “I don’t want kids here who aren’t interested in this.”
Kristin Minkler, lead teacher at the on-set school, sees “Abbott Elementary” as distinct from
people will say ... that a woman’s leap year prerogative, like most of her liberties, is merely a glittering mockery.”
The pre-sadie Hawkins tradition, however serious or tongue-in-cheek, could have empowered women but merely perpetuated stereotypes. The proposals were to happen via postcard, but many such cards turned the tables and poked fun at women instead.
Advertising perpetuated the leap year marriage game. A 1916 ad by the American Industrial Bank and Trust Co. read thusly: “This being Leap Year day, we suggest to every girl that she propose to her father to open a savings account in her name in our own bank.”
There was no breath of independence for women due to leap day. other shows. In her 19 years in the industry, this is the most difficult show she has worked on, mostly owing to its size. “I’ve never been on a project where almost every day you have anywhere from 40 to 120 kids,” she said. But it is also by far her favorite show. “They put the kids first, and as a viewer, you get that sense,” she said.
What does putting the kids first mean? “They’re just expected to be kids, and they’re allowed to be kids,” she said.
Brunson hopes that other shows might follow the example of “Abbott Elementary” in caring for the social and emotional needs of their child actors. And she trusts that the children, in their time on set, are learning more than their mandated curriculum.
“I hope that the kids on this show, when they leave here and go on in other projects, they know what health should look like,” she said.
Kwakye doesn’t spend a lot of time contemplating these things, probably because it’s his first professional job and he has never experienced the alternatives. But he remembers the moment when Janelle James, who plays Abbott’s cheerfully amoral principal, comforted him after a flubbed line and how Brunson once greeted him in the hallway.
“She said, ‘Thank you for coming,’ even though she picked me,” he marveled. Mostly “Abbott Elementary” has taught him that he would like to continue to act.
“Everything’s really fun to do,” he said. “It really makes me want to do it more.”
be stated stepped in to declare what date was used by leaplings for such things as drivers licenses, whether Feb. 28 or March 1.
Technology has made it far easier for leap babies to jot down their Feb. 29 milestones, though there can be glitches in terms of health systems, insurance policies and with other businesses and organization that don’t have that date built in.
There are about 5 million people worldwide who share the leap birthday out of about 8 billion people on the planet. Shelley Dean, 23, in Seattle, chooses a rosy attitude about being a leapling. Growing up, she had normal birthday parties each year, but an extra special one when leap years rolled around. Since, as an adult, she marks that nonleap period between Feb. 28 and March 1 with a low-key “whew.”
This year is different.
“It will be the first birthday that I’m going to celebrate with my family in eight years, which is super exciting, because the last leap day I was on the other side of the country in New York for college,” she said. “It’s a very big year.”