Course Correction
How ‘Abbott Elementary’ got around the gap in its storyline created by the writers strike
When a network sitcom about a group of public school teachers sets out to make its big comeback after a monthslong strike delay, an issue arises.
“Some shows are going to be able to return with no problem,” says “Abbott Elementary” creator and star Quinta Brunson, “because they’re not going by a school calendar. But we can’t even play with the summertime!”
Season 2 of the Philadelphia-set comedy ran for 22 episodes, from September 2022 to April 2023, which created room for familiar childhood fanfare like Halloween celebrations, fundraisers and Teacher Appreciation Week. The show’s writers intended to reconvene on May 2, but that ended up becoming Day 1 of the WGA strike. When they finally started working on Season 3 in October, they knew they couldn’t abandon the rhythm they had established.
“If you dip your toe into continuity and start matching up episodes with the actual times they’re going to be released, you’ve made this social contract with the audience,” says co-showrunner Justin Halpern. But it wasn’t as simple as starting the Season 3 story near its Feb. 7 premiere date and pretending the fall semester never happened.
“We have to answer for where we’ve been. The audience deserves to get their whistle wet with what happened in those five months off,” Brunson says. “I had some ideas about time-jumping, but what’s the justification? What’s the most creative way? That’s what I came into the writers’ room presenting.”
As such, the Season 3 premiere will illustrate what Janine (Brunson) and her colleagues were up to throughout the fall and explain precisely why none of the events from those months are depicted. In fact, Brunson says, the storyline presented is not only the most creative way to address the time jump, but “the most Philly way.”
“At one point, we did talk about a teachers strike,” says co-showrunner Patrick Schumacker. “We had an idea for that even before the writers strike happened, but it felt too winky, too meta.”
Brunson was relieved to find another solution. “Honestly, after the strike ended, I never wanted to hear the word ‘strike’ again,” she says. “And it’s a little inside baseball. I really try to keep to the ‘Abbott’ bubble; it’s just a sitcom about these teachers, and for us, it’s always more interesting to play in their more immediate drama.”
Halpern points out that “inherent in the core of the show is labor being devalued in the most extreme way, at least in this country. I don’t think we needed to put an extra layer on that.”
When “Abbott Elementary” does address timely topics, the laughs still come first. The writers “never want to make this a ‘very special episode’ kind of show,” Halpern says. Schumacker gives an example: “We have an episode coming up this season that deals with drug use, but we kept banging the drum: ‘This is going to be funny.’ I think people are going to be shocked. That is a balance that the show has always struck pretty well.”
So instead of putting Janine on the picket lines, Season 3 picks up with the eager but often insecure second-grade teacher making a major, plot-twisting decision. The idea for the “fun shake-up” was “always in my head,” Brunson says, but she initially thought it would require several episodes of setup. Instead, the strike-induced time jump helped her pull it off in a matter of minutes, by packing it into a “fun premiere full of things you wouldn’t expect. It’s flashy!”
The twist allowed Brunson to play Janine in a new way: “Her hair is different. She’s dressing different. We see immediately what kind of growth has happened for her in the past five months. From what I’ve seen online or from people I’ve talked to, they have no idea. They’re not guessing what happens. And for people who have seen it already, there’s alarm on their faces.”