QUINTA BRUNSON / THE INSPIRATION SERIES
A whole world
between
the bells.
The people, affection and careful comic choices
behind Abbott Elementary.
By Rob Urban
A teacher has a life that continues after a student leaves the room.
It is an obvious fact, and a wonderfully productive place for a comedy to begin. There are colleagues, friendships, small irritations, proud moments and opinions that have very little to do with the lesson plan.
Quinta Brunson’s imagination makes those lives worth spending time with. In Abbott Elementary, the school is a workplace populated by people whose differences give it energy.
I admire the affection in that choice. Someone doing necessary work can also be funny, particular and imperfect. The audience gets the pleasure of coming to know a person.
Brunson’s accounts of making the series reveal how much attention supports that pleasure. The people behind the show are as interesting as the idea that brought them together.
FIRST / THE MEMORY
A familiar room,
seen differently.
In her 2022 Fresh Air conversation with Terry Gross, Brunson recalls visiting her mother’s kindergarten classroom as an adult. She had once been a student there herself. Returning gave her a different view of a familiar world.
She describes her mother’s mutual respect with her students and connects that experience to Barbara Howard, the veteran teacher played by Sheryl Lee Ralph.
She also remembers Ms. Abbott, her sixth-grade teacher, helping her feel secure in a new school. The series carries that teacher’s name.
I find that origin beautiful in its specificity. An adult remembers how someone helped a child enter the world, then gives that memory a place in her own work.
The care travels through a different form. Viewers can encounter the warmth of those relationships without having known either classroom.
SECOND / THE KNOWLEDGE
There is life
around the
lesson plan.
Brunson told Education Week’s Ileana Najarro in 2022 that she wanted writers with connections to educators. Two members of the team had themselves been teachers.
She describes the work around the formal school day: preparation, learning new programs, and the after-school dance class her mother decided to teach.
Those particulars expand what a school story can contain. A teacher’s choices emerge from time spent with children, colleagues and responsibilities that extend past the bell.
Brunson also explains that the majority-Black world of the series reflects the West Philadelphia schools she knew. Familiarity supplies the starting point.
I appreciate the confidence of letting that world be specific. An audience can enter through recognizable feelings while discovering a setting in its own detail. The writing has people and experiences to return to when a broad description would be too thin.
THIRD / THE VIEW
You belong
in this room.
In Libby Hill’s 2022 interview for TheWrap, Brunson explains wanting viewers to feel as if they worked at Abbott, too.
The mockumentary form serves that intimacy. She describes the importance of finding director Randall Einhorn, whose experience included The Office, and recognizing that he understood the visual language she wanted.
That choice matters to my appreciation of her authorship. The feeling of being in a room is partly a matter of where the camera stands, what it notices and whose reaction it allows us to see.
A colleague’s expression can carry an entire opinion. A moment that seems incidental can become the thing we remember.
Brunson’s account gives that experience a maker. Einhorn’s expertise helps translate the intended relationship with the audience into the way the show looks and moves.
FOURTH / THE REVISION
Listen for
the laugh.
SDSU Magazine’s 2024 visit to the production brings more of the writing team into view.
Justin Halpern describes beginning the day with casual conversation among the writers. Riley Dufurrena explains how they propose new jokes after a table read when a line has not landed.
Brunson, in comments for the story, credits Halpern’s role in running the room and Dufurrena’s ability to keep the larger picture in mind, developed in part through his experience as a script coordinator.
I like the combination of play and attention. A funny conversation may yield something useful. A script then has to be heard, reconsidered and made more precise.
The people bring different kinds of care to that process. The result may arrive as a light half-hour in a viewer’s day, but many small decisions have helped it feel that way.
FIFTH / THE CARE
The children
have schoolwork
of their own.
There is another classroom behind this television classroom.
In Christi Carras’s 2024 Los Angeles Times report, republished by Education Week, lead studio teacher Kristin Minkler and colleagues including Sandy McNeil and Ali Bloom describe supporting the child performers’ education.
The children do schoolwork between filming. Their classroom contains learning materials, personal touches and student art. The production’s art department sometimes borrows or commissions that artwork for the sets.
Brunson expresses appreciation for the teachers’ patience and their attention to the children’s education.
I find the student artwork especially lovely. Something made in the real classroom can enter the fictional one. Behind a show about teaching are people doing the daily work of teaching.
Giving them space in the story makes the production feel fuller. The children are students as well as performers, with their own work to do and adults helping them do it.
The generosity I admire in Quinta Brunson begins with attention to people.
A mother’s classroom. A teacher who made a transition less frightening. Writers with their own knowledge of schools. A director who understands how a glance can become a joke. Studio teachers helping a child through the day.
Those relationships give the series a human scale. The subject is large, but the encounters are close enough to recognize.
That is one of comedy’s great pleasures. We can become interested in someone through a small, funny moment, then find ourselves caring about what happens to them.
Brunson has made a world with room for that attachment. I admire the imaginative work involved, and the care that lets the people inside it keep surprising us.
Sources: Brunson’s interviews with Fresh Air, Education Week and TheWrap; SDSU Magazine’s production visit; and Christi Carras’s Los Angeles Times reporting, republished by Education Week. Linked throughout. Interpretation by Rob Urban.
More from my desk: Writer’s Notes.