Quinta Brunson’s mockumentary sitcom about an underfunded Philadelphia school is quick, warm and better acted than network comedy usually manages. It softens as the seasons pile up, but Sheryl Lee Ralph and Janelle James keep it sharp.
Quinta Brunson has built a sitcom out of a form most people assumed was used up. A documentary crew follows the staff of Willard R. Abbott Elementary in West Philadelphia through a school year, and the teachers talk to the camera between lessons about what went wrong and whose fault it was. The Office and Parks and Recreation wore the glance at the lens down to a reflex; Brunson uses it anyway, and she is right to. Abbott Elementary is quick, warm and acted with more precision than network comedy usually bothers with. We recommend it, with the caveat that its lead can wear on you and its later seasons run long.
Aiyana Trotter and Michael Whetstone’s production design gives us corridors of painted brick, a ceiling tile that is always about to give up, and classrooms where the motivational posters are newer than the desks. Kurt Jones and Michael J. Pepin shoot it under fluorescent light with a camera that zooms as if it has just remembered where the joke is. Hachy Mendez and Susan Michalek dress the staff so you know them before they speak: pearls and cardigans for Barbara, bright shift dresses for Janine, and for the principal an outfit that cost more than the photocopier. The editors, Sarah Zeitlin and Elizabeth Praino among them, cut to the look at the lens a beat late, which is where the laugh is.
Brunson plays Janine Teagues, a second-grade teacher in her second year who believes that if she tries hard enough the building will stop falling down. She has written Janine with enough self-knowledge that the character can hear herself. Tyler James Williams is Gregory Eddie, a substitute who wanted the principal’s job and did not get it, and he does the show’s best face: a man deciding, each time, whether it is worth saying something. Their scenes together are careful, and the show takes more time with them than the situation can bear.
Sheryl Lee Ralph is the one we would keep. Barbara Howard has taught kindergarten for longer than Janine has been alive, and Ralph plays her as a woman who has seen a hundred Janines and buried most of them. There is a moment in the first season, in a corridor, where Barbara says nothing and lets Janine finish, and we were more moved than a school sitcom had any right to make us. Her patience is what did it.
Janelle James is the other pole. Ava Coleman got the principal’s job by means the pilot explains and we will not, and runs the school as a hobby she is losing interest in. James delivers lines about the children with the flat confidence of someone who has never met one, and we laughed out loud, then felt slightly guilty, because the joke is that the children are paying for her. Lisa Ann Walter’s Melissa Schemmenti can get you anything through a man she knows, Chris Perfetti’s Jacob Hill has read all the right books and none of his pupils, and William Stanford Davis, as the caretaker Mr. Johnson, walks through scenes dropping information that should have been classified.
The flaws are the flaws of American network comedy. Seasons two, four and five run to 22 episodes each, and no writing staff can fill that many without a few in which the ceiling tile is the plot. Janine’s cheerfulness is written to be tiring and it is, and around the middle of any season we wanted to move to a different table in the staffroom. It also softens: the first season is angry about money, the way a teacher is angry about money, and by later seasons the anger has been folded into affection.
It is warmer than The Office and less silly than Parks and Recreation, and it has a subject those shows did not: a system failing children while the adults in the building do their best. It never makes speeches about that. It shows a class without a rug.
Watch it in the evening after a bad day at work. It knows what one of those feels like, and it will not tell you everything is fine.
