We Are Family? Abbott Elementary Goes Beyond Hugging and Learning

Abbott Elementary is a critical darling and ratings juggernaut, and for good reason; it’s built on the solid elements of the sitcoms that preceded it, while not letting itself be defined by the past.  Tomorrow, we’re even going to have a good old-fashioned crossover episode…with crass, absurdist It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. (I’m thrilled.)

A mockumentary workplace comedy with the hugging and learning of earlier sitcoms (think The Brady Bunch or Leave It to Beaver), Abbott takes familiar tropes and rebuilds them from the ground up. Why is there a documentary crew? Because Ava, the school’s egomaniacal principal has invited them in. (The crew pushes right up to the edge of suspension of disbelief, but it’s worth it. Abbott even uses the theft of their equipment to explain the delay and shortened season of the writers’ strike.) Why is everything framed around that hugging and learning? Because second-year teacher Janine Teagues cares a lot about hugging and learning, and the documentary crew clearly sees her as a charismatic central figure to frame their work around.

And why does Janine care so much about hugging and learning?

Well.

This is one point at which Abbott sits firmly in the 21st century, when the line between work and home has been hopelessly blurred and it’s all right to talk in public about your shitty family (though you may choose not to). 

The claim that sitcoms of the past never talked about serious family conflict is a bit overblown, and was completely exploded by the time All in the Family, M*A*S*H and Maude hit the scene. Shows like Everybody Loves Raymond made the dysfunction the focal point. Abbott keeps the acid edge of the character’s lives at the edge of the screen; it’s not M*A*S*H, it’s also not a picnic. War is hell, but trying to serve the students of an under-resourced public school is a different kind of impossible, difficult situation. The educators at Abbott are often confronted with problems they can manage but never truly solve: a father who would rather pick fights than support his son, a golf course project that can get them new resources but is likely to change the whole character of their community. (The golf course and the gentrification which seems sure to follow is one of the throughlines for the fourth season, giving Abbott their first white student; he sticks out like a sore thumb in the classroom scenes.)

Family falls under this category, much of the time. The relationships we’ve seen onscreen, and the ones strongly hinted at offscreen, range from “not always easy” to “oh no.” Let’s dig in.

Abbott centers on Janine (played by series creator Quinta Brunson), with a core cast of school staff surrounding her her: the veteran teachers, dignified, churchgoing Barbara (Sheryl Lee Ralph) and brash Melissa (Lisa Ann Walter); the new guard, represented by reserved but good-hearted Gregory (Tyler James Williams), who begins the series as a substitute teacher, and neurotic history teacher Jacob (Chris Perfetti); and the show’s eccentrics, a one-two punch of Ava (Janelle James) and Mr. Johnson (William Stanford Davis), the janitor. In one of the show’s nicer touches, other members of the school staff and many of the students’ families show up as recurring characters, and the same group of children stay in each teacher’s “classroom” for the course of a season, usually quietly doing their homework while the adults carry the plot.

Janine has been looking for stability her whole life; she spent almost all of season one living with her middle school boyfriend, in part simply because they were both afraid of change. For most of the first two seasons, she looked to Barbara as a second mom. The reason she needed Barbara as a second mom, of course, was her difficult relationship with her own mother, an unreliable moocher who has never told Janine who her father even was. (Does she know? Probably? Maybe?) Janine had to hold things in her family together, resulting in a difficult relationship with her younger sister (who left Philly as soon as she was able to, leaving Janine feeling abandoned). Over Abbott’s four seasons, we’ve watched Janine grow, becoming more comfortable at taking risks and standing on her own, even starting to draw some boundaries with her mother. It hasn’t been easy for Janine, and the progress has been slow. But there has been clear progress.

Janine’s foil and love interest Gregory lost his mother young, and has the kind of relationship with his father that both of them would probably describe as “fine” if either of them were willing to talk about it. Where Janine openly longs for a mother figure and takes most of an episode trying to figure out who her father is, Gregory is reserved. He only opens up about his mother late in the show’s third season, after he and Barbara clashed over Mother’s Day. Gregory struggles in the early seasons with finding balance; he disappointed his father by choosing education over the family landscaping business. He works to find confidence as his own man, and builds it in part by his support of Abbott’s tiny garden. He, er, grows from secretly and resentfully supporting Barbara and Jacob’s project to taking ownership of the space, creating a gardening club for young men attending the school.

Barbara plays the role of Gregory’s father in her own family drama, fighting her own disappointment that her daughter has charted her own career path. Melissa has mostly come to terms with her loud, outspoken Italian family, but still wants their approval. Her primary onscreen conflict has been with her sister; they begin the series estranged and continue to snipe at each other whenever they meet. (Though in the Thanksgiving episode, they have a sweet little bonding moment when they both agree that the holiday would have been better if their bigoted uncle had dropped dead during the family party.) Ava has a grandmother in a nursing home who seems to have been her anchor, and has no interest in a relationship with her father (Keith David, who we’ll almost certainly see again). Abbott has left that plotline dangling for now, another example of the laudable patience the show has demonstrated in fleshing out its characters.

Jacob took the same path Janine’s sister Ayesha took; he left early and hasn’t looked back. His parents appear to still be together, and he has a charismatic, spotlight-stealing younger brother, Caleb, who is everything their parents wanted Jacob to be. Abbott’s most recent episodes focused on this relationship and the different experiences siblings can have within the same family: for Jacob, he was always overshadowed by his bigger, tougher, straighter younger brother. For Caleb, his brother was impossibly cool and smart; he even tells Jacob he’s proud of him for leaving their family home behind. The mutual understanding they come to leaves me hopeful that we’ll see more of Caleb (if nothing else, Tyler Perez is likely to have more free time on his schedule than the booked and busy Ayo Edebiri). If you want to know how good Abbott is at storytelling, just look at the brief moment in “Winter Show” (4.7) when Caleb briefly records Jacob dancing to the students’ ludicrous song and dance number (the culmination of the A plot, which features kindergarteners singing “Snowmans are scary/hot cocoa makes me fart”). “Send that to Mom and Dad,” Jacob says, laughing. “They will hate it.” Another show would spend half an hour telling you what Abbott showed with a few seconds of dancing and a single sentence.

Abbott draws a balance between over- and under-explanation: would Gregory be a bit less Like That if his mother hadn’t died when he was nine? Probably. Would he still be Like That? Oh, almost certainly. That gets us back to all that hugging and learning. In the world of Abbott, hugging and learning is often the solution to the problem of the day, but the show never forgets that the problem of the months, years, and lifetimes don’t go away. Jacob and Caleb are on a better track, but their parents will probably hate that. Janine’s mother will never give her the stability she still craves. Abbott and its students will continue to be vulnerable: to the charter school movement, to gentrification, to the grinding challenges of poverty (Ava keeps extra pants in her desk for students who’ve outgrown their uniforms before their parents can afford a new pair). Even Janine’s return to teaching at the end of Season 3 has cost her, and Abbott, support from the school district.

Abbott isn’t going to let its characters succumb to despair. It’s still a fast-moving, good-hearted comedy. (Brunson has drawn the line at depicting anything as serious or dramatic as a school shooting, for example.) But part of its strength is letting its characters struggle, fail, and sometimes suffer. On a practical level, you can only soften some of the losses and challenges these characters face so much. Gregory’s mother is always going to have died when he was nine. Even if Janine finds her father, she’s lived decades without him. There’s not going to be an influx of cash to save Philadelphia public schools, and things may well get worse in the next four years. Abbott’s willingness to let the darkness in, in every part of its character’s lives, is part of its strength.