The new urban-ethnic sitcom delivers gallows humor and condescension.
Watching the ABC prime-time comedy series Abbott Elementary, you wouldn’t know there was a crisis with America’s school system or an aggressive movement by teachers’ unions against parents and families. Like most TV entertainment, the show is designed that way. Its comic distraction is consistent with the methods of mainstream media to instill its hidden agenda inside popular fare. Abbott Elementary promotes the collapse of American education and, by laughing at the problems, hides the self-serving and recently exposed political interests of teachers’ unions. Abbott Elementary teaches hegemony.
This starts with the show’s mockumentary format. Media-obsessed principal Ava Coleman (Janelle James) invites a promotional film crew to the school to capture the overworked staff and the throngs of schoolkids in their everyday routines. “Y’all getting this, right?” substitute teacher Gregory Eddie (Tyler James Williams) smirks, looking into the camera to remind us of the show’s snarky fake realism. Other staffers are equally cynical, but brief: “They are covering underfunded, poorly managed public schools in America.”
That’s the basis of this satirical series, which was created by Quinta Brunson, an Internet humorist, who stars as Janine Teagues, the most optimistic teacher at the Philadelphia inner-city public school — that means for black kids. Janine, described as “pushy, squeaky, and annoying, naïve, clingy, too cheerful,” is a child herself. Brunson and Janelle James apply their Instagram series and BuzzFeed Video backgrounds to our school crisis but don’t show original feeling. Instead, they follow the format of other network sitcoms — particularly the curse of The Office.
By imitating The Office, with its swish-panning mockumentary-interview format, Abbott Elementary implicitly congratulates the TV audience on their “smartness.” Breaking the fourth wall contributes to the show’s elitist insincerity about its subject — all for comedy. But references to “trauma-bonding” among education professionals means this is gallows humor. On Disney-ABC, gallows humor is now urban-ethnic comedy. Gifted comediennes that Brunson and James are, they’re respectively doing little more than an Abbott and Costello routine — sometimes adversarial, sometimes sisterly. Extending their doofus-and-diva act to the classrooms, corridors, and teachers’ lounge transfers their personal careerism into a facetious representation of a major social institution.
Unlike the great school films Up the Down Staircase and Lean on Me, or socially conscious TV shows such as Mr. Novak and Room 222, which all recognized the problems of public education — yet seriously sought solutions — this “classic” Office-style comedy actually disrespects the middle-class vocation. Instead of Mike Judge–level (King of the Hill) social observation, the characters slip in and out of clownish and straight faces.
Sheryl Lee Ralph co-stars as Miss Barbara Howard, “the oldest teacher at the poorest school in America” and Janine’s tough-love surrogate mother. Ralph is acerbic yet frequently wise: “Why can’t any of you stick it out for more than two years, more turnovers than a bakery. . . . Our job is to build them up, make them feel confident. Concentrate on what they have, not what they don’t have.”
Howard denounces the Philadelphia school district’s “long line of people who do absolutely nothing.” It’s she who declares, “We’re teachers. We have to be able to do it all. We are admin, we are social workers, we are second parents; sometimes we’re even the first.”
Still, mockery is the show’s actual curriculum, full of sarcasm that deflects the reality we dread. When not being sentimental, Abbott Elementary hints at the education system’s political leanings: A nerdy history teacher boasts, “Maddow emailed me! I practically work for MSNBC!” The janitor who “voted for Kanye” is derided. The loony, “bad at her job” principal praises Mel Gibson’s “thriving” resilience. And, of course, there’s the requisite Barack Obama still-photo cameo. Altogether, it’s a frantic acting out of liberal mania — the kind of actor’s sellout that we usually see only at award shows. Here it’s written into too-clever sitcom condescension and the makers’ refusal to treat the disaster of modern schooling honestly.
The lesson of Abbott Elementary is that TV is indoctrination everywhere all the time — no shared goals or recognizable humanity, only shared cynicism. TV audiences are like school parents who settle for less.
