In the wilds of social media and cable TV news, public school teachers tend to be either heroes or sinners — selfless caretakers of the nature’s future leaders, or selfish resource-hoarders who don’t care about children at all. But it’s not that simple on “Abbott Elementary.”
ABC’s new sitcom, set in an underfunded West Philadelphia elementary school, is pro-teacher, to be sure, but its characters are flawed and gently mockable: the naïve newbie who’s so eager to fix every problem on her own that she sometimes makes things worse; the woke white twentysomething who awkwardly tries to relate to his Black colleagues; the tough-as-nails veteran who pulls strings with local gangsters to get a hold of much-needed school supplies. There’s a veneer of absurdity over the whole affair; the teachers lust over the aging anchor of the local “Action News” morning show, the custodian is obsessed with the Illuminati, and the principal spends more time than she should making TikTok videos. Still, on Twitter, some real-life teachers have quipped that the show is, for all intents, a documentary.
“Abbott Elementary” — which premiered in December and has since quadrupled its ratings — has drawn comparisons to “The Office,” for good reason. Both feature a mockumentary format and an absurd boss, and both are funny from the get-go. But in many ways, the new show is bolder. For a comedy that pokes fun at the indignities of everyday work life, an office park in Scranton is easy pickings; an inner-city second-grade classroom feels, if not sacrosanct, at least surprising. The show offers a window into a setting that many suburban viewers likely have never seen, an aging urban building with failing electrical systems, gushing toilets and mystery smells. Creator Quinta Brunson grew up in West Philadelphia, where her mother taught public school for 40 years, so it’s no surprise that many teachers are saying the details ring true. It’s hard to watch without feeling sympathy for the teachers who make do with nothing and the students who don’t know how little they have. Still, there’s no call to action or obvious agenda. The politics lurk slyly in the background. It’s the same on FX’s “Reservation Dogs,” about a band of Native Americans teens in Oklahoma, and on NBC’s recently-ended “Superstore,” which chronicled hourly workers at a big box retailer in St. Louis, serving up issues like union-busting and open-carry laws in a cloud puff of goofy humor.
Subtlety isn’t the hallmark of political discussions on television these days — the norm is panels of partisans who scream at each other, occasionally getting themselves into Whoopi Goldberg-esque trouble. And in the Trump and post-Trump eras, comedy, especially, has lost much of its nuance. Late night talk shows tend to wear their politics on their sleeves; Stephen Colbert is relentlessly hostile to anti-vaxxers, Jimmy Kimmel unloads on Ted Cruz and “Saturday Night Live” has never stopped overcompensating for making Donald Trump its host during the 2016 election cycle. Fox News recently launched its own weeknight comedy entry, “Gutfeld!,” which gleefully skewers liberals, and closed out 2021 as the second-most-watched late night show on television. Movies suffer from the same heavy-handedness; Netflix’s climate change farce “Don’t Look Up” was an extended rant about Trumpists and climate deniers, so clearly pitched to a left-leaning audience that it felt like watching MSNBC.
It’s hard to get away with that much stridency on a sitcom, because that’s not what sitcoms are designed to do. In fact, the sitcom might be the last place on TV where constructive political dialogue is happening at all.
The classic sitcom has evolved over the years, as multi-camera shows with laugh tracks largely gave way, in the early 2000s, to more and more single-camera productions with cinematic production values and rat-a-tat rhythms. But the basic trappings remain: a group of familiar characters in a self-contained setting, facing a different conflict every week. Because it’s intended to last for years, a sitcom needs a collection of three-dimensional characters who don’t all think the same way, and consistently push each other’s buttons. It adds up to a perfect medium for hashing out fraught issues, examining ideas from multiple perspectives, and cushioning political points.
“The aphorism is that TV doesn’t tell you what to think, it tells you what to think about,” says Philip Scepanski, a professor of media arts at Marist College and the author of Tragedy Plus Time: National Trauma and Television Comedy.
Over the years, TV producers often used sitcoms as a vehicle for pointed cultural commentary. Norman Lear’s “All in the Family” wrestled with the generation gap between a working-class conservative and his liberal daughter and son-in-law; “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” drove a conversation about the possibilities for working women; “M.A.S.H.” was thinly-shaded commentary on the Vietnam War. Sitcoms could advance conservatism, too; Scepanski points to the Reagan-era “very special episodes” on popular shows like “Diff’rent Strokes” and “Family Ties,” which dovetailed with the Reagan White House war-on-drugs agenda — and also sent Washington the message that primetime shows could be educational. (Under the Reagan administration, the FCC loosened requirements that broadcasters offer children targeted educational programming.) Even “The Cosby Show,” Scepanski argues, contained an embedded conservative message: “a Reaganite ideology about how we don’t need social programs because the Cosby family can lift themselves up.”
Later sitcoms were on the frontlines of emerging social issues — “Murphy Brown” even drew the ire of Vice President Dan Quayle for a 1992 storyline about single motherhood. The 1997 episode of ABC’s “Ellen,” in which Ellen Degeneres’ character comes out as a lesbian, drew 42 million viewers; Oprah Winfrey, who guest-starred as Degeneres’ therapist, said she got hate mail afterward. In the 2000s, bawdy, un-PC sitcoms like “South Park” started serving up cutting commentary on ripped-from-the-headlines current events. A 2014 episode of “Family Guy,” written in response to the death of Trayvon Martin, still feels like fresh commentary about racial justice: Peter accidentally shoots the son of his Black friend Cleveland, then walks free after the defense attorney describes the young victim with a set of racist tropes.
These days, TV is serving up more content than ever, but sitcoms are beginning to feel endangered — crowded out of network lineups by game shows and procedurals and overshadowed by lush dramas on streaming platforms. So it’s noteworthy that so many new entries into the field are intentionally trying to bridge political gaps — ABC’s 2018 “Roseanne” revival explicitly tried to represent Trump voters in middle America — or introducing strong viewpoints and often-unheard perspectives. FX’s "Atlanta" — which is closer to a short-film anthology than a classic sitcom — provides some of today’s most trenchant commentary on race. “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” shifted its goofy tone to explore the tensions of race and policing after George Floyd’s murder. On Peacock, the new show “We Are Lady Parts” chronicles an all-Muslim, all-girl punk band; the first song the audience hears is called “Ain’t No One Gonna Honour Kill My Sister But Me.” On FX, “Reservation Dogs” mixes magical realism (a deceased spirit with an ignoble past parodies the “Wise Indian” stereotype) with grittily realistic scenes about the challenges of reservation life, from broken families to underfunded health clinics. But it also depicts the power of community and the pride of heritage.
It’s also significant that the creators of many of these shows come from within the communities they’re portraying, Scepanski says. “These are things that we tend to try to treat with a light touch,” he says. “Because whoever it is — white liberals, or the people in charge — are afraid to offend, they don’t want to get flak or blowback.” When it’s told by Native Americans, he says, a story about Native American life has the standing to present a more nuanced, unflinching reality.
“Abbott Elementary” is less edgy and unflinching than some other recent sitcom entries. A network series that by definition needs to appeal to the broadest of audiences, it pulls a lot of punches when it comes to current controversies over education. There’s a brief reference in the pilot to young teachers who flee because they can’t take the pressure, but the remaining teachers occasionally voice clunky, on-the-nose lines about how much they care. The series exists in a world without Covid, so there is no mention of masking, quarantines, remote learning or return-to-school protocols. And the word “’union” never comes up.
But the show holds far less back when it comes to conditions in the schools and the socioeconomic challenges the students face. The teachers represent different approaches to managing a chronic lack of resources: fight the system, tolerate it or find ways to work around it. And the real villain is the system itself — a social order that allows an inner-city school to languish, because it lacks the political clout to get attention. When earnest young teacher Janine, played by Brunson, asks her principal if someone from the city can fix the school’s flickering light bulbs, the answer is matter of fact: “Girl, no. Do I look like the Kool-Aid man? I don’t have enough juice to manipulate the inner workings of City Hall.”
The show also takes on the vagaries of school funding and the limits of well-meaning charity. One episode centers on the ritual of teachers posting wish lists online in hope of getting donated school supplies. It turns out that no one pays attention to an ordinary list, but when it’s a heartstrings-tugging video about “the oldest teacher at the poorest school in America,” the donations pour in — partly from eager white millennials who want to film the donation delivery. (“We’re gonna do something super respectful!” one of them insists.) What’s really being skewered is the middle- and upper-class audience that tends to watch quality television like “Abbott Elementary,” a liberal establishment that gives lip service to supporting underprivileged populations but in actuality has the luxury of helping only selectively, or ignoring the problem completely.
A sitcom alone isn’t likely to change those people’s behavior, Scepanski says. But cultural values help set the political agenda. “You can’t know that these things exist and comfortably just let them be,” he says. And as awareness grows about the state of urban education, he says, maybe — maybe — “it becomes something that a mayor or a governor puts on their agenda because the polling starts to say that people are caring more about the state of inner-city schools.”
Teachers clearly hope that it will. In an essay in the music and culture siteOkayPlayer, one Chicago teacher wrote that the show highlights the consequences of neglecting education, and “how the only solution our cities have to improve these schools is to burn out its brightest and smartest young teachers.” A few others have asked if the series is realistic or jaded enough; a Sioux City Journal critic wrote that the show could introduce some teachers who aren’t as devoted as the current series regulars. And some educators have questioned whether a lighthearted sitcom should be a place for social commentary at all. “The crisis in education is not funny,” one professor of education tweeted last month.
But that’s the hidden power of a sitcom — the chance that a partisan who might never consume a treatise on urban education would wind up getting one anyway, by way of a squirting toilet and a principal who buys herself a footbath with the school supply funds. (“How does having a principal with muscle tension serve them?” she says of the students.) And the longer a sitcom stays on the air, the more nuances it can explore, and the longer a stealth policy discussion can go on. Humor is a hook, the smartest showrunners know. The politics just sneak in.
