She’s not even be five feet tall, but Quinta Brunson is a giant when it comes to making education fun, and funny.
Brunson created and stars in Abbott Elementary, a comedy that follows a group of elementary school teachers in Philadelphia who, despite the odds stacked against them, are determined to help their students succeed.
The series explores a wide range of topics — from dealing with difficult parents to the lengths teachers will go for school supplies.
In addition to Brunson, the cast includes Tyler James Williams, Chris Perfetti, Lisa Ann Walter and Sheryl Lee Ralph as teachers, with Janelle James as the school’s principal.
Her small size is a plus, says Brunson, remarking that, “It's given me a completely different world view.”
And, apparently, a lot to say.
“I think [my size has] definitely set me up for success as far as where a lot of my comedy comes from. It's the one thing that I'm actually self‑deprecating about, but the rest of me, I think, is pretty solid. Like, I watch other comics do all this self‑deprecation stuff and I'm like, ‘I don't really have anything except for being short, so I'll use that.’”
In creating Abbott Elementary, Brunson admits that she faced a myriad of challenges. to get the right tone. “With a school comedy, not only do we have things like shootings which are going on, COVID, the gun crisis — there's so many to name. At the root of it [is] underfunding and lack of care for our teachers and students, it means that we have to be special about the kind of stories that we want to tell, and I think we did that in this show.”
As for bringing the comedy aspect into it, Brunson says that meant asking, “’Are we laughing at these problems? Are we laughing with the people who do the job?’ I think there's a huge difference. We don't want to create an environment where we say, ‘hey, these issues are okay and shouldn't be fixed.’ That's not what we're going to do. What we want to do is say, ‘look at these people who do the job anyway. How can we support them further? How can we take a look at our school system and say it shouldn't be this way anymore?’”
To mine that for laughs, Brunson says, “I also feel that the important thing with the comedy is to make sure that you have that absurdist point, right? Like, you need to have that thing that goes a little bit farther than what happens in real life. That balance also allows us to tell these stories. If we were just telling people the reality of what's happening in these schools, that's not fun to watch. That's just straight‑up documentary. We get to have this absurdist humor that I hope gives [people] the opportunity to laugh and think. But, ultimately, I want people to be able to laugh with us.”
The show is shot mockmentary style, which Bruson says she loves. “My favorite comedies have been mockumentaries —The Office, Parks and Rec. What I love about the format is it gives an opportunity for the audience to build a different relationship with the characters. I had seen other teacher shows, and it's a lens on them that often can make them seem one‑dimensional, and they are the least one‑dimensional people there are. And, I said, ‘if these people could talk to camera and talk about their reasoning for doing this job, the reasonings for doing it how they do it, the reasoning for jumping through hoops to get these things done, I felt like public schools deserved to have that veil gone so people can see how much these people actually do.’”
With one more thought on the topic, Brunson adds, “Black people have been dying for a mockumentary show with Black people in the front seats. I was like, ‘what if we, for the first time in my knowledge, see some characters of color at the forefront of those shows?’ So that was another thing that went into the choice of [making this] mockumentary style.”
In doing gathering information for the series, Brunson says that she’s tapped many people in her personal life, for both stories and inspiration. “So many of my friends are teachers. I kind of use them to do my research. I also just do a lot of reading about the Philadelphia public school system specifically.”
She sites one person in particular who’s taught her why teachers do what they do, and the value it holds. “My mother, who was a teacher — these people are going to do the job. Nothing can stop them. They know all the systemic issues that are there, but, at the end of the day, they have to teach your kid how to read.”
All of this is why Brunson truly feels that Abbott Elementary is important, and fun. [We’re] giving people a behind‑the‑scenes look of what teachers really do through humor and heart and straight‑up comedy.”
‘Abbott Elementary’ airs Tuesdays at 9pm e/p on ABC and is available for streaming on Hulu.
