Abbott Elementary. Season 5. Need I Say More?

(Oh Don’t Worry. I Will)

In a world full of chaos, rage and endless despair America needs a hero. Quinta Brunson answered the call…by opening last night’s episode of Abbott Elementary by having the entire student body as well as the faculty doing the Macarena.

Like everything else that I’ve seen on this masterpiece that sequence was something I absolutely didn’t know I needed in my life and now that I’ve seen it I can’t imagine a world without one. That’s always been the great blessing of Abbott Elementary, the great constant that has been and another reason that it is just as necessary as before. It sparks joy and brings genuine laughter into your life for thirty minutes. When you’re not laughing at the antics, you’re smiling and you have a spring in your step that can carry you through the rest of the week — or you know until another great TV show either returns for a new season or you get distraction from another form.

As we enter the fifth season of Abbott there are small changes as well as steps backward. By this point Brunson, both as performer and creator, has always struck the balance of keeping things close to the norm were used to but willing to throw in new wrinkles. In Season 5 we see it with two new members of the faculty: a new teacher (played by Shrinking’s exceptional Luke Tennie) and a new guidance counselor, who even by the standards of Abbott is overworked. (She doesn’t even have time to talk to the camera because she works at twenty other schools.) Janine is in a good place with Gregory (Tyler James Williams) and is so confident in where she is that when her old boyfriend starts dropping off his girlfriend’s son for second grade, she no longer feels threatened by him and completely ignores Ava’s attempts to even try to meddle in her love life to create drama. Tariq has managed to improve in some ways (he’s a good boyfriend and is doing well as head of the PTA) and Janine said: “They said it couldn’t be done. I’m they.” Then of course Tariq starts demanding preferential treatment for his son and reverts to the hysterical behavior we knew when he was Janine’s boyfriend. Janine is now so clearly over him that she can point out his flaws to the cameras with a certain resigned behavior and its clear he can no longer get under her skin.

Much of the early episodes of Abbott deal with some of the new changes in the faculty. Barb (the always wondrous Sheryl Lee Ralph) seems to be making progress from her down year last season which initially annoys Janine but she’s fine with it now. The more interesting byplay is between Jacob (Chris Perfetti) and Melissa (Lisa Ann Walter). This past summer Melissa decided to go from teaching third and second graders to teaching sixth grade, which she thinks she can handle because she thought the girls were friends in school. Jacob then, partly with joy, partly as a warning, went out of his way to make it very clear just how horrible these adolescence girls and boys can me in hysterical detail which rattled the usually solid Melissa to the point she started reconsidering to anyone who might take it. It was hysterical to see Walter flapped.

Last night’s episode showed Melissa dealing with it. She’s allowing her students to curse once a period and get it out of the way and she has a good rapport with them. She thinks she did a good job when the students all aced her test — and then Gregory figured out all of them had cheated. Melissa reacted poorly to this to the alarm of Gregory (“You do know you can’t kill them?” he said, his poker face showing genuine terror.) Melissa then set up her kids in a way to fail but was double crossed when her kids all…studied for the exam. Then surprisingly she took it very well and her final scene talked about she was schooling them on the facts of life. She told them that they had make the mistake of making the conspiracy too big and that they had blown their best trick at the start of the year and now Melissa was aware of it. You got the sense of mutual respect from her class that you aren’t used to on Abbott and its another sign why Walter deserves an Emmy nomination (she’s one of the few cast members who has yet to receive recognition)

Ava (Janelle James — give her an Emmy) remains in the field of delusion she’s always in in what I’m pretty sure is the first referral to recent events, however subtle. She is now claiming she lost her job because she fell in love with her current boyfriend and Janine got in her way to stop her from getting it back. Being happy in her current romantic life she’s now trying to stir up drama between Gregory and Janine, which unfortunately for her is doomed to fail because both are too smart to engage. And it’s a credit to how much she’s grown as a character that when the new guidance counselor comes into complain about how Jacob and Barb have been disturbing her, she actually takes her side. Of course the guidance counselor doesn’t know Ava, so she naturally assumes the principal is a professional woman who is trying to rise above everything.

Then again to be fair it’s hard not to be on the guidance counselor’s side considering that in the second episode Jacob and Barb got into one of their weird feuds about the dishwasher and how many dishes to load it with. In both cases the guidance counselor was in the room and both of them chose to overshare while she was trying to work. She gave enough vague advice to make it seem she was on their side (in reality she just wanted them to go away) and when it backfired both of them went to her and she pushed them away. The fact that she was with a student didn’t seem to make them turn against her and try to get her removed. Again this could have worked badly but as always by the end of the episode they were back to being friends again.

That may be the greatest trick Brunson has pulled as Abbott Elementary enters Season 5. This is usually the time, particularly in a network comedy, when shows reach their creative peak and begin to start growing stale. Either the characters become too familiar and grating or the writers try to change things radically. But I see no sign of this in the first two episodes of Abbott. The show continues to open new depths to every character, including as always Mr. Johnson the janitor. In the season opener we learned that he had never once learned how to ride a bike and Gregory went out of his way to help him do so. The entire student body ended the episode cheering him. Of course, later on we found he couldn’t figure out how to stop. In last night’s episode we learned that Mr. Johnson apparently does a podcast where he teaches people to use the dishwasher to cook great delicacies. And sure enough at the end of the episode we saw him talking about cooking salmon and lasagna in the dishwasher, a la Julia Child. When it didn’t work properly, he moved on to duck. The guidance counselor was there and she just say: “I’ll listen to this at home,” meaning like everyone else she has his podcast.

We’ve long since passed the point when this is one of the greatest shows of the 2020s: Abbott Elementary is now in the hallowed grounds of being one of the greatest comedies of the 21st century, favorably comparable to Parks & Rec in the previous decade and Scrubs in the 2000s. (And yes I am glad to know that they’re rebooting that particular show on ABC: one masterpiece at a time.) That’s because like so many of the best comedies of this decade in particular, it’s about community, kindness and working together towards a common goal. It’s not easy, particularly when you’re working in an underfunded elementary school in Philadelphia and Brunson and her cast never make it look easy. Nor does she mythologize the teachers as heroes or even great people, they’re just working-class folk trying to make it through the day as best they can. And sometimes when things go wrong, you do an impromptu dance number in the halls of your school because you can’t help yourself. Watching Abbott always makes me feeling like dancing too.

My score: 5 stars.