(courtesy IMP Awards)
The very best sitcoms don’t simply makes us laugh.
That may seem like a strangely counter-intuitive thing to say since the final three letters of the genre’s abbreviated name makes it very clear that is very much what they are there to do; and yes, they are – why have the “com” for “comedy” otherwise?
But the really good sitcoms, the ones that stay with you longer after the laugh track has crackled and spluttered to a halt (to be fair, the masterful members of this genre don’t need one) and your twenty minutes or so of joke-punctuated storytelling has run its elegantly-constructed course, are the ones that realise this televisual artform is far more than just a cleverly set-up punchline.
Shows like Philadelphia-set Abbott Elementary, now in its third and strike-truncated 13-episode season, created by star Quinta Brunson, fully appreciate that jokes mean nothing, either in the short or long-term if the characters don’t mean anything to us, if any inherent humanity is nothing more than the lead-up to a joke and if the show doesn’t have anything worth saying about society or the people who pretty much always fallibly make it up.
We want to laugh, and escapistly so, but we want to feel and think too, and what Abbott Elementary does is manage to meet all those needs, and tick all those viewing boxes, without once feeling as if it trying too hard or trying to be too thoughtful or serious for its own good.
Throughout this wholly engaging season, Abbott Elementary does that in exemplary fashion, and in ways that often supersede the highly enjoyable first and second seasons of the show which ran to far longer traditional sitcom episode counts.
Perhaps its new found storytelling elegance comes from the fact that it had just 13 rather than 24 episodes with which to tell its tale of public school teachers, doing their best against a resource-deserved and often unthinkingly bureaucratic system, to educate the kids they care so much about.
That’s always been a hallmark of the mockumentary-styled series – to be both a love letter to teaching and the way it is a calling as much as a job, and to comment, wryly but with unmistakably impactful intent, on the way in society often speaks loftily of the value of education and of value of its educators and yet which fails to equip them in such a way that all those warm-and-fuzzy words have real meaning.
While that’s very much still front and centre in season three, especially with Janine moving a job at the school district with new pals Manny (Josh Segarra), Simon (Benjamin Norris) and Emily (Kimia Behpoornia) who all believe in helping schools to actually educate, the real driver of season three is about bolstering the fullness and veracity of all the characters.
Front and centre, of course, is Janine (played by Quinta Brunson), an earnest teacher who refuses to accede to limits and grim realities, and who unlike, her longer-serving and far more circumspect colleagues like Melissa Schemmenti (Lisa Ann Walter) and Barbara Howard (Sheryl Lee Ralph), is determined to remake the system from within.
Part of the comedic thrust of Abbott Elementary is that Janine almost never succeeds in her visionary attempts to make things better, mocked all the time by Melissa and Barbara and by vacuously self-involved school principal Ava Coleman (Janelle James) who sees her role as simply one of self-aggrandisement with the teachers and students simply impediments to her getting her way.
While Janine has staunch allies and friends in Jacob Hill (Chris Perfetti) and fellow newbie, and love interest Gregory Eddie (Tyler James Williams), she is mostly the lone true believer trying to make things better and often falling flat on her face (though this being one of the better, more emotional thoughtful sitcoms out there, Abbott Elementary doesn’t simply use her as a butt for all their jokes and draws real pathos and warmth from the fact that she tries even when she knows she likely won’t succeed).
But in season three, Janine actually makes some headway and has some success, all part of a sitcom that grows up a lot and realises that you can’t simply keep making the same, brilliantly executed jokes over and over as lesser sitcoms would be wont to do.
In this more mature take on Abbott Elementary, Ava actually grows up a little and make actually have a heart beneath her vapid exterior (but not too much of one since, you know, we love her superficiality, of which she is all too aware), Jacob and Melissa discover they might be friends after all (leading to some very funny “coming out” moments) and even the janitor, Mr Johnson (Wiliam Stanford Davis), while implausibly and hilariously accomplished, is given moments of really moving humanity.
But it’s perhaps the way in which Janine keeps her enthusiasm and idealism but tempers them with a knowingness that doesn’t stop her trying to make the world of Abbott Elementary a better place but in a far more considered way, that really sets this season apart.
Far from the inflexible Janine of the first season, who saw knowing souls like Melissa and Barbara as threats to her idealism rather than ways to burnish it and give it real-world practical legs, the improved Janine of the third season knows what she wants but that while she still wants to go hell for leather to get it, that there are limits and that perhaps she has to compromise to get what she really wants.
Or who she wants.
This is a bigger, more grown-up but still gloriously funny Abbott Elementary which elevates its already richly-realised fulsome characters still further, dials up the hilarity while grounding things in real down-to-earth humanity and emotionalism (the final scene between Barbara and Gregory in the episode “Mother’s Day” is a touching joy), and which knows that while you want the laugh, guffaws and the chuckles, that what you really want is to be moved, to feel like you belong to the world the characters inhabit, and to have all those lovely emotions and wondrously good comedy to stay with you long after school has finished for the year and summer has begun …
Abbott Elementary season 4 premieres on 9 October on the U.S. ABC network with later streaming on Disney+