Waiting For I'm No Superman
I am going to start by addressing Reno 911!, but that's not the show I really want to talk about. I've been a longtime fan of Reno 911! and thought the new movie on Paramount+ was basically fine. Wendi McLendon-Covey was especially terrific in it, but none of the excellent cast really seemed to get enough screentime (including Niecy Nash, who is not underused per se but is such a stellar actor it's weird to see her as a relatively small part of an ensemble)(watch CLAWS). Reno 911! is very funny, but there's another reason why this has so much more staying power than other cop shows: unlike most cop shows, Reno 911! knows that cops are venal and stupid and that they don't do anything useful all day long. One of Brooklyn 99's many problems was that even as it tried to address criticisms of copaganda, it couldn't jettison fundamental misconception that police help people. We don't need to love fictional characters to laugh at them, but it's a hard line to walk to get us to both laugh about something and acknowledge that it's important.
This is where we find the new ABC sitcom Abbott Elementary. Abbott Elementary is a mockumentary set in a Philadelphia public elementary school. It focuses mainly on the teachers, especially Janine, played by series creator Quinta Brunson. Janine is one of two second-year teachers, the other new teachers in their cohort having quit. There's some romantic tension between Janine and Gregory, a substitute teacher played by Tyler James Williams, and almost every other character on the show thinks they have romantic tension with him. There are two older teachers, played by Lisa Ann Walter and the great Sheryl Lee Ralph, who are more jaded than the idealistic younger teachers. The school's principal, played by Janelle James, is self-absorbed and obnoxious, to hilarious effect.
Abbott Elementary is very funny and very sweet, and the characters feel well-defined early. One of the things that makes it stand out among other recent sitcoms about teachers (for example, TruTV's Those Who Can't and TV Land's Teachers) is that it is genuinely concerned with the education of students. There's definitely something funny about teachers who don't care at all about their jobs (this is also the premise of the movie and series Bad Teacher, for example), but Quinta Brunson is doing something arguably more challenging. How does one make comedy that also acknowledges that public education and students are in crisis, that the work of public school teachers is vital and difficult and rewarding in unexpected ways? To do this without producing the kind of thing Yo Teach was parodying is to create something rarely on TV.
The closest antecedent to this is not a school-based show at all, but the medical comedy Scrubs. Scrubs hasn't really left the cultural footprint of some of its contemporary series (perhaps in part because of Zach Braff's fairly ridiculous directing career), but as someone who watched it at the time, please believe me when I say it was often a good show! A great deal of it doesn't hold up (creator Bill Lawrence was pretty bad about writing women, people of color, and queer people; he's gotten slightly better at writing women since then) but its balance of humor and heartbreak was solid. Scrubs was set in a hospital, told mostly from the perspective of JD, a new young doctor. He and his cohort dealt with the pressure of saving lives while being young, dumb, and horny.
During the George W Bush administration, a friend told me that his doctor father found Scrubs to be more like his actual job than any other medical show. For many professionals, TV dramas are absurd representations of their jobs - few doctors have been through what Meredith Grey has been through. Most jobs involve a lot of hanging around shooting the shit with coworkers and dealing with administrative stupidity - the kind of thing sitcoms portray very well. This was also why Studio 60 was so hated by TV comedy writers; making a weekly sketch show may have its dramatic moments but it's mostly sitting around talking about how stupid your boss is. Sitcoms struggle, however, with workplaces where people feel passionate about the importance of their work. Scrubs was a show where the characters had wild fantasy lives and Dr. Cox gave everyone demeaning (sexist) nicknames and characters formed an at-work air band, but also patients died and the doctors felt terrible about it.
The JD-Dr. Cox dynamic is superficially one of Scrubs's greatest similarities to Abbott Elementary. Janine views Barbara (Sheryl Lee Ralph) as her mentor, a role Barbara is uncomfortable with. And like JD in Scrubs' early seasons, Janine worries that Barbara is too jaded - that Barbara should be attacking teaching with the passion for innovation that Janine has. As Barbara explains to Janine (in a conversation echoing several between JD and Cox), to last in a job as difficult as teaching, one must do everything possible to avoid burnout, especially including not living or dying by each day's successes and failures. This is a difficult lesson Janine must learn repeatedly, and of course her passion will occasionally remind Barbara of her own love of the job.
Though no one would claim that Scrubs was educational about medicine, the show attempted to keep its medical stories grounded in reality. Its season six musical episode, for example, was told from the perspective of a patient with musical hallucinations based on a real case study. In a similar vein, Abbott Elementary's latest episode, "Gifted Program" does something I have never seen a show set in a school do, ever - it has two teachers discuss educational theory, name dropping Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences. The teachers on Abbott Elementary are silly sitcom characters as well as being people who sincerely care about education and are knowledgeable about it. Have you seen this on television before? On a network sitcom? I haven't.
There are some first-season bumps for the show to smooth out, but I really do hope it continues for a long time. One moment on the latest episode had me laughing so hard I had to re-watch it and then try to explain it to someone who'd never seen the show. It's a minor character beat, where Janine enters a room ready to solve that episode's plot and instead gets mercilessly roasted by the principal and her mentor for the way she walks:
It had nothing to do with that episode's story but it demonstrated just how strong the cast and how specific the writing are that a joke like it could land so well so early. If we get lucky, Abbott Elementary will live long enough to get its own musical episode.
SCREEN TIME: SOME THOUGHTS ON AND RECOMMENDATIONS OF CHILDREN'S MEDIA
I don’t know what to make of PBS’s Odd Squad! It’s an utterly charming show with good and fun educational content and adorable performances by its cast. But it uses lots of child actors which I generally find irresponsible, and it’s set at a fictional law enforcement agency similar to the Men in Black. Is it copaganda? I think it probably is but I really do think it’s cute.
WHAT'S NEW ON GH LATELY
Gonna spare you more about my excitement over what's happening between Sonny and Nina right now to explain that the heel Peter August and the face Maxie Jones had a baby, Louise. To hide the baby from Peter, Maxie gave Louise to Brook Lynn (currently a face with an edge), who'd been pretending to be pregnant with Valentin (a heel in the midst of a lengthy face turn)'s baby for business purposes (Valentin thought she was really pregnant). Maxie asked Brook Lynn to raise Louise as her own (under the name Bailey) until Peter's menace was officially neutralized. After raising "Bailey" as his own for months, Valentin learned she wasn't his baby (leading to a classic heel-face-heel reversal) and immediately police officer/face/human-Scrappy-Do Harrison "Chase" Chase (who'd somehow figured out that "Bailey" was actually Louise) claimed "Bailey" was HIS baby with Brook Lynn, his former roommate. Now in on the scheme, Chase is taking "Bailey" to pediatrician appointments and the like and living with Brook Lynn again. Also, Peter has finally realized that "Bailey" is in fact his daughter Louise. Where this goes remains to be seen but one thing is for sure: Louise has three men who think of themselves as her father: Peter, her biological father; Valentin, her legal father; and Chase, who is neither but claiming to be the former.
TAGS
This broadcast's theme song is a mashup that dropped last year, the Seinfeld theme mixed with a hit song from every year Seinfeld was on television, by mashup duo The Hood Internet and @Seinfeld2000: https://youtu.be/OY9axZBUUlo. If you like that, you may also love @Seinfeld2000's Jerry (Maybe We Should Get Married): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARmDfjRgEIM (Vocals by Bethany Cosentino of Best Coast; composed, performed and edited by Nick Lutsko).
I want to offer a sincere congratulations to Caterina Mete. Caterina has been a choreographer and dancer with The Wiggles since 2003. As is so often the case with Wiggles crew, she's played a number of roles within the Wigglesverse, including tertiary characters Dorothy the Dinosaur and Officer Beaples (a police officer character who was, in 2021, bafflingly declared by the Wiggles to be nonbinary along with Shirley Shawn the Unicorn and Bok the Hand Puppet), dancer, costumer, and production scheduler (?!). I'll try to be brief with this but Wiggles history can be complicated. The first incarnation of The Wiggles in 1991 included Jeff The Purple Wiggle, Anthony The Blue Wiggle, Murray The Red Wiggle and Greg The Yellow Wiggle. When Jeff, Murray and Greg mostly retired from being Wiggles (they are all still involved in the Wiggles to an extent but they're no longer part of the main quartet), the new lineup as of 2013 kept Anthony the Blue Wiggle and introduced Lachlan The Purple Wiggle, Simon The Red Wiggle and Emma The Yellow Wiggle. In 2021, in an effort to increase the diversity of The Wiggles, the quartet was expanded to an octet, with sort of an all-white A-squad and a diverse B-squad for each shirt color (two red Wiggles, two blue Wiggles, etc). I agree this is not the best way they could have done this but okay. Emma (A-squad Yellow Wiggle)'s star has risen dramatically since she first became The Yellow Wiggle, and at the end of 2021 she left The Wiggles to finish her doctorate and perform as a solo act. With Emma's departure, the B-squad Red Wiggle (Tsehay Hawkins) was bumped up to be the new A-squad Yellow Wiggle (it's not hard to see why, she's terrific but also a literal teenage child so now there's a 42-year gap between the ages of the oldest and youngest A-squad Wiggles), leaving the B-squad Red Wiggle spot open. That spot was then filled by...Caterina! Caterina's work with the Wiggles has long been vital and stellar and this is her biggest front-of-house role thus far, so a big hooray for Caterina! And of course we wish Emma Watkins the best on her new endeavors.
You've probably seen that, following the viral success of a video asking "What if The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was a drama?" Peacock is releasing a new drama, Bel-Air. I'm VERY curious what that show will be like. I'm also curious - what classic sitcoms could be remade as dramas? What about Cheers? He's an alcoholic who owns a bar, it writes itself. Sergent Bilko? A gambling addict enters the military and keeps digging himself into further debt, like Uncut Gems but in the army. Chico and the Man? I'd love to hear your suggestions!
I really think W. Kumau Bell's documentary We Need To Talk About Cosby is terrific. Four episodes feels right for providing necessary context to this horrifying story, and the choice to include accounts of his sexual assaults concurrent with explaining his rise as an entertainer and public figure feels very well-considered. I'll be interested to see what other people think, including critiques of this, but I genuinely feel it's worth seeing (with the obvious trigger warning that it includes many first-person accounts of sexual assault).
"'Take care of yourself and each other.' - Jerry Springer" - Harry Waksberg