Has anyone ever been more grateful to see a boiler fail than the fans of Abbott Elementary School? In “Anniversary”, the fall finale, the school’s furnace breathes its last, forcing the school to move to an abandoned shopping center. The location change is where the second half of Season 5 will take place, and it can’t come soon enough. Abbott Elementary School has always been a sitcom that has skillfully injected sharp observational humor into stories that address real-world issues surrounding underfunded public education, with an optimism that, in lesser series, would seem false. And its excellent ensemble cast grounds it, bringing an authenticity to the proceedings. But season 5 has been pedestrian at besta mixture of complacency and simple forgetting of those things that made the series successful in the first place, and it needs a shake-up. Seriously.
‘Abbott Elementary’ Season 5 Shifts Towards the Conventional
One of the biggest problems with season 5 of Abbott Elementary School it’s the absence of Abbott Elementary. A significant part of the season took place outside the school walls. In fact, three sequential episodes – “Ballgame,” “Game Night” and “Camping” – spent more time at a Philadelphia Phillies game, Gregory’s (Tyler James Williams) apartment and the DMV, and in the woods, respectively, than at Abbott Elementary School. It gives off the aura that the show has exhausted all the stories it can tell in the school itself and must find them elsewhere. In doing so, any story arc that may have been in play over the course of the season is lost in the stops and starts (the school needing repairs is first addressed in the season premiere, but isn’t brought up again until after “Anniversary”).
The 10 Best Episodes of Abbott Elementary (So Far), Ranked
“You know, Thursday is the sexiest day of the week.”
The characters, more complex and nuanced in previous seasons, become two-dimensional. Barbara (Sheryl Lee Ralph) has resigned herself to being the group’s great-aunt, with the passion that defined her character diluted early on. Ava (Janelle James) lost the nuance that kept his narcissistic behavior from becoming monotonous. But, arguably, no character was as affected by Season 5’s shortcomings as Lisa Ann Walter’s Melissa.. The move to teaching in year 6 actually made her lose the self-confidence she had shown from the beginning. This is good in itself, but it is the naivety that accompanies the gesture that insults the character. Old Melissa would never have been accused of cheating on exams. And as the season progresses, Melissa leans more and more into the stereotypical Italian character. And now that Janine (Quinta Brunson) and Gregory are together, and everyone has settled into a routine, Abbott Elementary School seems content to be complacent.
‘Abbott Elementary’ Season 5 Proves the Series Still Has Life
That said, Season 5 of Abbott Elementary School showed moments where his brilliance shines through. Two of this season’s highlights, “No Phones” and “Goofgirl,” utilized an element that was sorely lacking: students. The kids at Abbott Elementary are a never-ending source of intrigue, and when they’re part of the story—a student surprises the teachers with their phones and blackmails them into a pizza party in the first episode, a girl joining Gregory’s Garden Goofballs shakes up the group dynamic in the second—the episode is better for it.
The emergence of Mr. Johnson (William Stanford Davis) as a regular player has been a big positive for the series. The mysterious Mr. Johnson keeps dropping tidbits of information about himself that are as absurd as they are funny, much like Phoebe does (Lisa Kudrow) would leave allusions to his past in Friendslike learning French behind a dumpster in his days on the streets. And moments like the one where he learns to ride a bike in the Season 5 premiere, “Team Building,” are not only endearing to watch, but reestablish that teacher-helping dynamic that was missing.
What the showrunners Abbott Elementary School what should be avoided, however, is playing with the Janine/Gregory dynamic in order to shake up the series. For starters, on a series that has proven in the past that it can succeed without relying on tropes, it’s low-hanging fruit that lesser sitcoms always reach for when things go wrong. Abbott Elementary School is smarter than that. And it’s one of the few relationships on television that’s both believable and effective. In theory, at least, moving classrooms to the mall has great potential, and certainly provides more than enough material to shake things up on a series that sorely needs it.
