| Molly Fischer
Staff writer I first met Quinta Brunson in January, when she was in the midst of shooting “Abbott Elementary” ’s third season and had just won an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. It felt like a moment when she was ascending to a new plane of celebrity—the plane where one, say, receives a giant bouquet from Oprah in the course of a regular workday. More important, though, it was a moment when her work had achieved a new stature. In the time since “Abbott” premièred, at the end of 2021, it has gone from a scrappy surprise to a durable hit. When I interviewed her, Brunson and her collaborators were in the process of figuring out what the show’s success meant for their work. What kind of creative freedom did they have now that the audience had come to know these characters—a group of teachers at an underfunded West Philadelphia school—and this world? Brunson’s show draws on her mother’s thirty years of experience as a public-school teacher in Philadelphia. But it’s also grounded in network-sitcom tradition; Brunson is a connoisseur of the form—“I watch everything,” she told me—and she has a clear sense of both its pleasures and its constraints. Prior to the third season, the show’s action was often confined to the school’s classrooms and corridors. Now Brunson’s character has taken a position with the school district, and the landscape is expanding. Hennesy Street, an outdoor set on the Warner Bros. studio lot, once stood in for San Francisco, in the 1935 movie “Frisco Kid,” and for New York, in the 1982 version of “Annie.” When I visited, it had been revamped as “Abbott” ’s Philadelphia, complete with storefronts for a psychic, an Ethiopian restaurant, and a bar where the teachers hang out after work. Maybe the most momentous change was something that Brunson showed me elsewhere on the lot: the actual brick-and-mortar exterior of Abbott Elementary. The façade used to be made of molded-plastic panels, but, before the third season, it was reconstructed with actual building materials. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” the production designer, Michael Whetstone, told me. “But you have to do it on a show that you think is going to be around long enough to warrant it.” Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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