Season 4 of Abbott Elementary is one for the books.
“Each season has been better than the last, and I think that is because we all feel so comfortable with each other now,” Chris Perfetti, who plays sixth grade history teacher Jacob Hill, said in August at D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event presented by Visa®. “We all speak the same vocabulary—not just us actors, but everyone else who makes the show.”
Premiering Wednesday, October 9, at 9:30 p.m. ET/PT on ABC and streaming next day on Hulu, Season 4 of Abbott Elementary will give audiences a deeper look at the Philadelphia educators as they face everything from a potential budding romance to (gulp!) a ringworm outbreak.
“I like to have a North Star—a place where I’d like each character to end up,” said creator and executive producer Quinta Brunson, who plays second grade teacher Janine Teagues. “None of these characters were ever one-note, [because] people aren’t one-note. That forces us to continue to peel away layers… Even though this is a comedy, we use those 22 minutes to say, ‘How can we be funny and peel back another layer for all these characters?’”
One of the ways in which Brunson and the writers achieve that is by regularly pairing different characters together, creating natural tension—and, as a result, room for growth.
“We switch it up by saying, ‘I want to see Barbara [Sheryl Lee Ralph] and Gregory [Tyler James Williams] go through this together,’” Brunson said. “We started the journey with Barbara mentoring Janine, but then it became clear that she was a mentor to more than just Janine. We started with Ava [Janelle James] kind of on the outs, but she and Janine have more in common than you’d think. With Melissa [Lisa Ann Walter] and Ava, we realized they share ideologies. Sometimes they team up to fight crime together, and that’s important. When you have characters that are this rich, the possibilities are really endless.”
Speaking of pairings, audiences are eager to know what’s next for Janine and Gregory following their long-awaited kiss in the Season 3 finale—and they’re not alone! While their relationship status will be revealed in the Season 4 premiere, Williams said he’s just glad that the characters are no longer denying their feelings for one another. “People don’t understand. I have to live in his skin,” he said. “I can feel it, too. I know. What’s so nice about the writing is that we squeezed all of the juice out of it that we possibly could. If as the actor you’re starting to feel it, then you know it’s time. And it felt like the timing was right.”
While Brunson didn’t want to spoil too many plotlines in Season 4, she did confirm that it will contain more episodes than it did the season prior. “I’m very happy to have 22 episodes again, because I think it’s so much more room for storytelling, and I noticed that audiences have been asking for TV shows to have more episodes,” she said. “We are fortunate enough to be able to do that, because we are on network television. We get to showcase all of these character sin such different ways, and that’s exciting to me. The more episodes that we have, the more pairings that can happen—like Ava and Jacob, or Melissa and Barbara.”
To wrap things up, Ralph shared a heartfelt message with fans: “Don’t stop watching. Keep talking about it. Keep telling people how great this show is. We are what a real comedy is!”
