Inside ‘Abbott Elementary’

IT'S A SIZZLING JULY AFTERNOON IN PHILADELPHIA, the kind where heat radiates off the asphalt and pedestrians tuck inside the long shadows cast by the city’s ubiquitous rowhouses. 

Around the corner, construction workers hammer away on a building project. You can imagine their lunch-pail conversations about Eagles QB Jalen Hurts or Phillies trade rumors.

Just then, the illusion is shattered by the approach of … a golf cart?

“And here we’ve come to the set of ‘Abbott Elementary,’ our hit ABC sitcom,” announces a Warner Bros. Studio Tour guide to a group of starry-eyed tourists.

On this day, we are not in steamy Philly after all but in sunbaked Burbank, California—specifically Warner Bros. Studios, a densely packed collection of soundstages and external sets in the shadow of the iconic WB water tower.

The tourists smile as they snap photos of the Willard R. Abbott Public School facade, the iconic focal point of the show’s intro.

Justin Halpern (’03), one of “Abbott Elementary’s” showrunners—a top executive producer in television parlance—smiles too. A big benefit of working on a hit, he points out, is that your show becomes part of the tour, which means the sets stay in place. Or can even be expanded, hence the construction crew.

By any measure “Abbott” is unmistakably a hit. The mockumentary-style sitcom, created by and starring Quinta Brunson, follows the experiences of a group of teachers, administrators and staff at a fictional Philadelphia school. As it embarks on its fourth season, the show has delivered steadily strong ratings, a score of 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and haul of 24 Primetime Emmy nominations, with four wins.

Few know of the San Diego State University influence in the writers room.

OUR GUIDES TODAY at Warner Bros. are Halpern and story editor Riley Dufurrena (’13), both graduates of SDSU’s Television, Film and New Media program. The two are part of a growing number of Aztecs finding success in an entertainment industry long dominated by grads of the University of Southern California, Northwestern University and the Ivies. A notable example is writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton (’11): His indie filmmaking chops caught the eye of Marvel Studios.

In recent years, students have been supported by alumni like producer Mort Marcus (’77), whose Aztecs to Hollywood fund provides micro grants to students looking to make industry connections. Meanwhile, the TFM Advisory Council has offered mentorship and organized student trips to Los Angeles.

But right now, it’s time to get out of the heat.

Behind the wheel of another electric cart—this one decorated like a school bus—Halpern drives us to the comfortable office he shares with creative partner and “Abbott Elementary” co-showrunner Patrick Schumacker. Action figures adorn both their desks, fitting given their other major project, the Max animated comedy “Harley Quinn.”

As we recover in the air-conditioning, Halpern shares his “Abbott” origin story, one that began with a pilot that never got off the ground.

In 2017, he and Schumacker cast Brunson for a project on the network The CW. Brunson was a rising star, gaining fame for the viral Instagram comedy series, “Girl Who Has Never Been on a Nice Date,” which she parlayed into a video producer role at BuzzFeed and her own YouTube Red comedy series “Broke,” which lasted one season.

Halpern says the character they created, a ditzy Valley Girl, wasn’t a fit for Brunson. But there was something about her.

“Quinta has this preternatural ability to connect with people in a scene,” Halpern says. “Then, as I got to know her better, I realized she also has an encyclopedic knowledge of sitcoms. She’s 10 years younger than me, yet every show that is a cultural touchstone for me is also a touchstone for her. So, she has such a deep understanding of what an audience wants because she’s such a good audience herself. That is a rare talent.”

The pilot flopped, but Halpern and Schumacker were eager to work with Brunson more and asked if she had anything in mind. Turns out she was mulling over a project—a story based on the experiences of her schoolteacher mother. A year later, the stars aligned and Halpern and Schumacker helped her pitch and sell the show, initially called “Harrity Elementary.”

The rest is sitcom history.

Like Brunson, Halpern gained fame in an unconventional manner. A former Aztecs baseball pitcher who quit the team to pursue his passion for film, Halpern started the Twitter feed @shitmydadsays when he was living at home with his parents in San Diego’s Point Loma neighborhood in 2009.

The account, which documented the witticisms of his no-nonsense father, caught fire. It garnered more than 2 million followers before being greenlighted as a sitcom starring William Shatner that lasted 18 episodes before CBS pulled the plug in 2011.

Halpern and Schumacker collaborated on several other projects, but none were hits. After seven years in Hollywood, Halpern hit a wall.

“I remember saying to Patrick, ‘I am so [bleeping] sick of making shows that I would never in a million years watch,’” he says. “‘We have to make a rule: We’re only going to make shows we’d watch.’”

Their next project was “Harley Quinn,” which is about to start its fifth season. Then “Abbott Elementary.”

It seems he was finally on to something.

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AMID THE HEAT IN BURBANK, Dufurrena isn’t breaking a sweat. Perhaps it’s his upbringing in Spring Creek, Nevada, a mining and farming community known for extreme temperatures.

Despite a recent promotion from staff writer to story editor and with “Written By” credits on three episodes under his belt, success hasn’t gone to Dufurrena’s head. After standing for the cover photo shoot, he helped break down and carry the equipment, unprompted.

“From a young age I knew I wanted to do TV or film,” he says. “I wanted to go to a prestigious film school in LA, but I couldn’t afford it. I had an aunt who went to San Diego State, and I wanted to be in SoCal. I got in.”

During a TFM course his senior year, there was a guest speaker in class one day: Halpern.

“I remember he seemed like a funny, cool guy,” Dufurrena says. “I thought it would be great if I could graduate and get the opportunity to work on the same show as him.”

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But Dufurrena blazed his own path first. After graduation, he quickly found work as a writer’s production assistant—a junior position that supports the writing team—on the long-running ABC sitcom “The Middle.” To his delight, television comedy felt like home.

“Once I saw that writers room, I was like, ‘That’s it. It’s the best job in the world,’” Dufurrena says. “You get to do storytelling, but you get to laugh the whole time.”

One day at work for “The Middle,” Dufurrena was wearing SDSU gear when one of the writers took note. The writer happened to play basketball with a guy who went to San Diego State.

The guy in question was Halpern, and the two soon met for coffee.

“I just kept pestering Justin,” Dufurrena says. “Every few months I would email him. I would keep up with San Diego State basketball and football and send him an article here and there.”

After “The Middle” ended in 2018, Dufurrena was tapped to be a script coordinator on a spinoff that was ultimately not picked up. In March 2021, Halpern emailed out of the blue and invited him to interview for “Abbott” as a script coordinator. 

After an interview with Brunson and Schumacker, he got the job.

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ON THIS JULY AFTERNOON, the “Abbott Elementary” team is hard at work on Season 4. Today was a table read—a structured read-through of the script with the show’s actors.

“If there are jokes we don’t think landed, we’ll all come up with our own punch-ups,” says Dufurrena, who particularly loves writing for the character Mr. Johnson, the show’s hilariously offbeat custodian. “We’ll read them together, and whichever get the most laughs make it into the scripts.”

Leading the writers room alongside Brunson, Halpern likes to start off each day with what he calls “host chat,” where writers casually shoot the bull. The idea is to create a space for funny people to be funny. It is not uncommon that things said during this warm-up period end up somewhere in the script.

One unwritten rule of the writers room: Always remain on your toes.

“For me it’s a lot of, ‘I have a good idea for a joke,’ followed by, ‘No, that’s not very good, Riley,’” Dufurrena deadpans. “‘Try harder.’”

Halpern interrupts: “We do make fun of Riley a lot. Everybody makes fun of everybody a lot—it’s the best part of the job.”

Indeed, cutting it up with the writing team is the half of the showrunner job Halpern loves. The other half—wrangling budgets and supervising people—he equates to managing a Macy’s. But it’s all for one common goal.

“My job is to make sure that Quinta’s vision for the show is what’s on TV,” Halpern says.

Brunson, via an email from her publicist, expressed appreciation for what Halpern and Dufurrena bring to the show.

“Justin I simply couldn’t do my job without: He’s my right-hand man in almost every sense. Without him, our room doesn’t run,” Brunson writes. “Riley is meticulous in a big-picture way. I know it stems from his background as a script coordinator, but it’s also a part of his character to think about the big picture, and that’s very helpful in the writers room as well as on set.”

Of course, Halpern and Dufurrena are aware that there are some contributions they just can’t make. As two white men on a show with a diverse writers room and a majority-Black cast, they both say they’re mindful to stay in their lanes.

“The thing that I’m always aware of is that it is a show about a place where I am not from and an experience I didn’t have,” Halpern says. “So there is a healthy amount of just listening. But I think the unifying thing is storytelling. It’s what connects us all, and it’s why ‘Abbott’ has a giant, diverse audience.”

As the interview winds down, the two proud Aztecs remember their time in SDSU’s TFM program as formative. Both mentioned the influence of professor emeritus Greg Durbin, known for putting cameras in the hands of his students and letting them sink or swim, as a particularly influential faculty member.

“That’s the ultimate gratification for any teacher, to see their students succeed like this,” says the recently retired Durbin, by phone. “I’ve taught at many places, and I can tell you that SDSU students were hungry. They had to make a virtue of necessity, and they were energetic and persistent.’”

As a showrunner, Halpern sees it too.

“Every time I’ve hired anyone from San Diego State, they’ve always done a really good job,” he says. “I think that’s my little way of pushing back against what can be a very insular environment here.”

Soon, we pile back into the whimsical yellow cart, and Halpern drives us back across the Warner Bros. lot to the gate. 

The shadows are longer now. The construction workers have gone home. The heat on the streets of faux Philly is finally beginning to break.