Review: Abbott Elementary, “Team Building” | Season 5, Episode 1

Welcome back to our coverage of the ABC sitcom Abbott Elementary, which returns for its fifth season. As with previous seasons, these reviews will go up in time to the arrival on Hulu on Thursdays. As always, the first review is free, but subsequent reviews will be exclusively for paid subscribers. You can find our full fall schedule here.

It’s a new school year for Abbott Elementary, and a new era here at Episodic Medium. After three seasons of funny, thoughtful reviews, the inestimable LaToya Ferguson has turned in her school badge when it comes to this series. Now I’ll be here as your new permanent substitute teacher—trying my best to be the Janine to her Barbara. (Or, let’s face it, probably more like the Jacob to her Janine.)

I’m gonna be honest, it’s quite a unique assignment to take on. I’ve joined shows as a reviewer in their second season before, but never their fifth. And I’ve never taken the leap from a show I usually watch as a breezy binge at the end of each season to one I’m analyzing in-depth on a weekly basis. I don’t know if that will make me like the series more or less in the long run, but it’s fitting that as I figure that out, Abbott is also figuring out how it wants to enter its “elder statesman” era. Where it was once the brightest new thing in the world of network TV sitcoms, it’s now entering its fifth season as an established institution.

It's a question that mirrors Janine’s arc over the course of a “development day” full of mandatory team-building punishments, sorry, activities. When the show began, Janine was a young, optimistic ingénue trying to figure out how to become the elementary school teacher she always wanted to be. Being the inexperienced newbie has been a big part of Janine’s identity these past four seasons. But as the staff welcome a new fourth grade teacher so young he used to have Barbara as his kindergarten teacher, her place in the school is suddenly a little less clear. If she’s not the Scrappy to Barbara’s Scooby, who is she?

Like a lot of the storylines in “Team Building,” it’s a low-stakes dilemma to ease us back into the world of the show. Though I briefly wondered if the kitchen gas leak was going to result in part of the school blowing up or something, Abbott is subtler in its changes to the status quo. Ava is in love—happy to show off her vacation photos with O’Shon, but still in the more responsible mode we’ve seen her grow into the past few seasons. (Even if she has mentally rewritten her love story as one of star-crossed lovers beating impossible odds.)

Barbara is also in a sunnier, more optimistic place than she used to be—opening a “new chapter in the Book of Barbara” now that she’s learned how to bond with her music students by embracing stuff they love. She feels like a parent on their second kid; looser, less stressed, and more willing to go with the flow. Like many an eldest daughter, that sends Janine absolutely reeling as Barbara invites that aforementioned new teacher—Luke Tennie’s Dominic Clark—to come to her with any concerns and questions or just text her if she’s not around. (“Oh my god, we get it, you have her cellphone number!” Janine later explodes.)

Melissa, meanwhile, thinks it’ll be a breeze to jump from teaching second grade to her new role as a sixth-grade math teacher. She knows kids and she brushed up on the curriculum over the summer. Her patented Schemmenti confidence is at a high, at least until Jacob and Mr. Morton come to warn her about the absolute hell that is middle school. While “Team Building” is a little light on laughs overall for me, some of the biggest ones come from this storyline, which delivers all sorts of delightfully specific details about the ways that middle schoolers torment their teachers.  

“We live in a post-truth landscape and these kids hit below the belt,” Jacob warns. “Every day is like an episode of Scared Straight.” If you talk back to the kids, you get written up. If one kid gets the best of you, you could lose the period—or even the year. If you swear, the kids will report you. Oh, and they’ll regularly rate you to your face. (“Have you ever been called a one on a day you just knew you were a 10?!?” Mr. Morton cries.)

As evidenced by all those terrifying examples, the idea of Melissa moving up to middle school opens up a whole new world of storytelling possibilities for Abbott; as does the idea of Janine being left to handle all 40 second graders herself. In real-life, a big part of being a teacher is that every year is kind of the same, so it makes sense for Abbott to move its core cast into new roles in order to tell new stories about the public school experience.  

Still, befitting an elder statesmen comedy, Abbott doesn’t rush into those new storylines too fast. Instead, we get Mikey Day giving an affable if not exactly laugh-out-loud performance as Craig, the latest district stick-in-the-mud (and Ren Faire attendee!) trying to get Abbott to follow the rules. And we get a random, if ultimately quite sweet, story about Gregory teaching Mr. Johnson to ride a bike.

While the bike riding saga doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know about Gregory and Mr. Johnson, I actually got kind of choked up watching the whole school line up to cheer Mr. Johnson on after his initial struggle. While he (rightly) points out that the worst thing that can happen is that he’ll fall and die, Janine earnestly promises, “If you fall, we will catch you.”

We know these characters and this world well enough to know that’s true. And that dovetails beautifully with Janine’s realization that in her sixth year of teaching she actually has wisdom of her own to impart now. She doesn’t have to be Dominic’s rival or the first-floor grump, she can now be a mentor to a young, new teacher who’s just as overwhelmed as she once was.

It’s a simple but impactful way to acknowledge how much we’ve seen Janine grow and evolve these past four seasons. As with many a long-running series, it’s the time we’ve spent living with these characters that now makes their weekly adventures so meaningful. And while Abbott is hardly “over the hill” as far as sitcoms go, it feels right that its characters are all maturing in some way or another—even if its maturing in a more relaxed direction, like Barbara.

Presumably the school’s crumbling infrastructure and the new classroom assignments will offer more madcap fun to come. But, for now, it’s just nice to be back in this gentle, amiable world of Eagles Super Bowl shirts, broken HVAC systems, and teachers who really, really care about their students.

Stray observations

• We get a strong cold open to kick off the season. Everyone accidentally eating the donuts that had been left there since the last day of school was funny enough, but Mr. Morton falling through the crumbling ceiling in his bathrobe actually made me laugh out loud.
• I went back to see how often Abbott starts with the first day of school vs. some sort of pre-school-year episode. As far as I can tell, this is the first “development day” we’ve seen since season two. Which is good news for Janine, since development day is her second favorite holiday after Christmas!
• There’s a nice bit of continuity about why Mikey Day is forcing Abbott to do all this teambuilding stuff. The district wants to ensure the teachers are actually going to comply this year, after all the nonsense they pulled with the golf course last season.
• I love how essential Sweet Cheeks the guinea pig continues to be to Melissa’s storylines. That feels like a bit the writers could have dropped between seasons and I’m so glad they didn’t!
• Also, great that Ava casually knows that guinea pigs originated in the Andes.
• I love the brother/sister energy between Jacob and Melissa as she needlessly steals his lollipop and he just gasps, “My lolly!”
• So according to Janine’s Scrappy-Doo theory, Barbara is Scooby, Gregory is Fred, Jacob is Velma, and Melissa is Daphne (which ignores Shaggy altogether). Ava argues she’s Daphne, which does kind of feel right to me. Although I can also see Ava as Fred, Gregory as Daphne, Janine as Velma, Jacob as Shaggy, and Melissa as Scooby. Feel free to weigh in with your own castings in the comments!