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SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the Season 5 midseason premiere of ABC‘s Abbott Elementary.
Abbott Elementary returned to ABC on Wednesday night, but network television’s favorite teachers were not within the familiar walls of Willard R. Abbott Elementary School.
After the midseason finale ended with the school in disrepair, the teachers found out they’d be temporarily moving their operation into an abandoned mall. The Season 5 return picks up a few days before the holiday break ends, with the teachers gathering at said mall to give up some of their vacation time in order to get the building — which is in its own state of disrepair — at least somewhat ready to welcome children.
The idea for it came from creator Quinta Brunson, inspired by the students and teachers from Palisades High School who had to relocate to an empty Sears in Santa Monica, California, for the remainder of the school year and into the 2025-26 session after the school was badly damaged by the devastating wildfires a year ago.
“She was like, ‘I want to talk about the reality that these educators go through and have us put our characters through the same thing,’ because that’s always what we’re trying to do,” showrunner Justin Halpern tells Deadline.
RELATED: ‘Abbott Elementary’ Season 5 Cast Photos & Episode Release Guide For ABC Comedy
From mysterious leaks to broken windows to endless entrances and exits, the shopping center presents so many challenges it’s hard to keep track. They certainly don’t cease when the kids arrive. If anything, the situation gets even more difficult to manage. But, in true Abbott fashion, these teachers find a way.
In the interview below, Halpern and showrunner Patrick Schumaker break down the logistics of shooting at an abandoned mall (and also a live baseball game, which they did earlier this season) and the future of the ABC sitcom as it awaits a Season 6 renewal.
DEADLINE: I just think this whole concept of the school moving into an abandoned mall is so brilliantly funny. Can you tell me how you came up with the idea?
JUSTIN HALPERN: We heard about what had happened at Pali High after the fires, and then we started doing some research about just a lot of schools that were having a lot of structural issues, in Philadelphia, but elsewhere, and how common it was for schools to have to relocate for a certain amount of time, which felt like, after everything else you throw at educators then put that on top of their already busy schedules, and it felt impossible. Quinta, I think originally, was like, ‘I want to show this.’ She was like, ‘I want to talk about the reality that these educators go through and have us put our characters through the same thing,’ because that’s always what we’re trying to do. We talked to several different people who had actually gone through it. Educators, administrators and teachers, who had gone through this.
PATRICK SCHUMAKER: We specifically talked to someone from the LAUSD board who had dealt with firsthand relocating kids from Pali High after the Palisades fire to the dead Sears at the Santa Monica promenade. So, that was super illuminating, talking to him about about that change, how it affected the kids, what a headache it was for the board and for the school and educators [and] administrators involved in the Pali High [move]. And they’re still there.
DEADLINE: They are still there?!
SCHUMAKER: To my knowledge, they are still there. They were when we wrote this.
HALPERN: I assume they might be back, now.
SCHUMAKER: Are they back? When we were writing it, they were still there.
DEADLINE: How long should we anticipate this goes on in the Abbott world?
HALPERN: I think we want people to feel what the educators are feeling, which is they’re not sure when they’re going to get to come back and what metrics are going to be used for them getting to come back. So we’re going to be a little cagey with how long it’s going to be, and that’s purposeful, because we want people to feel the discomfort that they feel in the show, while also just being comforted by the show.
DEADLINE: It’s such an interesting plot device, I’m curious how it intrigued you creatively and what storylines it opened up for you?
SCHUMAKER: I mean, we were sort of able to reverse engineer some of the story based on the location, because it is a real location. Well, if that isn’t obvious, but it is a real dead mall out in Topanga, California. We have the distinction of being, I believe, the last people to enter it legally before it’s being demolished. I think the Rams are building some sort of facility in the footprint of that mall. This show will be the last thing that films there.
But just in terms of the creative, I mean, we had what we had. In a great way, it was lived in and had seen much better days. There had been some break-ins, vandalism, that sort of thing that just kind of breathes character into the location. We went with that. We wrote the sort of darkened nooks and crannies of the mall that were terrifying the kids. Just the production headache of ‘where are we placing everything?’ became a part of the story as well, with how these teachers are going to geographically recreate the school in this new space. Then also just the fact that there’s a million entry points and exit points that they don’t have to deal with on a daily basis at Abbott proper. That became part of the storyline as well. The rest of it was, I think, inspired by our own experiences at malls growing up. Melissa’s character, being someone who’s a little closer to our age, experiencing the malls in their heyday and sort of reliving that nostalgia, that became a thing. It came naturally, I think, to sort of figure out what all the headaches would be, in addition to what we learned from the administrators that we spoke with who had to do this in real life. That kind of drove the bus creatively.
DEADLINE: Can you tell me a bit about the headaches that affected production?
SCHUMAKER: There weren’t a lot of choices. Our locations manager, who’s wonderful, David Lyons, he’s the one who found it and who obviously had to do some negotiations in concert with Scott Sites, our line producer, and our whole production team in making it somewhat affordable. The location fees were pretty extensive. We have our sets built it at Warner Bros., and so that’s our home base, and it’s easy to amortize the cost of building those sets over several seasons, because we’re just there and nothing changes. But this was like a whole new ball game. You’re moving a cast and crew. You’re moving 100 people, let’s say, very rough estimate, out to Topanga. You’ve got extra transpo. You’ve got lights that you’re bringing in that you don’t ordinarily have to deal with moving on a daily basis. It was just a literal giant production, having to relocate everyone for, essentially, a month and change, because we’re moving in [and] you’ve got to do a couple of weeks of prep and all of that.
Moving equipment and the logistics of that is just this massive undertaking. I likened it to U2 going on tour. It was just a massive undertaking. So it’s really about costs. How do we minimize that? If it’s even possible? We rearranged a little bit of our production schedule with hiatuses, because there was a hiatus that had been built in. Then you’re looking at, and this is getting into the weeds, but it’s just the cost of being down for a week, but then having everything living at the at the mall location while you’re actually not shooting. So, having to rearrange that so we’re being as efficient as possible with our budget and things like that. It’s just a lot of variables that you have to take into consideration.
DEADLINE: I have really enjoyed Luke Tennie’s character this season, and I feel like we really get to see a fun side of him in this episode. Can you tell me more about the idea to bring in a new teacher and what we should expect from him in the latter half of the season?
HALPERN: Well, I think turnover is a huge part of being a public school teacher. We have our core cast, which want to keep forever, as long as the show goes. But we also wanted to expand the world and let people see that new people are always coming into these schools. It’s always dependent on grade size. It’s always a good barometer for how far Janine and Gregory have come when you bring in somebody brand new. It allows us to remind the audience like, ‘Oh, wait, these aren’t the teachers we saw in Season 1. They’ve grown. Here is the measuring stick we can use to show you that.’ Luke’s just such a great guy and brings such a unique energy. I think anytime we’re looking for a guest star in our show, we’re looking for someone who understands the world but operates at a slightly different frequency than each of our core cast members, and Luke does that so beautifully.
DEADLINE: The ballpark episode this season was one listed on several ‘best episodes of the year’ lists. What went into making that episode?
HALPERN: I’m an enormous baseball fan. I’ve been trying to get Quinta to somehow work baseball into the show, and then this year she came into the writers room and she’s like, ‘I want to do an episode at the Phillies game.’
SCHUMAKER: Yeah…I mean, we tried a couple seasons to work it in, but just the way that our production schedule versus the Major League Baseball schedule [fit], we go into production toward the end of the regular season. We usually try and save our big-ticket items for the end of the year. Well, that’s impossible if you want to do a baseball game. It just doesn’t line up. So we were like, ‘Alright, if we’re going to do this, we’ve got to do it at the beginning of the season.’ So, it was the third episode that aired. It was toward the end of the regular season. We were like, ‘Okay, we’ve got to build this around an actual game here. Oh, there. They’ve got a three-game home stand against the Braves. Great. It’s a division rival. That’s awesome from just a story standpoint.’ We kind of went from there, just figuring out what are our parameters were.
The funny thing was, originally, a huge part of the story was [Phillies left fielder and hitter] Kyle Schwarber is in a slump, and Barbara — who is the consummate Phillies fan. She loves baseball. She knows the ins and outs of it. She is so inside baseball. She’s trying to correct Kyle Schwarber’s stance. Well, obviously you can’t write what’s going to happen in the real game. The way that we shot the game was we did three days in Philly. One was on location outside the stadium. The second day was inside the stadium with 500 extras, where on the edges of the frame is no one. It was an empty stadium, because we had to shoot to get sound, right? [We can’t] rely on a stadium of 43,000 people, give or take, to give us good sound. So we shot everything that was heavy on the dialogue the day before Game 1 of that three-game home stretch.
Then Game 1 of that three-game home stretch happens on our third day of shooting, where we’ve already gotten all this dialogue shot that has to do with Schwarber being in a slump, and then Kyle Schwarber goes and ties the record for the most amount of home runs in a single game with four. He had an opportunity to hit a fifth and break the record, but he didn’t, but he came close. I think he was batting against an infielder at that point, because they were running out of pitchers, the Braves, because the Phillies just hammered them, and they won. I think it was 18 or 19 to 3 or something like that [Editor’s note: The official score was 19-4]. It was crazy.
So we had to pivot on the spot. Ava Coleman, who was the writer of the episode, she was there on site with Randall Einhorn, who’s directing this episode. I mean, Ava did a phenomenal job with the script. She loves baseball. It shows. Randall did a phenomenal job directing the episode, especially for someone who does not know anything about baseball. Anything about it. He had to learn everything before he went, directed it, but he’s our producing director. He’s just a phenomenal director, phenomenal producer, and made it work. We have a show that is done mockumentary style, right? It’s pretty loose. We don’t storyboard stuff within an inch of its life. We have some flexibility. We rehearse the scenes, and the directors, they have an idea of where they want to put the cameras beforehand, but a lot of times you have to pivot. When you’re there in the moment, on the day, you’ve got to pivot for what’s best for the scene.
But with this episode, it was so ambitious — the amount of shots that we needed, the amount of moments that we needed, all this coverage — that Randall really did have to storyboard everything. Then he had to reverse engineer it, because there were moments where we’re trying to sell that we’re in this game, and we shot the dialogue before the actual game. So we have stuff where we’re stitching together two shots to look like one whip-pan. You’re angling on the field. You see something happen on the field, and then you whip to our cast in the seats and complete the shot. The second half of the shot is actually something that we shot before the first half of the shot, if that makes sense. So on Day 2 of production, we shoot the dialogue and the B-side of that whip-pan, and then Day 3, we shoot the A-side of that whip-pan.
So, we’re having to remember. You’re having to reverse engineer everything, and also you’re having to have a copious shot list versus the looseness of what we’re normally used to, and it still came out looking like an episode of Abbott, while also having that insane production value of being at Citizens Bank Park. You talk about these puzzles, right? These production puzzles that we’re not often presented with on the show, because we are in the friendly confines of Stage 16 or 8 at Warner Bros. in Burbank most of the time. Here we are thousands of miles away in a stadium with 43,000 people. It’s like going to war.
DEADLINE: So did you have enough without using all the dialogue about Kyle Schwarber being in a slump?
HALPERN: Ava Coleman, again, the writer, she was so [good] in the moment [with] rewrites just helping wherever needed to be helped within the scripts to make everything make sense. She’s really the one to talk to about it. But, yeah, Ava did a bunch of little things all during that whole shoot. That was one of the most challenging things we’ve ever done.
DEADLINE: I know there’s no official renewal announcement yet, but I’m curious if you’ve started to think about Season 6? It’s so rare for a show to run for that long anymore.
SCHUMAKER: And we have never experienced it.
DEADLINE: So what does that look like for you guys to reach that milestone and keep the engine of the show going?
HALPERN: It really has been comforting. ABC has been so good, too, just about supporting the show and letting us always know where we stand with the show. It has allowed us to do some planning over the years. We haven’t gotten a pickup yet for Season 6, but I feel good. I feel good about it. I feel like we’ve definitely, in the writers room with Quinta and the staff, talked about what a Season 6 looks like. One of my favorite things about working with Quinta is that she’s not afraid to throw out a big idea and then have everybody talk and argue about it. Maybe that’s not where we end up. Maybe the big idea she tossed out isn’t where we end up, or maybe it is where we end up. It just stokes this very fun conversation, and I feel like it keeps the writers room really fresh, and the ideas really fresh. The number one on the call sheet, the creator of the show, isn’t afraid to just be like, ‘What’s something crazy and fun we can do that honors these characters and the stories we tell?’ So I feel like we have gotten to actually talk a lot about at least the basic building blocks of what a Season 6 might look like, which has been really cool.
SCHUMAKER: We’re still breaking the last three episodes of Season 5, when we come back from the holiday. But, there’s some big milestones planned that will clearly set up a dynamic in Season 6.
DEADLINE: The PAs on Abbott recently unanimously voted to unionize. You both, and Quinta, were supporters of the writers strike in 2023. I saw Quinta on the picket lines often. What do you make of these efforts by the PAs?
HALPERN: I’m a board member of the WGA, and to me, it’s fantastic. I mean, I think culture at Abbott is a really important thing and being able to support the people who work on the show wanting a collective voice is huge. I think it’s great, and I wish every workplace had the chance to unionize and not face any sort of backlash against it from their employers.
SCHUMAKER: I mean, working in this industry, it can be a grind. The PAs on Abbott, as on any show, have some of the toughest jobs as far as hours go. They’re up at the crack of dawn. They’re getting there before everybody else. Everybody deserves to make a living wage and be taken care of, and the PAs are absolutely not an exception to that. So, more power to them.
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