This week’s “Abbott Elementary” episode is just half of the story. “Volunteers” featured the long-awaited crossover with FX’s long-running “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” as told from the vantage point of the hit ABC sitcom. But you’ll have to wait for the upcoming season of “Sunny” to get the Gang’s take.
“Scenes that were happening off-screen in our episode are happening on-screen in theirs,” teases “Abbott” exec producer Patrick Schumacker. “Someone should get ahold of both episodes [once they air] and cut them together. This isn’t quite the perfect comp, but people keep comparing it to ‘Rashomon.’ We’re not getting different truths happening, but their episode does take place essentially in the same time frame.”
Schumacker suggests that Hulu should consider pairing both episodes for audiences to view back-to-back once the “Sunny” version (which has also already been filmed) airs sometime this spring. But in the meantime, we now have a pretty good idea of what the set-up will be in that episode as well: The “It’s Always Sunny” Gang ends up doing community service at Abbott Elementary — and Melissa (Lisa Ann Walter), who has visited Paddy’s Pub before, recognizes them as the criminals they are.
“We were like, who from our cast would ever go to Paddy’s?” says exec producer Justin Halpern. “Oh, Melissa could stumble into that place once. We buy that she could.” Adds Garrett Werner, who wrote the episode: “That’s also the neighborhood she lives in, South Philly, and that’s where Paddy’s is. It was the clearest overlap.”
Star/creator/executive producer Quinta Brunson and the “Abbott” writers met with “Sunny” EPs/stars Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day early on to brainstorm ideas for the A story, and they settled on the “Sunny” canon that Charlie (Day) is illiterate.
“As we were breaking what we thought the stories might be, and the pairings that we wanted to see together, we just kept coming back to the fact that Charlie can’t read,” Halpern says. “A good ‘Abbott’ episode generally has some sort of emotional grounding in the story and a character reaching some sort of satisfying, emotional moment towards the end. And so we were like, Barbara [Sheryl Lee Ralph] teaching him how to read could build to an actual meaningful moment and still hold true.”
And then, for a secondary storyline, the writers realized that both Janine (Brunson) on “Abbott” and Dee (Kaitlin Olson) on “Sunny” went to the University of Pennsylvania — and that this unlikely duo might bond over that.
Quinta Brunson, Kaitlin Olson, “Abbott Elementary” (Disney/Gilles Mingasson) Disney
“Janine is the one teacher at Abbott who, at least at the top of it, wants to give these people the benefit of the doubt,” Schumacker says. “Because the way that they come into the fold is that the Gang is doing community service,. So they have to volunteer at Abbott to essentially avoid jail time. Once everybody puts two and two together that these are criminals, they’re all like, we got to get them out of here. But then Janine has bonded with Dee over their mutual alma mater, and she’s sort of blinded by that, a fellow Penn grad.”
Finding a way to merge the voice of two different kinds of comedies and mixing those tones was hard at first, Werner said. But the mockumentary nature of “Abbott” helped in splitting the difference.
“The Gang are horrible sociopaths, but they are still aware of how they’re perceived,” he says. “So, just having the fact that they have to interact with cameras and they’re going to be documented, that sort of brings them back from where they could sometimes get to —because there’s filmed evidence about what they’re doing. So that helped bring them down. And then, just by having four sociopaths loose in this school, it kind of loosens up our characters’ tones too, just to sort interact with them. It ended up feeling kind of natural, actually.”
It’s unclear how many “Abbott” fans are “Sunny” viewers and vice versa — although the producers note that there aren’t many comedies on TV, so there’s a good chance fans of laughing watch both. But nonetheless, they made sure to make the episode still make sense even if you’re not familiar with Charlie, Dee, Mac (McElhenney), Frank (Danny DeVito) or Dennis (Glenn Howerton).
“We wanted to treat them like they were typical guest stars on the show,” Schumacker says. “I don’t think we over explain it at all. There’s a couple of little inside jokes, but those are pretty few and far between. We wanted to treat it like, if you’re just a fan of ‘Abbott,’ and you don’t know who these people are, you can appreciate it. And hopefully that works on the on the flip side as well. And in the episode of ‘Sunny,’ I think it will.”
Werner watched several famous TV crossovers to prepare for this one, and he came away knowing that he wanted this one to have teeth.
“Having grown up a TV watcher in the ‘90s, all of those crossovers were always cameo driven, like the characters were not load-bearing in the story,” Halpern says. “We didn’t just want to do the, ‘oh my god, Urkel showed up in “Full House!”’ We wanted to do something really ambitious that tied these two episodes together. That if you were someone who was going to watch both episodes, you would have a viewing experience that I don’t know that you would have in any other crossover.”
Charlie Day, Rob McElhenney, Kaitlin Olson, Danny DeVito, “Abbott Elementary” (Disney/Gilles Mingasson) Disney
Meanwhile, the “Abbott” writers also faced the challenge of not knowing which “Sunny” stars would be available for the episode beyond McElhenney and Day. Olson was busy at work on “High Potential,” while Howerton was shooting Netflix’s “Sirens.” And DeVito’s availability also wasn’t clear a t first.
“Rob’s like, you got Danny, and then our casting people would be like, ‘Danny won’t return our calls, and we don’t know where he is,’” Halpern says. (Which was confusing since “Abbott” and “Sunny” share the same casting teams.)
Adds Werner: “We didn’t know Dennis was going to be in the show until the day I went out on script. So it was just sort of like, let’s figure out a way to explain why he’s in there so briefly. It was just motivated by so much fun and enthusiasm by all parties, that that kind of just kept propelling us, no matter when, a little logistical challenge came up. Everybody’s attitude was like, ‘well, we’ll figure this out.’”
“Abbott” executive producer/director Randall Einhorn was also a bridge between the two shows, having also directed on “Sunny.” “Randall was like this middle ground of building trust between both sides, where Randall could vouch for us and for them for each other,” Werner says. “There was just an immediate comfort, I think, that he brought to everything that we could not have had with any other director on the planet.”
Among the episode’s Easter eggs, Werner notes that every episode of “Sunny” kicks off with a title card that includes the day and time. So on “Abbott,” “we don’t have title cards, but after the cold open, the very first line is somebody saying the day and time as like, a nod to ‘Sunny.’ There’s other little references like they make. It’s just very fun to figure out all the lore of ‘Sunny,’ and then what is the lore of us. So both Janine and Dee both have big feet. It’s like a very strange little thing, because they can line up on that and serve both audiences.”
And besides his inability to read, Charlie’s affinity for bird law on “Sunny” comes into play on “Abbott” as well. That’s partly because the “Abbott” team wanted this episode to still play an important part of Season 4’s ongoing storyline: The legal showdown regarding a golf course moving into the “Abbott” neighborhood.
“This episode is every bit as important as every other episode in this season, as far as the seasonal mythology goes,” Schumacker says. “In Season 4, we have the specter of this golf course and the gentrification in the neighborhood. There’s the illicit deal that Ava has struck with the lawyer from the golf course who’s giving Abbott payola, hush money, essentially. That stuff all comes into play in this crossover episode, and the ‘Sunny’ Gang influences that relationship as well. This episode doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It actually is one that rewards ‘Abbott’ fans who are planning on watching the whole season.”
This episode even contains what the writers say is the most elaborate special effect “Abbott Elementary” has ever done: The school’s scoreboard dropping off the gym wall in the cold open.
“It doesn’t really have to do with the ‘Sunny’ people at all, it was just another big thing we did for this episode,” Werner says. “We dropped the scoreboard before, but it was off-camera and just the sound effect. But this one we actually rigged up. There were all these tests of the scoreboard falling. It could fall into all these different ways and stuff. Randall and I were just like, ‘what’s the fastest, funniest way for it to fall?’ So we did it in one take. It really was amazing.”
Quips Halpern: “We’re a regular ‘Avatar’ over here.”
Next up, it’s still unclear when the “Sunny” side of this crossover will air, and the producers are hesitant to give any hints at what might transpire during their version of the tale.
“I don’t want to spoil any of their stuff, because it’s really their story to tell, but I will say that what they did is really ambitious,” Halpern says. “If you’re a fan of ‘Abbott,’ you’re going to definitely want to watch their episode.”
