Abbott Elementary writer Chad Morton is grateful that a running joke in his recent episode "Girard Creek" seems to have resonated not just with fans but with his own family.
"My uncle just recently texted me 'Seven…teen,'" Morton says with a laugh. "There was no other context."
Morton's uncle is referencing the number of Arnold Palmer beverages consumed by devoted and eager teacher Janine Teagues (played by Abbott’s Emmy-winning creator and executive producer Quinta Brunson) at the grand opening for the Girard Creek Golf Course. Girard Creek is the end result of a season-long construction development-turned-feud between the very cringe developer Miles (Matt Oberg) and the Abbott faculty. The latter take their students to the event where high-end, fancy truffles are served alongside the endless Arnold Palmers that Janine can’t bring herself to stop drinking, despite wanting to find something at this shindig to hold against Miles as he and his corporate conglomerate execute a hidden agenda to use Abbott’s diverse students as token marketing tools.
Morton's script effortlessly mixes Abbott's formula of character-first comedy with timely and relevant social themes, while also juggling key subplots: Principal Ava Coleman (Janelle James) and teacher Melissa Schemmenti (Lisa Ann Walter) plotting a comical heist involving those aforementioned truffles, while veteran educator Barbara Howard (Sheryl Lee Ralph) struggles to broaden the limited palate of her colleague Gregory, played by Tyler James Williams. Meanwhile, Chris Perfetti's determined Jacob finally finds an extracurricular activity that excites quiet student R.J. (Logan Carter), though it comes with some problematic undertones.
The end result is one for the fourth season's most memorable installments so far, and Morton recently spoke to the Television Academy about how it took a village (and a lot of truffles) to pull it off.
Television Academy: How did this episode originate? Was it a story you pitched, or did the writing duties just happen to land on you in the rotation?
Chad Morton: So, generally, how we do a lot of our episodes is at the beginning of the season, Quinta always has a plan. She knows exactly where she wants to end. So she will lay out a few ideas, and we'll pitch our own versions of what we think that idea should be. Quinta and the other showrunners will come back and give us notes, and we'll go from there.
With ["Girard Creek"], we knew ahead that at some point we wanted to have a huge moment with R.J. And we knew we were going to involve Girard Creek. So building off the first episode of season four, we knew we’d come back to it, and it just so happened to be my episode. I just so happened to get assigned this episode in the rotation.
When you say Quinta usually has an overall plan for the season, does she come in with a fleshed-out treatment of sorts or a beat sheet?
Sometimes it'll be that way. Other times, it would be like, "You know what? Last night I had an idea. We should do this." And we kind of just pivot from there. But generally, I would say, at the start of the season she does know where she wants to end. How we get there changes usually around the halfway point, once we've already written like 12 episodes. But we have a vague idea of where we're going right at the beginning on the first day when we come back for the season.
My favorite bit in the episode is Janine’s hilarious "Arnold Palmer" joke runner. How did you land on that? It seems to have been very popular on social media when the episode aired.
I'm so happy everybody really attached themselves to that. That was something we kind of just came up with in the room. Like, "Yeah, let's [work in] Arnold Palmers." And then it just became a whole thing. My family was texting me about it. My uncle just recently texted me "Seven … teen."[Laughs] There was no other context, just 17.
Originally, we had an ongoing bit with Janine and her having tuna or another fancy food. But we realized we didn't want to have Quinta just eating a bunch of tuna bites all day. So we were just like, "What's something cool?" And I was sitting there, in the writers' room, and I was like, "I think Arnold Palmer is related to golf. Why don't we try that?" And it just became a thing.
Are there any other jokes or scenes that were discussed originally that did not make the cut?
A big one is the truffle scene. So, what you see on-screen was not in the original shooting draft. Originally, we had it as Melissa would hand the truffles to Jacob. And Jacob was just going to start shaving them down. And that's what will get Miles to eventually give in [to the Abbott crew's demands] at the end of the episode.
But our director, Randall Einhorn, had an idea. He loved the arc of Gregory finally loving something that he can't afford, which is truffles. And his idea was, "What if we brought him back and he just started eating them?" But how [Randall] pitched it was, he just starts eating them. So I was like, "Okay, I don't really know where we go." Because, keep in mind, he pitched this three or four days before we filmed. So we had already finished the script and everything. But he really wanted to do it, so we finally gave in. We first did the scripted version, and then we wrote some new lines. And we were like, "Now we're going to do your version." By the time we got to set, we had the truffles ready.
How did this new bit of business land with Tyler? He seemed to really enjoy that scene.
Tyler — he was a warrior that day. He was ready to commit and eat the truffles. We had real truffles there. And it was so funny watching him actually try to put that food in his mouth — everything you see is real. That was everyone's real reaction, in real time, to him eating the truffles.
By the time we did three or four takes of that — after what he just went through and seeing him spit out the truffles — we were like, "Why don't we just keep that?" We all felt pretty good about keeping that version and then not using the original one we had. All of that was like three, four days right before we were going to film. And at that point, how we scripted it, Gregory wasn't really involved in their story as much. But it ended up being a good payoff to his storyline and being so funny. It's one of the funniest days I've ever had on set, just watching him try to hold that down.
Gregory being a massive fan of plain food has become a recurring aspect of his personality on the show.
A lot of that is based on one of our writers, actually. It's so funny how a lot of people would be like, "Oh my god, [Gregory]'s so picky. He doesn't eat." And we're all sitting there like, "Everything that you think is so outlandish is based on this guy that's sitting across from us." [Laughs]
Another memorable scene in this episode is the truffle heist involving Ava and Melissa, and their very funny back-and-forth exchange of movie titles that had heists in them.
I'm so happy you said that about the movie titles. I think we originally had scripted just two movies. And we were sitting there — me and one of our other showrunners and executive producers, Patrick Schumacker — and we just felt like it needed a few more beats. But we came to that, I think, on our last take. So we were in a hurry. We went to IMDb to search for heist movies, and we were just trying to get in as much as we could. We then immediately walked over to Janelle and Lisa, pitched it to them and they were with it right away. The take you see was our last take that we had filmed, and then we put that version in.
I was trying to go off memory of heist movies, but we had to make sure these are actual heist movies, so I immediately was going to Wiki, trying to read the summary as fast as we could, because they were filming as we were trying to think [up alts].
So, logistically, were you and Patrick just calling out alternate lines to actors off-screen, or —
They had just finished the take, and we immediately walked over to them. And we're like, "What if you said it this way, and then you said it this way and there’s this back and forth?" Lisa and Janelle are professionals, so they picked up on it right away.
How challenging was it to find a resolution to R.J.’s storyline within the plot of this episode? We see Jacob struggling in another episode to help his student find something that interests him, and it ends up being golf at their rival’s place.
With R.J. in particular, we knew that with this episode there was a lot of irony with Gregory finally liking something, but it's something that he can't afford. With R.J., he finally likes something, too, but it’s also something that he can't afford to do. So we wanted to really highlight that socioeconomic disparity that can happen with inner-city kids, or just people who live in the inner city in general, and the people who are in privileged positions of power — who take advantage of those people, sometimes unknowingly, in the case of Miles. Our goal was to find a way to make Miles not seem too evil and cartoonish, but also realistic. A lot of the things he said [to R.J.] — one of the lines is "Every great golfer needs a great caddy." That line, I had originally put that in the script, and we did it at the table [read]. And it got a lot of “oooohs” from people, because everybody was a little bit on edge.
And at first, some of us in the writers' room were a little bit scared, because they were like, "Oh, was that too much?" I wanted to keep it in, just because I felt like people like [Miles] do think that way. It was a racist line, but he's not necessarily thinking of it in that way. They're thinking, "Oh, I'm doing something for you." And we wanted to show how dehumanizing that can be. And we actually did an alternate line for that. Randall, our director, loved the caddy line, because he said, as a kid, some people poached him to be a caddy. He was like, "It's a real thing. It's a real thing that people did." So we're like, "Okay, we'll film it." And in that scene, Sheryl had no idea that we were doing that take, so she gasped, and it was her real reaction that we had caught on film.
So, in terms of any difficulty with that arc and R.J.'s arc, we just really wanted to get a better sense of realism in terms of his POV and what Miles thinks. When I wrote that line, I was looking at my girlfriend. I pitched the line to her. And I was like, "Is that too far?" She was like, "No, no, no."
And Ava's attempt to "distract" everyone else in attendance, where she actually doesn’t do anything, has a really funny payoff.
We threw in a little Bring It On reference there, with her lines and her scene. It's funny to see certain people catch on to that. Some people on set would be like, "Wait, I've heard that before." It was funny to just hear their reactions, and then to see what they're thinking of.
But going back to what you asked earlier, about how did we bring up or plan the heist — again, that was all Quinta. She thought it would be funny if one of the characters just stole something from this fancy event, but something you wouldn’t expect. For the longest time, we were trying to figure out what that was. One of her examples was like, "What if the golf club has a chandelier?" Well, obviously, that would be ridiculous. But the intention was to find something that would be expensive, something fancy, that our characters could get. And we actually landed on truffles from that idea of wanting to do a heist, and then we integrated the truffles throughout the rest of the story.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Abbott Elementary airs Wednesday nights on ABC.
