‘Abbott Elementary’: Quinta Brunson & EPs On Janine’s Last Day Of School Party & Gregory’s Bold Move In Season 3 Finale

Disney/Gilles Mingasson

SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the Season 3 finale of ABC‘s Abbott Elementary.

The last day of school is always cause for celebration, and the teachers of Abbott Elementary sure know how to throw a party.

Fresh off her stint at the district, Janine Teagues (Quinta Brunson) made it back to her second-grade students in time to send them off for the summer and back to her co-workers in time to host them in her tiny apartment for a bit of a celebration in the Season 3 finale. Naturally, the documentary crew was also invited along for the ride.

“We knew we wanted it to end with Janine throwing a party, mostly because it was a year of her getting herself out of her comfort zone, pushing herself in ways she hadn’t before,” executive producer Justin Halpern told Deadline. “This party is something that she wouldn’t have probably done that long ago. Now she’s kind of in a different place.”

But, any party with that crew is sure to come with a certain amount of mayhem, like Sea Barbara rearing her head or Mr. Johnson stealing people’s money at the door. It’s not long before things get a little more wild than Janine signed up for.

“She’s still Janine, right? So it’s still very over planned. She wants to control, essentially, the chaos of life,” Halpern continued. “And ultimately, what we want her to learn is you have to just let go.”

Maybe that’s why, when Gregory (Tyler James Williams) makes a bold move and kisses her at the end of the night after months of back and forth, Janine really doesn’t ask any questions. She just kisses him back.

“It just felt like the right time,” Brunson said of the much-anticipated scene. “To me, I feel that I always envisioned Season 3 would be the season that leads these two characters together after seeing a lot of growth for them as individuals.”

Halpern and Brunson, along with executive producer Patrick Schumacker, spoke with Deadline about ending Season 3 on such a high note and where things are headed in Season 4.

DEADLINE: We’ve got a drunk Barbara, Mr. Johnson pretending to be a bouncer, and so much more at Janine’s party. I need you to take me inside the writers room when determining how each of these teachers would act in this environment.

PATRICK SCHUMACKER: With Barbara, it was too tempting not to have Sea Barbara make an appearance. We just love seeing Barbara and Melissa act in tandem. They’re certainly best work friends, so it felt right to us that they would, of course, be the ones to show up early. It felt like a little bit of a generational thing. At least at the start of the party, it felt like they would be the moms, thinking that they were the ones who were going to keep everything in order.

[Mr. Johnson’s] always got a side thing happening. With Ava, it felt right to us that she would try and turn this into a bit of a business, making some money. Yeah, I guess. We wanted to try and put a little bit of a button on Jacob and Zach. It felt like this was yet another thing that could trickle down from Janine’s master plan. In all honesty, I think if we had had a full 22 episodes this season, we probably would have explored more with Jacob’s breakup. We probably would have explored a little bit more with Jacob and Melissa, and their living situation as well. We had to pick and choose and kill some of our darlings, because of the nature of only doing like 14 episodes. For some of those characters, it felt like we wanted to use this momentous year-end bash as a way of putting a bit of a button on their season runners.

DEADLINE: I am glad to see Janine back at Abbott, as much as I enjoyed the district storyline. Was that always the plan?

JUSTIN HALPERN: We were always gonna have Janine come back from the district, because we felt like we owed the character and the audience. She’s always, in the back of her head and even verbally expressed this in the season, that she wants to make large, fundamental changes. She’s always talking about that. There’s a moment in an episode where Barbara has basically tells her…you’re dealing on a person-to-person basis here in the school. Those large changes happen outside of here. If you want to, you have a degree from UPenn, you want to go work at the place where you can make those large structural changes, then go do it. So we felt like her character, as she grew and got more confident and more ambitious, would want to answer that question. I think we didn’t want to have her answer that question in Season 4, because we had a different plan for that.

So this felt like the right time. It’s fun to take a character who’s comfortable and makes them uncomfortable, especially if it feels like they’re in a place where they’re ready to be uncomfortable. So we’d always said, though, that the district is going to service this idea that the thing that she loves the most is the one-on-one interactions with the kids in her class and in school. Those things are just irreplaceable for her. That’s why we didn’t make the people who worked in the district like boogeymen, even the superintendent. He’s just talking about the realities of what he has to do in his job. But what makes Jeanine special and what makes her special teacher is that she craves that one-on-one contact with students. That’s what we wanted to show her character and ultimately the audience.

DEADLINE: I have to say, I am sad to see those district characters go. Is there potentially room for them to return?

QUINTA BRUNSON: I think in essence, their arc is closed. But, because they are district members, I think we totally can see those people again. In this modern age of making TV, I try really hard not to depend on any outside characters we bring in. Honestly, the reason why is just scheduling. These actors, fortunately, become a part of other great projects and other great shows, great movies. I’m always just worried that maybe we won’t be able to get them in again to be part of our universe as permanently as we would like them to be. So I’d always like to keep all of our characters around.

For instance, someone who we brought in that we didn’t know would be wind up becoming a big part of the fabric of Abbott is the Mr. Morton character. We didn’t really know he’d be a continual returning character. We’re having the same experience with Cree Summer, who played the librarian this year. I love Cree. We adore her. But Cree’s got a lot going on. Once we casted her, I was like, ‘Oh, man, I don’t know how often we’re gonna get to have her.’ So she’ll continue to be part of the fabric of our world. But I try not to put too much on our guest stars, mainly because I want them to have successful careers doing whatever it is they want to do.

DEADLINE: We have to discuss Janine and Gregory’s kiss. Why did it feel like this was the right time to make this happen, especially right at the very end of the finale?

HALPERN: We were charting their individual growth as characters, and we were just trying to see like, Where would they actually feel like they were in a place to make this work? They had worked on themselves enough. They’re two very measured people, right? These aren’t two characters who just throw caution to the wind. These are two very measured people in different ways, so we had to get them as exhausted of the ‘will they, won’t they’ as potentially some audience members would feel so that when it happens, it’s like they can’t deny it anymore. It’s like, ‘I don’t really give a shit about anything else other than this feels right.’

DEADLINE: I love that they both keep saying they’re in their ‘F it’ era, of sorts. But when given the opportunity to act on impulse, they absolutely do still overthink things.

HALPERN: You know why? Because people in their 20s are full of sh*t. [Laughs]. They think that they know everything that they f*cking want, and they absolutely don’t. That’s so fun to play in this season as to like, ‘I’m a very measured and serious 20-something who knows where my life is going.’

SCHUMACKER: I’m just glad I can stop getting weekly texts from my mom saying, ‘Tell me Gregory and Janine get together next week.’

DEADLINE: How did Janine leaving Abbott potentially help this trajectory?

BRUNSON: I think it helped because we did get to explore these characters separately, in a way that maybe we wouldn’t have if they were right next door to each other. So Janine having her own journey of returning back to being an educator in the classroom, to me, made her more self assured. There was a decision made for her, by her, an experience she had on her own that led her back to this place.

As far as Gregory, he also went on a journey this season, starting the garden goofballs, and actually being a part of the DNA of this school by his own accord — not because of Janine’s presence or anything else, not because of his dad’s judgment, not because of what he thought he should have been doing or what he thought he’d wind up doing, which was being principal. With his character, we talked a lot this season about there’s a choice that he made in the first season to stay at the school permanently. And then the second season, he made the choice to learn how to be a teacher, really. And then this third season, I do think there’s a difference in being a teacher and realizing that you are part of the DNA of the environment. I felt that was important for him with the goofballs. It’s beyond just sitting in the classroom and teaching or being there between certain hours. For a lot of educators, it’s helping to provide guidance and extracurricular activities for students. That’s the kind of thing that really made you a part of a place. It’s making you a part of the community, as opposed to someone who’s just there. So the ability we had to get there with those characters with them separated instead of together, it made it more their own decisions, in my opinion.

DEADLINE: Does this mean they’re going to date? What’s their relationship status going into Season 4?

SCHUMACKER: We haven’t started the writers room yet. We start off actually only in two weeks. I do think that we’re going to start the year essentially picking right back up with what you saw in the finale. I mean, it will be the beginning of the subsequent school year, so, it’s not like it’s the next day after the party. But we’re not in the business of buying things back.

DEADLINE: I love that before the kiss, Janine gets some sage advice from Mr. Johnson. Why him?

BRUNSON: There were two reasons. One, I am always about mixing up our pairings in the show and having characters interact with each other who don’t get to interact often or who we haven’t gotten to see interact yet. So that was one main reason that Mr. Johnson and Janine became very exciting to me, especially after the journey of Janine searching for a father earlier on in the season. I thought it was just very serendipitous for her to find somewhat of a father figure in Mr. Johnson. We’ve seen him kind of have those moments with Gregory, but not with her.

You mentioned him causing chaos earlier at the door. Chaos is actually what Janine and Gregory need to welcome into their lives in order to put the foot on the gas as far as their relationship. When we explored what has always been keeping these two [apart], it’s been worry or doubt, thinking they’re not ready, not wanting to ruin the friendship, not wanting to ruin the relationship. But clearly, they are two characters who have a magnetic pull to get to each other. And we felt at this point, it’d just be best to throw caution to the wind, and it felt like, who better to help them do that than our resident chaotician, which is Mr. Johnson. He does it while talking about the beauty of just going for what you want, and not having worries, which I do feel like is an important lesson for people to learn. It’s weird. It’s just as important as planning and making important, well thought out decisions.

HALPERN: He lives in chaotic neutral, really. But I think this seemed to be one of those spots where it’s like, he has so much life experience. We try not to do the thing where it’s like the old custodians always giving advice, but it is specific to what we’ve done in the character, which is this guy who is clearly a risk taker, and is very different than Janine and Gregory. He would have perspective on this. And if you caught him in the right moment, you would get it.

DEADLINE: You mentioned having more ideas that may not have fit this season because of the shorter length. What are you looking forward to about having another full season to flesh things out?

BRUNSON: It’s so interesting. Before we went into the 14-episode season, I was over the moon. I was like, ‘Oh, thank God.’ Because 22 is a lot. We did it, and we had fun doing it, but for me in particular, I was exhausted. I was so excited about these 14 episodes, but I realized I missed the room for storytelling that we had with the 22. I’m so excited to tell more stories in the school again. Yes, because of Janine going to the district, but really, because of those 14 episodes, it felt like there was a limited amount of time to create the arcs that we enjoyed creating in our second season. So I’m looking forward to creating those in-school arcs again. I want to be able to tell three-episode-long stories in this school, kind of like we did with the second season when we had the charter school arc.

I’m so looking forward to holiday episodes again. Those are just fun. I’m looking forward to having more of that kind of fun. In this third season, had a lot of different shifts. For instance, us having an Oscars episode was a shift for us schedule wise, tone wise. We really wanted to create a cold open that would get people to watch the show who maybe never heard of it before, which led to a different way than we would normally do things for an Episode 7. I am looking forward to getting back to regularly scheduled programming.

Editor’s note: Brunson was interviewed separately from Halpern and Schumacker. The interviews have been edited together for ease and clarity.