‘Here’s This School, and We’ve Just Introduced 5 Sociopaths’
Spoilers follow for the Abbott Elementary episode “Volunteers,” which aired January 8 on ABC.
The administrators, teachers, and students at Abbott Elementary are used to rolling with unexpected visitors and their accompanying wackiness: rival charter-school teachers, hapless substitutes, musician Questlove, and the school’s first white parents. But nothing could have prepared them for the whirlwind of foolishness and ego that is the Gang from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. In Mr. Johnson’s (William Stanford Davis) words, they’re “trash.” In Ms. Schemmenti’s (Lisa Ann Walter), they’re “schlubs” and “low-lifes” who own “the skeeviest bar I’ve ever been to.” And in the Gang’s own, uttered matter-of-factly by former sweatshop owner and established maniac Frank Reynolds (Danny DeVito), “We’re criminals.” Abbott could use all the help it could get … but maybe should’ve drawn the line at these five.
In “Volunteers,” Sunny’s resident delinquents travel from their South Philly stomping grounds to West Philly’s Abbott, a cross-network crossover episode between two tonally oppositional series (one mostly earnest, one mostly inappropriate) that was months in the making. Both shows’ writers weren’t even sure it would happen. Obstacles were everywhere, from behind-the-scenes legal approvals to the need for a narrative that would work for fans of both series. But the resulting “Volunteers,” the first of a two-part crossover that will culminate with a Sunny installment later this year, is a delight, 22 minutes that push Abbott a little further into raunchy quirkiness (a joke about eating ass!) and emphasize how fantastically Sunny’s ensemble embodies the characters’ derangement. “This school, man,” one of Abbott’s students says after meeting Charlie (Charlie Day) for the first time. The boy’s resigned head shake captures exactly how well “Volunteers” walks the line between acknowledging Abbott’s underfunded desperation and the Sunny Gang’s gleeful sociopathy.
Capturing that balance without mimicking a plot from one of Sunny’s 16 seasons was the Abbott writers’ greatest challenge. “It was a little bit like two chefs coming in, and one of them’s like, ‘I only make desserts,’ and the other one’s like, ‘I only make Indian food,’” says executive producer and writer Justin Halpern. “It’s like, Okay, how are we going to make these two things work?” (“I believe Justin’s describing fusion cooking,” deadpans his writing partner and fellow EP Patrick Schumacker.) The solution: frenzied bouts of brainstorming, a director who has worked on both shows, and cast members who were game for anything. “It really was a lot of fun,” says episode writer Garrett Werner, “because you’re like, Here’s this school, and we’ve just introduced five sociopaths to it.”
‘Why are these guys crossing paths?’
Philadelphia is big enough for both Abbott and Paddy’s Pub, but Hollywood is small. A tweet from a fan and a meeting at the 75th Emmys in January 2024 inspired Abbott creator and star Quinta Brunson and Sunny creator, showrunner, and star Rob McElhenney to start chatting about a possible crossover event that would include an episode of each show. Brunson told her writers’ room about the idea in early June, but not everyone was convinced it could become reality. Although Abbott airs on ABC and Sunny on FX, both Disney-owned networks, Abbott is also a co-production with Warner Bros. Television, which would need to give its own go-ahead. “Most of us assumed lawyers would stop it,” Werner says. Then Brunson teased the crossover at San Diego Comic-Con in July, and the public nature of that statement made the idea feel far more real. “She just knew it was going to happen,” Werner says of a conversation he had with Brunson after Comic-Con. “She had talked to Bob Iger recently, and she said, ‘Because I brought it up to him and he didn’t say no immediately, I figured we could do it.’”
On the Sunny side, McElhenney broached the collaboration with Day, who is also an EP and describes himself as “overly precious” about the series he, McElhenney, and co-developer Glenn Howerton (Dennis) have worked on with Kaitlin Olson (Sweet Dee) and DeVito for nearly 20 years. “There’s a piece of me that likes to keep Sunny small. If I had it my way, we’d still be shooting in 4:3; it’d be grainy, like on a home camcorder; and we would shoot half the episodes in Philly,” he says. “I was hesitant because I don’t know how many episodes of It’s Always Sunny we have [left]. We did eight this season and we might do eight more next year,” he adds. But McElhenney’s excitement helped convince Day, whose primary concern became ensuring that the accompanying Sunny episode felt “authentically like” their vulgar, surrealist, wonderfully absurd show.
Because Abbott’s episode would air first, it was their writers’ responsibility to come up with a way to merge the series’ characters. The task was easier than expected, Werner says, given the Sunny Gang’s propensity to show up in places they’re not wanted, including a rich family’s pool, a trendy rival bar across town, and the asylum where Frank grew up. “That was the first thing we had to figure out: Why are these guys crossing paths? We need to shoot in our sets, so they’ve got to come to us,” Werner says. “We can’t just shoot them at Paddy’s.” The initial idea won out, with the Sunny Gang forced to leave their bar for court-ordered volunteering at Abbott. “As long as these guys are okay with their characters being criminals, which they clearly already are, then it really wasn’t a big deal,” Werner says of pitching the storyline to the Sunny team.
‘There was a lot of dread’
Once Abbott got the legal go-ahead, the writers got to work breaking the episode past the initial volunteering concept. Someone intimate with Sunny’s 16 seasons of lore and character development needed to pen “Volunteers,” so Werner stepped in for the episode’s original writer, Joya McCrory. In addition to tackling the various logistical challenges, he had to overcome his anxiety that this mashup of two series with very different tones would become a “notoriously hated thing” in the vein of The Office’s “Scott’s Tots” episode. Meanwhile, consulting deals for the Abbott writers who worked on “Volunteers” had to be finalized with FX because of the influence the episode would have on Sunny’s accompanying installment.
After the Abbott writers decided their episode should focus entirely on the Sunny Gang rather than relegate them to a cameo, the series’ casting department needed to nail down whether all five members core Sunny cast members could even appear on Abbott, which in turn would impact how heavily they were featured in the script. Olson and Howerton were both working on other series at the time (ABC’s High Potential and Netflix’s upcoming Sirens, respectively), limiting their availability, and there was a delay in confirming DeVito’s involvement. “Rob would be like, ‘I talked to him, he’s in.’ But then you go through actual channels and our casting people are like, ‘We have not spoken to him. We can’t get a hold of him, and his reps are telling us he can’t do this.’ And we’re like, ‘Wait, what?’” Halpern remembers, laughing. “There was a lot of dread, because there was a high possibility that this falls apart the week before we shoot,” Werner adds.
As they waited for the Sunny actors to sign on, the Abbott writers’ room split in two, half to break “Volunteers” and half to work on the season’s next episode. On August 8, the week before the Sunny writers’ room opened for season 17, McElhenney and Day (the latter on Zoom with a case of COVID) joined Brunson and the Abbott writers with two ideas: that Mac latch onto principal Ava Coleman (Janelle James) to satisfy his need for proximity to power, and that the script take advantage of the functionally illiterate Charlie. Day’s “Billy Madison–esque” suggestion became the A-story, with Charlie moving down through the school’s grades until kindergarten teacher Barbara Howard (Sheryl Lee Ralph) takes it upon herself to teach him how to read. “We had always talked about the backstory that she had taught adult literacy classes, but we never figured out a way to put it in the show,” Halpern says. In “Volunteers,” her interactions with Charlie provide a “real emotional grounding.”
The Abbott writers prioritized maintaining the Sunny characters’ personalities — and pettiness — while moving forward some of Abbott’s season-long story arcs, like the progression of Gregory (Tyler James Williams) and Janine’s (Brunson) relationship, which is tested by Dee’s aggressive meddling. To accommodate Howerton’s limited schedule, the writers emphasized Dennis’s established wariness around cameras, documented thoroughly in the season 12 true-crime sendup “Making Dennis Reynolds a Murderer.” (“There was a version of the script that just didn’t have him in it, as kind of a contingency,” Schumacker says. “Does he get stuck in Mr. Johnson’s closet or something?”) Pairing Frank with Mr. Johnson, Abbott’s wild card, “felt like a natural fit,” he continues, as did putting straight-man Gregory between the two. And locking Frank in a cage with urine-soaked animal pelts stemmed from an early suggestion from Brunson, who had a very specific image in mind. “Quinta had a visual she kept talking about, which was of Frank peeing into the garden,” Werner says. “I saw Quinta in our little snack area after we had figured it out. I was like, ‘It ends with Danny DeVito in a cage eating dirt, covered in piss pelts.’ And she was like, ‘I guess if we’ve got Danny DeVito, we should use him.’ And I took that as a pitch approved.”
Within the month, the “Volunteers” crew had worked out all of the Gang’s storylines. Although the Abbott team “begged” for a slightly longer run time for the crossover event, “ABC only gave us 15 seconds,” Werner says. (The episode clocks in at 21:47 minutes.) Werner turned in the episode’s script on September 18 and shared it with the Sunny team, who had slight changes to dialogue to reference events going on in their own episode. “I felt as though they really nailed the characters’ voices. I was more worried about how they were gonna react when we sent them ours,” Day laughs.
‘We’re asking you to lay down in dirt and pretend to eat mulch while you’re covered in piss-coated things’
On September 30, “Volunteers” began its six days of filming (one more than the series’ usual five per episode) on the Abbott sets at the Warner Bros. studio lot. Production began with just the regulars before the Sunny cast arrived, along with Abbott executive producer and regular director Randall Einhorn, who directed 14 early episodes of Sunny, and script supervisor Jeff Gonzalez, who served the same role on the FX show for 11 years before joining Abbott in 2022. Both men helped the Sunny team feel as if they were “getting to do our show, but with a whole new group of talented people,” says Day.
Werner’s biggest concern for production was filming a winter-set episode in unrelenting September heat. “It was in the high 90s, and this is the first time we’ve ever met Danny DeVito. We’re like, ‘We’re asking you to lay down in dirt and pretend to eat mulch while you’re covered in piss-coated things,’” Werner says. “I was really nervous about that. But he got to set, he immediately laid down on the ground, and he’s like, ‘Let’s start doing it!’” That positivity and preparation spread through the rest of filming, resulting in the series’ biggest practical effect to date, the school’s scoreboard falling down (“Our equivalent to Tom Cruise riding a motorcycle off of a cliff,” Halpern says), and a number of improvised moments Schumacker hopes make it into an outtake compilation.
Werner packed the episode with various Sunny-isms that also play as amusing non sequiturs for Abbott viewers unaware of their canonical significance: Charlie mentioning his interest in “milk steak”; Janine spitefully calling Dee a “bird”; Frank getting accidentally locked in a cage meant for raccoons, much like he once got trapped in a playground coil kids play on. The gooey core of the episode, though, is the relationship between Barbara and Charlie, who celebrates his reading accomplishment at a Move Up Day assembly that plays out, Schumacker says, like Charlie’s “Rudy moment,” complete with “Pomp and Circumstance” as diegetic noise. As Halpern puts it, this is the Abbott-patented “squishy part” of the episode: The kids who previously helped Charlie sound out words during reading time cheer on his achievement when it’s his turn on the stage. “Being around the kids, it creates this level of reality, because only one or two of them fancy themselves aspiring actors,” says Day. “Most of them are just kids. It all felt very alive.”
Day doesn’t know when Sunny’s crossover episode will air, but emphasizes that the episode (written by himself, McElhenney, and Keyonna Taylor, and helmed by longtime Sunny director Todd Biermann) is “a complete rated-R version of their show, not just for our characters, but for their characters as well. We were really able to do things with them that they can’t do on ABC.” That episode was filmed on the Abbott sets, features talking-head moments, and will explain what Dennis was getting up to behind the cameras during “Volunteers.” One thing that’s up in the air, though: how much Charlie’s reading skill sticks. His tag at the end of “Volunteers” shows him reading the word “guest” as “ghost.” “It’s ultimately up to the Sunny guys how much he retains,” Schumacker says. “We weren’t going to call any shots on their mythology, that’s for sure.”
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