• Movistar Plus+ Cannibal femininity and nostalgia: why Yellowjackets is the series of the moment

A young man stops an older woman at the door of a school. He tells her that she was his teacher and that thanks to her he went from being a small vandal to working as a security guard. Janine, the protagonist, looks brightly at her partner, who represents everything she dreams of: to be able to change the lives of children with little prospect and become profitable adults. But when both women walk away from the zagal, Barbara, the most mature teacher, confesses that she has no idea who she is. This gag, corresponding to one of the first episodes of Abbott School, encapsulates very well the spirit of the series and the mood of its main character.

With an intrinsic positivity that hits reality, this comedy has become the latest phenomenon of traditional American television and, in times of streaming and niche products, has managed to connect with a wide audience, regardless of whether its protagonists are mostly racialized. Now, its second season – still airing in the US – has just landed on Disney +.

After the goodbye of long-running comedies such as The Big Bang Theory, Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Superstore, it seemed that the times of laughter and endearing groups of characters were a thing of the past. While the platforms bet on increasingly shorter seasons, the North American networks did not find the key to find new proposals that would bring freshness and have enough consistency to hold on the air for the next decade. But a young black comedian, Quinta Brunson, actress and creator, has shown that traditional television is far from dead.

His Abbott School (named after Brunson's real teacher, Miss Abbott) manages to be refreshing without inventing the wheel: in the key of a false documentary, it portrays the misadventures of a group of teachers from a public school in Philadelphia who do what they can to carry out their work with hardly any economic resources or institutional support. Nor of its egocentric director. Criticism of the weak American welfare state underlies the series, but it is not the focus. It is the daily life of the center and those who give it life with more enthusiasm than school supplies. The success of the series, in addition to bringing out the viewer's smile, is that quality that television comedy has to make us feel comforted, as among friends; What they call happy place.

The fifth child in a family (yes, the name was given to her for that), Brunson became interested in comedy when she was in college back in 2008. He discovered that most of the comedians on Saturday Night Live (at that time they were on Ted Lasso's Jason Sudeikis or Barry's Bill Hader) had trained at Chicago's Second City theater taking improv classes and there he went. One of her teachers advised her to sign up for screenwriting classes and, since she did not have a penny, she offered to pay them.

That's how she began to train and find her voice through monologue rooms and videos on the network: her first success, in 2014, was a series of videos on Instagram that she called The girl who has never been on a pleasant date and that went viral. Not only that; She herself, who starred in them, became a meme. BuzzFeed signed her to make viral videos for them and then had other projects for YouTube and Facebook, all with the common denominator of their view on things that interest and concern twenty-somethings in general and a black woman in particular.

But it would be in 2018 when an opportunity would come that would be an intermediate step towards stardom: he would co-create with comedian Jermaine Fowler the pilot of a series for CBS that, finally, would not get the green light. However, there he would meet Larry Wilmore (executive producer of two key works of recent African-American comedy such as Black-ish and Insecure), from whom he would learn the trade and how to move in the television industry. After that failed project, Quinta Brunson would appear in small roles in the series iZombie and Miracle Workers and would join HBO's A Black Lady Sketch Show as a writer and actress, although she would leave soon to dedicate herself to her own project.

With three Emmys and two Golden Globes under its belt, the biggest award for Abbott College is the public's endorsement. Although its linear audience, as with all open television, does not record stratospheric figures (it ranges between 2.6 and 3 million viewers), its total performance does impress: the start of the second season rose to 10.4 million when counting delayed viewings and digital audience.

This data consecrated it as the most successful comedy of the ABC channel in the last three years or, what is the same, the strongest since the goodbye of Modern Family in 2020. And it also has the recognition of critics, as well as that of American professors, who feel that, for the first time in a long time, their precarious reality has been captured on the screen, albeit from the prism of humor.

  • Series

According to The Trust Project criteria

Learn more