Abbott Elementary Crossed the Will-They-or-Won’t-They Threshold
Spoilers ahead for the season-three finale of Abbott Elementary.
Well, Abbott Elementary did the damn thing: After three seasons, Janine and Gregory gave us the deep-in-their-feelings, wrapped-in-each-other’s-arms kiss we’ve all been waiting for. And in doing so, they pulled an Office, a Parks and Recreation, and a Friends — a declarative kiss involving a doorway, a lot of pent-up longing, and a sense that the show we’re watching is about to change. The door represents a new beginning, and the kiss? The kiss represents hotness! Gregory’s smirk at the camera when he pulled down those blinds had some bad-boy energy, didn’t it?
Janine and Gregory’s will-they-or-won’t-they-flirtation has been integral to Abbott Elementary, a way to grow each protagonist from their initial characterizations. Sometimes their romantic interest informed an episode’s plot, like them buying their now-exes Valentine’s Day gifts that were more appropriate for each other, slow-dancing at the hookah club, using Jacob as a go-between to gauge how the other person felt, or falling into a regretted embrace after one too many drinks. When Janine and Gregory’s obvious endgame status wasn’t an A-story, it was background texture with the implied-to-be-constantly-rolling cameras inside Abbott capturing details that reminded us of the characters’ emotions: secret glances, little smiles after an interaction, a different tone of voice when they talked about the other person. It was all groundwork for when the pair would finally get together in distinct Abbott fashion, after denying their feelings and worrying about the consequences of their attraction. The payoff arrives in the season-three finale, “Party,” which resembles the first kisses between Leslie and Ben on Parks and Recreation and Ross and Rachel on Friends and especially the early smooches on The Office between Jim and Pam, whose alcohol-influenced first kiss and more purposeful, soul-baring second one are practically a road map for Janine and Gregory’s workplace-romance journey.
“Party” is Abbott operating at the height of its abilities with nearly every character in the ensemble getting a little bit of the limelight as Janine throws a summer-kickoff party. This is Janine in peak planner mode with every corner of her apartment designated for a different activity; the party can only go well, she believes, if the people she thinks belong in each section stay there. Of course, the party gets more delightfully chaotic, its celebratory joy more organic, when the guests break free of where Janine expects them to be and mingle. And, of course, the party becomes a metaphor for Janine and Gregory’s shared feelings and their fear that if they act on them, they’ll endanger their jobs and potentially hurt each other down the line. This anxiety has been lingering since the drunken kiss they tried to downplay in the second-season episode “Teacher Conference” and their more recent attempt (and failure) to get on the same page in the season-three premiere, “Career Day.” But at the party, when Mr. Johnson encourages Janine to, as he did, live her life “to the fullest,” and reassures her, after she sneaks another glance at Gregory, that everything “will be all right,” it’s enough to inspire Janine to spill all to Gregory. (And it’s another instance of Mr. Johnson being a lot gentler and more thoughtful than others assume.) Writers Chad Morton and Rebekka Pesqueira can’t help but throw another obstacle into the pair’s path when Gregory, assuming that Janine and Manny are dating, leaves the party, denying Janine the chance to tell him “that I like him and I want to be with him.” But when Gregory doubles back to Janine’s place, knocks on her door, and then swoops her into his arms, it’s a hugely satisfying payoff for all the episodes we’ve spent watching these characters circle each other, hoping their shared crush would eventually transform from awkward to scorching.
This kiss may not technically be Janine and Gregory’s first, but it is the first one they’ve shared with their eyes wide open about what this means; there’s a certainty to how their bodies arc together that wasn’t in “Teacher Conference,” when Janine’s first post-kiss words were “Oh, no,” and Gregory covered his mouth in surprise. All barriers are down now, and in both its deeply emotional tone and its use of a snooping camera, Janine and Greg’s “Party” moment shows an awareness of the sitcoms that came before Abbott. Abbott Elementary thrives in the faux-documentary lane paved by The Office and Parks and Recreation, undoubtedly thanks to executive producer Randall Einhorn, who before directing 21 episodes of this series — including both “Party” and “Teacher Conference” — was a cinematographer and director on both of those series. So it makes perfect sense that this scene has echoes of both Jim and Pam’s kiss in “Casino Night,” on which Einhorn was DOP (Jim tells Pam how he feels, and she rejects him; he leaves, and she goes to Dunder Mifflin to call her mom; then he walks through the office doors that give him his first look at her every day and kisses her), and Leslie and Ben’s in “Road Trip” (after their dinner out is interrupted by their boss, Leslie goes to visit Ben in his office the next day, he tells her while leaning against the doorframe that their boss isn’t around, then he lunges forward into a kiss). And outside of the faux-documentary style, recall that Friends’ first kiss between Ross and Rachel also involved messy declarations of feelings, Ross storming out and then returning to Central Perk’s front door, the exquisite agony of Rachel taking forever to undo all the locks she’d just fastened in a huff, and Ross coming through the door for the two to make out so passionately that we’d all buy it when Phoebe later described them as lobsters mated for life.
What is it about a closed door opening, a threshold being crossed, that is so sexy? Is it the fresh opportunity of it all, the sense of a future unfurling? Is it the act of letting someone in, accommodating and absorbing them into your space, that invites the We can’t control ourselves anymore kiss? Whatever it is, “Party” has it and builds on the Office and Parks and Recreation formula by abandoning the over-the-shoulder shots and back-and-forth editing for an uninterrupted take that involves a floating camera moving backward to keep Janine and Gregory in frame while they kiss and then continues filming through Janine’s door until Gregory blocks their view. Janine and Gregory acknowledging the voyeurism of the camera, and rejecting it so they can maintain their intimacy, is built into this embrace, something neither The Office nor Parks and Recreation do in their analogous scenes. But that little touch of the characters knowing someone is watching feels like an acknowledgment of how invested we are as an audience in Janine and Gregory working out and like a reassurance from Abbott that they’ve got this — they’re not going to let us down, even if they’re going to make us wait to find out where the couple is at when season four returns. (The Office did this, too; “Casino Night” was the season-two finale.)
For where Janine and Gregory go from here, look again to Abbott’s NBC predecessors, since both of those series involved co-workers becoming lovers. If Abbott were to honor Ava’s concerns about Janine and Gregory dating while working at the same school, maybe we get an Office season-three situation, in which one of them has transferred somewhere else and they each pursue doomed relationships before circling back to each other. I don’t think Abbott would go this route since this third season already sent Janine to work at the school district instead of next door to Gregory at Abbott, teasing a love triangle in the process, but it’s an option. (And if it means more Manny, I’d be glad!) More feasible, I think, is Abbott doing what Parks and Recreation did with Leslie and Ben, who were blissfully together for a while before briefly breaking up, because they didn’t want to ruin their working relationship or professional reputations, and then realized that they cared too much for each other to stay apart. And then there’s the Brooklyn Nine-Nine model, in which Jake and Amy’s co-workers-to-lovers-to-married path was fairly straightforward and simply became, as Janine and Gregory already are in Abbott, matter-of-fact elements of the series.
Abbott had already built on the foundation of the workplace sitcoms that came before it with its intraschool dynamics, and now it’s reinforcing the genre’s time-honed narrative components with Janine and Gregory’s second kiss and the relationship they could have in the future. Early in “Party,” when Janine said, “I’m proud of myself for following my heart back to Abbott,” that was foreshadowing for how Gregory would follow his heart back to her in the episode’s final moments. And whichever way Abbott Elementary chooses to go from here, Janine and Gregory’s lovely, purposeful kiss throws the door wide open.
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