‘Abbott Elementary’ EPs Say Season 4 Will See Janine and Gregory as a ‘Real, Solid Couple’

Note: This story contains spoilers from the “Abbott Elementary” Season 4 premiere.

After the “will they, won’t they” between Janine (Quinta Brunson) and Gregory (Tyler James Williams) extended through “Abbott Elementary’s” first three seasons, Season 4 will see the pair as a “real, solid couple,” per the show’s EPs.

“We spent as long as humanly possible getting them together without annoying people,” EP and coshowrunner Patrick Schumacker told TheWrap, joking that they “probably still annoyed a couple of people,” including his mom. “But now that they are together, they’re together. There’s not a credible threat or anything to their relationship. We want to spend time with them as a real, solid couple.”

Still, that doesn’t mean their growing relationship will be the focus on Season 4, with coshowrunner and EP Justin Halpern saying, “we still don’t ever want to make this ‘the Gregory and Janine show.'”

“We have such a great ensemble — the show’s about so much more than that,” Halpern told TheWrap. “We want to have them exist in the way that any kind of couple in your workplace might, where there are times when there’s a lot of it, and then there’s times when there’s less of it, and it just becomes part of the daily stew.”

Below, the coshowrunners and EPs unpack Janine’s fear of commitment and the season’s exploration of gentrification, and tease the introduction of family members during this season’s holiday episodes.

TheWrap: Jacob is the only one who knows about Janine and Gregory at the start of the episode. How do you imagine he found out/they told him?

Patrick Schumacker: He’s just so close with them that it was inevitable. But then, as we talk … in the talking heads, everybody kind of knew.

Justin Halpern: I’m trying to think about, like, who maybe told him first and I’m actually not sure. I bet Quinta has it in her head. I bet if you asked her, she would be like, “Oh, in my head, it was always Janine or Gregory, and this is how they did it,” but there’s a legitimate argument for either one.

Schumacker: He has good intuition too, with regards to them.

Last season started after the Hollywood strikes and had that as a challenge to work around. With a blank canvas for this season, what storylines did you want to explore and dig deeper into?

Schumacker: Now that we have a full 22 episode season, you know, we’re able to explore every series regular’s life in a little bit more detail. There are things we wanted to do last season with Melissa and her family — We want to delve into that a little bit. Without spoiling anything, we have some some cool holiday episodes coming up this season that just deal with family, and we get to meet some more family members of a handful of our series regulars … It’s just an opportunity to delve deeper into everybody’s life, even Mr. Johnson, who’s spent the series as a bit of an enigma, and we don’t ever want to give away everything, because I think his character works best as kind of an International Man of Mystery.

There is the specter of this PGA golf course that is opening in West Philly, an interesting area, maybe unexpected, but it is also changing the neighborhood. Every season, we’ve kind of tried to explore a larger mythology within that season and the idea of gentrification is sort of that larger idea this season. So you’re going to see more of that threaded throughout, and how the neighborhood’s changing for better or worse.

By the end of the premiere episode, we see Janine confront her fears of making it official. Why was she initially scared of this commitment and how does she work through it?

Halpern: We try to put it to bed in that first episode. These are two people who deeply care for each other — I don’t think that’s in question. [That’s] not to say that they’re not going to have little bumps here and there and who knows, as they grow, what happens, but just currently in the show, that was something that we felt would be realistic to the way that she would handle that, but that it wasn’t based around the idea that, “Oh my god, does she actually not like him? Are they gonna break up because of this?” She’s only been in one relationship in her life — one real one, one big one — and so in many ways, she’s pretty new to it, and has a lot of insecurities that someone who hasn’t dated a lot might have, or even someone who has dated a lot.

Schumacker: We wanted to sort of take a breath from the “will they, won’t they” and we wanted to just let them be like a great couple and explore how are they as a couple, particularly in the workplace setting. Our Halloween episode explains a little bit more about how they are as a couple, and how our other teachers react to their behavior as a couple.

What can you tease about Gregory and Janine’s journey this season? Can we expect to see them together for a while?

Halpern: What we always say for any any of our characters, is we try to be true to the characters. We try to think about where they are at in their arcs as human beings, and stay true to that, so we would never have somebody do something that just felt like they wouldn’t do that at the time for where they are. It sounds like such a cop out, but we take it a handful of episodes at a time. Obviously there’s larger arcs that we’re thinking about that are always in the back of our head, but we try not to rush past that stuff. This is not “24” — we’re not pounding the plot every week and all these twists and turns.

Beyond the crossover, can you tease any guest stars? Any plans for Ayo Edebiri or Taraji P. Henson to come back and meet Gregory in the context of Janine’s boyfriend?

Halpern: This may sound crazy, but we’re still kind of breaking out large portions of the season. So as of right now, I don’t have a definitive answer.

Schumacker: We’ve written about half the season.

Halpern: We definitely meet some family members in this half, and I will keep it on a DL as to who comes back and who isn’t. But, I mean, I love Ayo and Taraji. They’re exceptional. I don’t think the door is closed for either one of them. We had a lot of big, huge guest stars last year, and I think we this year, we definitely have some but we also have guest cast who you may not have seen before, but they’re terrific and they’re awesome performers, so I think we have a nice mix.

There was also a union scabbing storyline in this episode. Was that maybe inspired by the recent Hollywood strikes?

Halpern: Melissa is very pro-union. All of her family was in the union, maybe some of them doing crime, but all of them in the union. I think that’s an important thing for her character. As each season goes along with every character we try to add a little new layer. Listen, the strike was like seven of the hardest months of everyone in the business — crew, cast, writers — lives, so it’s not surprising that through kind of osmosis, it probably made its way into a few episodes.

Schumacker: We will explore something in Season 4 dealing with labor.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

New episodes of “Abbott Elementary” premiere on Wednesdays from 9:30-10:00 p.m. ET/PT on ABC.

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