Photo: Scott Everett White/ABC
Network comedy is … back? Baby? The season-two premiere of Abbott Elementary turned out to be ABC’s highest-rated comedy telecast in three years. Fittingly, the prior comedy to be so highly rated on the network was the series finale of the epoch-defining Modern Family.
Since premiering last year, Abbott Elementary has been getting hella plaudits, including Emmys for Sheryl Lee Ralph and Quinta Brunson. Brunson had to step over Jimmy Kimmel’s prone body to accept her writing Emmy, for reasons that apparently made sense to Kimmel at the time. But critical love doesn’t always equal viewing numbers. In this case, there’s a 1:1. Abbott Elementary has grown to an overall viewership of 10 million.