Payton Russell

A conversation with showrunner Patrick Schumacker.

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It’s every writer’s biggest dream: Their joke Twitter account becomes a hit, eighteen-episode CBS series. 

Every writer’s second biggest dream: Co-creating a comedy based on one of their favorite DC comics.

Their third biggest dream: Running into Quinta Brunson on the Warner Bros. lot, offering her a ride, and sparking the idea for Abbott Elementary on the long, Los Angeles-traffic-ridden drive home. 

To some, these dreams seem like something you’d hallucinate during a bout of Yellow Fever, but for Patrick Schumacker, the co-showrunner of Abbott Elementary, Harley Quinn, and Kite Man: Hell Yeah!, these were real stepping stones in his successful, now decades-long career in television. They’re not visions brought on by smallpox, COVID, bubonic plague, food poisoning, or sleep paralysis, but defining moments that led to some of our favorite comedies.

Alongside his writing partner, Justin Halpern, Patrick has built his career on preparation, talent, and recognizing opportunities as they arise. Sometimes those opportunities look like a blank Twitter page, just waiting to be filled, and sometimes opportunities look a little more like a hitchhiking Quinta Brunson, thumb in the air, ready for you to pick her up.

However, Patrick’s career didn’t take off overnight—before breaking in, Patrick spent seven years in LA working as a commercial director’s assistant, carrying coffees by day, and consistently writing by night without much luck. Then, in 2009, Justin started the Twitter account Shit My Dad Says, and that shit took off. Patrick and Justin sold the idea to Warner Bros. and then adapted it into an award-winning series. Today, they just re-upped yet another WB overall deal.

For current assistants, whose lives are defined by their boss’s emails and putting the right lunch order in, keeping up with fever dreams can seem naïve. But Patrick and Justin are proof that persistence in Hollywood (and continuing to write) can eventually pay off. Just look at Patrick, who wrote himself from the very bottom to the very tippity-top.

Below, Patrick talks about the writing and production process for Harley Quinn and Abbott Elementary, and he tells the soon-to-be-famous story of how a lucky ride home sparked the partnership behind Abbott Elementary.

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Harley Quinn

Payton Russell (PR): How did the Harley Quinn series come to be? Was that something you and Justin pitched to Warner Bros., or did WB come to you?

Patrick Schumaker (PS): Harley Quinn was a great opportunity that kind of landed in our laps. Around 2016, we were running Powerless, a DC workplace comedy for NBC. While we were doing that, the studio asked if we’d be interested in doing an adult animated Harley Quinn show. I’m a giant comic book nerd and a huge Batman fan, so I couldn’t say yes fast enough.

We pitched it as Mary Tyler Moore if she were a psychopath—a workplace comedy and a breakup story between Harley and the Joker. Harley was in the cultural zeitgeist then, after Margot Robbie’s portrayal in Suicide Squad, but at the time, the studio asked us to focus our attention on Powerless. We begged them not to give Harley Quinn to somebody else. We said we’d run Powerless, and as soon as we had a break, we’d jump back into Harley Quinn. To their credit, they allowed that. 

We pitched the show to NBC in 2017. They said we had a choice: we could take it to Netflix or Amazon, where they’d shown interest and maybe do a pilot presentation, or they could put it on this small, niche streaming service called DC Universe. Maybe nobody would watch it, but they’d pick it up for 26 episodes. That was a bird in the hand. Even if no one watched, we’d get to make the show.

Being on a smaller streamer actually helped creatively. There was less infrastructure and fewer layers of standards and practices. We had oversight to protect the IP, but otherwise we got away with a lot—especially because the show was told from a villain’s perspective. The show tested extremely well with DC fans, which gave us a lot of freedom. 

I’ll never forget premiering it at Comic-Con in 2019 in a ballroom of 2,500 people. We were nervous people would reject it. But from the first joke, people were laughing. The screening was great. The Q&A afterward was electric. People didn’t expect something that irreverent, that R-rated, in that world.

It was the first adult animated show Warner Bros. Animation had ever produced. It was cool to be part of that studio’s legacy, and hopefully help build a new one.

Structuring a Series:

PR: When you’re creating a new show like Abbott Elementary, how do you approach where to start the story in the pilot?

PS: I think it’s on a case-by-case basis whether we’re making something like a premise pilot or just an ordinary episode. It often depends on the buyer because they’ll also have input on what works well for them. [My writing partner and I] used to do a lot more premise pilots when we first started. Now, unless you’re doing a serialized show, I don’t know that a premise pilot is always the best way to go.

With Abbott Elementary, for the pilot, we did an episode that technically could have plugged in anywhere. It was a jumping-off point—Janine’s second year teaching—but it wasn’t just, “Here’s a brand-new teacher.” The story was something that could have happened on any day. It worked really well, and on a 21-and-a-half-minute network show with commercials, there’s not a lot of time.

When you’re telling a pilot, you already have to be so efficient. To also set up a complicated premise and introduce six series regulars is a tall order. I think you’re often shooting yourself in the foot by doing a premise pilot. In an episodic broadcast show like Abbott, it’s better to just throw everybody in. It’s an easy concept to grasp—teachers, underfunded school—and then you can spend the time getting to know these people as human beings. That’s where you want to spend the meat of your time.

Harley Quinn was also 21-and-a-half minutes. Even though it was on a streaming service domestically, it was sold overseas to traditional cable outlets with commercials, so we had to write it in three acts with commercial breaks. We did a premise pilot because we had to, but we also had 13 episodes to tell a larger story, so we knew the next episode could pick up where the last left off.

We broke the season almost like a feature—three acts across the whole season. When we’re breaking any story, Justin and I usually start with the act breaks—the mile markers—and then fill in the blanks. If you don’t have act breaks, it’s hard to argue that it’s a story. We applied that thinking to the full season.

In season one of Harley Quinn, the pilot has her breaking up with the Joker, and by the end of the season, she sets out to become the criminal queenpin of Gotham. That’s a lot to tell. As an episode, it’s probably farther down the list of fan favorites, because there’s so much table-setting. It’s not going to be the most memorable episode. But you’re still putting in the necessary work to get to the fun stuff.

Abbott Elementary: Inside the Writers’ Room

PR: In a comedy room like Abbott Elementary, how do you keep track of all the episodic ideas that are thrown out?

PS: We have a lot of whiteboards—basically they surround the entire room. Each one has its own purpose. We have a seasonal whiteboard that’s a grid with 22 squares, which lets us see the season from a 30,000-foot view.

Before the writers’ room starts each season, Justin, Quinta, and I will sometimes sit down for a few hours and talk about what Quinta wants the season to be about—what the larger idea is that we want to explore. In Season Two, it was charter schools. In Season Three, it was the district. In Season Four, it was gentrification. What happens when a golf course moves in? How does that affect the school and the surrounding community?

When the writers’ room starts, we spend the first few weeks talking about character arcs for the season under that umbrella. You start to fill out notions of episodes, knowing nothing is immutable and everything will change as the season goes on. You begin plugging A stories, B stories, etc., into that master season grid.

PR: Do those whiteboards also help on a smaller, episode-specific level?

PS: When we’re breaking something like the season premiere, we use a separate board for the individual storylines. Usually, we do an A story, a B story, and a C story runner—no more than that. We break each story starting with the inciting incident, then act breaks, then the resolution. Roughly, the A story has about nine beats, the B story five to seven, and the runner around three. Those aren’t hard rules, just whatever the story calls for, but the A story should be the meatiest with the most turns.

Then we have another board where we weave the stories together by scene. Everything is color-coded. Once you’ve figured out the order—first A beat, first B beat, first C runner, second A beat—it’s essentially a beat sheet.

Then, we outline. What we do differently from most places is group outlines. We started this on Harley Quinn, and it’s very efficient and gets everyone invested in each other’s episodes. Justin does the lion’s share of the talking in the room—he’s always there, while I’m back and forth to set. He’ll stand at the board with the color-coded scenes and go around the table, starting with the writer assigned to that episode, who’ll take the cold open or first scene.

Once the first scene is figured out, Justin moves on to the next writer, and so on. After we’ve talked through everything, the writers go off and write their scenes in prose. The writers’ assistants then Frankenstein it all together the next morning. We go through it, refine things, and make sure everything’s working. That becomes the outline.

Sometimes Quinta is in the room, which is great because we can get approval in person. Other times we send it to her if she’s on set. She combs through everything, because she’s the final word on Abbott. Once we get the thumbs-up, the writer goes off and does the draft based on that outline, which is already pretty in-depth.

PR: When Abbott Elementary was first conceived, how was the world populated? Did it start with Janine’s character and build out?

PS: Interestingly enough, when Quinta came to us with the basics of the concept, it was originally intended to be an animated show. That’s a long story, but the stars didn’t align—mostly a scheduling thing. At the same time, Justin and I wanted to do a broadcast, live-action mockumentary. I ran into Quinta on the lot and gave her a ride home. I said, “What do you think about turning that animated show into live action?” She said, “I was actually thinking the exact same thing.” Two weeks later, we were pitching it to Warner Bros.

When Quinta pitched us the basic idea, the story that really hooked us was about her mother, who Barbara is very much inspired by. She told us this story about her mom’s dedication—waiting until ten o’clock at night on parent-teacher night for a parent to get off their night shift so she could finish the conference. It was this sweet story about the dedication of an unsung hero. We were like, that’s how we need to start the pitch. We like to begin pitches with a personal anecdote. Even with Harley, we told breakup stories.

Originally, Quinta wanted the show to be about Barbara. She really likes writing more than anything else, and she said she’d be fifth on the call sheet and maybe not appear in every episode. We said, “If we take this to Warner Bros. and you’re attached as an actor, they’re going to want you to be number one on the call sheet.” At most, it would be a two-hander with you and Barbara. I think she reluctantly acquiesced.

She had Janine in her head, Barbara in her head, and a lot of the characters were amalgams of educators she knew. The only character not originally there was Mr. Johnson—he wasn’t pitched as a series regular. We had an art teacher named Blair who never showed up. Sahar, played by Mitra Jouhari, was a different version of a teacher early on.

Jacob was originally more of an Andy Samberg–type character, leaning into performative aspects. Then Chris Perfetti auditioned, and we realized what he was doing was better than what we’d imagined, so we pivoted the character toward that.

For the most part, the characters were baked in. They were archetypes, but versions we hadn’t seen before—especially someone like Gregory. He’s not a traditional leading-man love interest. He has idiosyncrasies; he’s kind of a weird dude. That excited us.

It’s alchemy. You don’t always get everything right, and sometimes when you do, it’s luck. People say you can have a mediocre cast and a great script and fail, or a mediocre script and a great cast and succeed. Casting is 90% of the battle. But with Abbott, we kind of had both. The pilot Quinta wrote was amazing, and the performances elevated what was already on the page.

A lot of it was grounded in Quinta’s real experiences—an army of real people distilled into singular characters. When shaping the pitch, we helped think through how these characters would ping off each other every episode, what combinations would be the most dramatic or intriguing. And five seasons later, the characters are still going strong.