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This is Fresh Air.
I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is author and poet Layla Motley.
She earned critical acclaim a few years ago, at just 19, for her New York Times bestselling debut novel Nightcrawling.
Now she's back with a new novel that follows three young women as they navigate what it means to be a mother today, when reproductive rights are being rolled back across the country.
Motley says she found herself writing and rewriting The Girls Who Grew Big in real time as abortion laws rapidly shifted, forcing her to adapt her character's lives to this new and uncertain reality.
The novel is set in Padua Beach, a fictional Florida town, so small it doesn't even appear on a map, and it opens with an explosive scene.
Simone at 16, impregnated by her 22-year-old boyfriend giving birth in the back of his red pickup truck.
To tell you the truth, I didn't know much of nothing back then, sitting in that pickup truck staring at my placenta.
How could I?
Not because I was young, but because I was new.
Like my newborn baby's skin so soft, it seemed like they could tear open at any moment.
I was just a fragile thing in a sharp world, like every other girl is, before they meet themselves, before they meet their child and know what it means to be tethered.
I already know y'all will take any chance you get to say we don't know what we're talking about.
I've seen all the teen mom shows, but that's not what I'm saying.
All those shows get made just to give y'all some white girls to laugh at, pity and say they should have known better.
But maybe you should have known better than to believe a camera is a mirror, or an ocean is a pool, or a mother is anything but a mother.
You won't know till you know.
And now I do.
Motley says her goal as a writer is to offer new perspectives on what it means to be a young woman in contemporary America.
At 16, she was named Oakland, California's Youth Poet Laureate.
Her 2024 poetry collection, Woke Up, No Light, wrestles with girlhood, reparations, and desire.
She also co-wrote and starred in the documentary short When I Write It, which was featured in the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival.
And her best-selling debut Nightcrawling, was inspired by real cases of young women in Oakland who were assaulted and exploited by police.
And a note and a warning before we get started.
This conversation references assault and sexual violence, which may not be suitable for young listeners.
Layla Motley, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much for having me.
You know Layla, as I was reading this book, I kept thinking how, over the last 50 years, young women have kind of been taught that motherhood doesn't have to be their ultimate aspiration.
Teen pregnancy rates in this country are, I believe, at an all-time low now.
And yet, at the same time, we're in a moment when access to abortion is drastically decreasing.
Being rolled back, and your novel actually puts young mothers at the center, right in the middle of these conflicting realities.
How did you think about that tension as you were writing this book?
I think we've been taught that teen pregnancy is a moral issue.
And I wanted us to question the idea that young parenthood is anything but a circumstance and urge us to look differently at the ways that we look at mothers in general.
I think that the world and our culture has so much criticism and judgment for any and every choice that mothers make, from how you birth and to how you feed your baby, to how you put your baby to sleep, to what school you put them in all of these things that are only compounded when we look at young parents who are almost judged and demonized for the very acts of their parenthood.
And as we see declining rates of teen pregnancy, we're taught that that is a win, which in some ways then implicitly implies that young pregnancy and parenthood is a failing.
And it's not.
I am also a doula and so I am kind of immersed in the world of pregnancy and birth and specifically work with young parents and with Black parents.
And I believe that the transformation into parenthood has a direct relationship to the way that we raise our children and become new people as parents.
How did you come into being a doula?
I don't quite know how I got that in my mind.
I worked in preschools as a teenager.
So I've been working with kids for most of my life.
And then when I sold Nightcrawling, it happened concurrently with the pandemic.
And so for the first time in my life, I wasn't working with children anymore.
And about a year later, when I was 18, I decided that I wanted to become a doula.
And then a little over a year ago, I started actively attending births.
But I also work in full spectrum doula work.
So I do prenatal education and postpartum work, too.
And then I also support abortions.
I'm wondering how your experience supporting moms in real life shaped the way you wrote about birth and motherhood in this novel.
Yeah, I mean.
I think getting to witness the transformation into parenthood is so abundantly clear to me how isolating it can be, especially in those first weeks and months, as there's almost a death of the self and a rebirth of the new self.
We don't have a kind of culture of community and communal care around parenthood and what it looks like to support mothers specifically.
There's so much judgment for mothers.
Motherhood is kind of the greatest equalizer for any and every parent.
It is challenging and it pushes you to the limits of yourself.
And you have to learn how to become something, not just for yourself, but for this little person that you've created.
Right.
And I think for the girls in this book.
They essentially have already been outcasted and othered from communities of mothers and their community as a whole and have to kind of create a collective together in ways that I think many of our communities haven't figured out how to do.
You set this in the panhandle of Florida, a place that you had never been before you started writing this story.
Why Florida and why a fictional town in Florida?
Yeah.
So when I started writing this book, I knew the setting needed to be set in the South, where reproductive care was limited.
And I wanted the setting to mirror these girls' experiences differently.
The Florida panhandle is kind of an entirely different culture than a lot of the rest of Florida.
It's culturally the South, but it also still has kind of the same culture of escapism that we think of when we think of Florida, like spring breakers and people going to camp vacation in these coastal towns.
But I wanted us to look at like there's this small town that's not even on the map and in a lot of ways I think it mirrors the girls experience of being undervalued and seen as undesirable, but creating a world of possibility and beauty for themselves, regardless of if that is recognized by the world.
Were you writing and rewriting in real time as the laws in Florida were shifting?
Very much so.
When I started writing the book, it was before Roe v. Wade was overturned.
And then, over the course of writing the book, the laws in Florida around abortion changed four times.
And so it went from a 15-week abortion ban to an 11-week abortion ban, to a six-week abortion ban that then had to pass through Supreme Court.
And when we think about a six-week abortion ban, that's six weeks from your last missed period.
A lot of people don't even know they're pregnant at that point.
But I wanted this book to look at not only kind of those facts that we talk about around abortion access, but also some of the other limitations and obstacles to accessing abortion.
Like in a lot of states, you need to have two appointments 24 hours in between in order to receive medication, to then go home and self-manage an abortion.
For these girls, they're three hours away from the closest abortion clinic.
And that means that they have to figure out gas money.
And a lot of women have children already when they're getting abortions, including the character in this book.
And so that means child care access and then actually self-managing an abortion, having a safe place to do so.
All of those things can be prohibitive, not to mention the actual cost of abortion and the restrictions around timeline.
I want to talk a little bit about the characters in this book.
So 16-year-old Adela, 18-year-old Emery, and then there's 20-year-old Simone, who already has twins and she's, at the beginning of the book, pregnant with her third child.
Is there something in particular about those ages 16 18, 20 that felt like time periods in a woman's life that you wanted to explore?
The teenage years are so packed and all-consuming.
Everything feels big.
And so I wanted us to get a spectrum of young girls who some maybe have a little more hindsight than others because they've already lived through some of it.
Whereas, you know, Adela, she's 16, she's pregnant, she's in the thick of it.
Emery has...
And I think I wanted us to understand how much can change for us between those ages.
I know a lot changed for me between 16 and 20 years old.
And there is just so much growth that takes place.
But this is also a time in life where we're gaining independence, right?
And we're figuring out how to separate ourselves.
And I think the way that we think about young people as a culture is almost as though we own them until they're 18.
And the very act of pregnancy and parenthood is a marker of choice and independence.
And there is some tension that arises for them with their families and their communities in figuring out how to be their own people and how to do so while also wanting to receive the love and support and belonging of their families.
Just a note before we get back to our conversation.
There will be a frank discussion of childbirth.
That may not be suitable for young listeners.
Layla, one of the things you do is immerse us in this book with your characters' inner worlds.
We are reading this from the private conversations they're having with themselves and it feels deeply intimate.
And I want to share another excerpt from the character Simone that captures this so powerfully.
So this moment I'm going to have you read.
It's a significant part of her journey, but I promise to listeners that it's not a spoiler.
So in this section, Simone reflects on getting an abortion and she mentions the name Luck in this excerpt which refers to one of her children, one of her twins.
Can I have you read it?
You ever wondered what happens after you abort a baby?
Life.
And blood.
The blood came on and off for almost three weeks.
I threw a party with the girls on the beach when all the spotting ceased to nothing.
In between songs and rounds of Would You Rather?
I took another pregnancy test down by the water, Emery standing by me, and we both hollered like coyotes in the night when only one line showed up.
It was over. all my ugly feelings washing away with my piss.
I ran back to the girls, picked Luck up and swung her into the air until she started hiccuping.
She was laughing so hard, me laughing with her like I hadn't in months.
That hurricane began and ended so many things, but I'd spent every minute since then worrying it didn't work or that I was about to hemorrhage or that somebody was going to come and lock me away for what we did that night in Adela's basement.
But now it was really over.
Life was a steady trickle by the dune lake, and me and my babies was good.
That's my guest today, Layla Motley, reading from her new novel, The Girls Who Grew Big.
I want to talk to you a little bit about your process in finding these voices, because you have three singular voices that you're telling these stories through.
And for Nightcrawling.
I actually heard that you spent time journaling as the main character to deepen the voice of the main character in that book.
What was your process of finding the characters' voices in this novel?
I also did journaling for each of the characters in this book.
This was a process because I was creating three first-person perspectives of girls in similar demographics, from the same place, going through very similar experiences.
But each of them has a different perspective and a different kind of foundational sense of the world that changes the way that she interacts with pregnancy, with parenthood, with life.
And I wanted us to understand that there are a lot of ways to be a good mother.
And that teen parenthood isn't monolithic and it doesn't look just one way and that it exists across race and across class and across geography, and that we see a lot of different examples and representations of the way that these girls handle themselves and their lives and their friendships.
And so I did a lot of work to kind of create their individuality.
And a lot of that is how we see them interact with kind of the same scenario very differently.
Were they based on real people?
No, I think that as a writer, there are like fragments of myself and people that I know that show up kind of subconsciously in every book and in every character.
There's two relationships between young girls and older men in this book.
And I wanted us to kind of examine that, because a good portion of young parents have partners who are six or more years older than them.
And I think when we're 16, we don't understand the vast difference between 16 and 22.
Whereas by the time that we get to 22 we hopefully have a lot more perspective on how big of a gap there is between that.
And I think that there needs to be a lot of grace and compassion for the way that we look at at young girls who want to be loved and are being told things that they don't have the information to know aren't true.
What made you want to explore the age difference situation?
It's almost so common in society that we don't see it.
Like the main things that we focus on is whether someone's underage or legal.
But anything beyond that.
I don't know if I've read anything that really examines that power dynamic and difference between say, someone who is 17 and 18 and being with a man who is much older.
It's so common.
And I mean, I grew up with so many people who dated far above their age.
And when you're a teenager there really isn't as much perspective on that difference because you feel grown.
And in a lot of ways, like you want to be independent.
And this person comes in, tells you like, oh, you're mature.
There's no difference between me and you.
And you want to believe it.
Is that an experience that you ever had?
I think in my experience in Oakland as a young person there was a lot of harassment and sexual harassment.
And I think that's common, particularly among young black girls.
And what did that look like?
Explain it.
I mean every single day of my teens, from when I was maybe 10 or 11, I was followed home bullied, called out to, had people try to get me to get in their cars all kinds of things groping.
I think that it is an experience that is so common we almost don't even bother to talk about it, because we already know that no one is going to protect us.
And a lot of, I think, Nightcrawling was built around.
What does it mean to walk through a world that doesn't care about your safety?
And I think part of this book was born out of.
What does it mean to care about what it means to be a parent and figure out what it means to be a good parent, and do so while you're also trying to become a person yourself?
Because in Nightcrawling, which was your best-selling debut novel, it's about a young woman named Kiara who was scraping by in East Oakland, and she eventually becomes exploited by the very people that's supposed to protect her the police.
She becomes a sex worker, and she is exploited.
And that story is loosely based on several true stories.
Is this part of the reason why you wanted to tell it?
Why did you feel like, for your debut novel, this would be a story that was important to get out there?
I was 16 and 17 when I wrote Nightcrawling.
And for me, part of it was a memorializing of Oakland.
I grew up in Oakland at a time where it was rapidly changing and still is.
And there's a sort of implicit grief in that experience.
And I wanted to capture my city as it was and And also recognize that we can love a place and we can call a place home and also recognize and criticize the ways that it doesn't protect us.
And I don't know a single black girl specifically, who hasn't experienced the same type of harassment and abuse and unsafe experience in the world and particularly in my city.
And there is a lot of loneliness in that experience, especially as young black girls.
We are taught that we're supposed to stay silent because it makes other people uncomfortable.
And so I wanted to create this story that maybe hopefully, helps us understand why what it feels like to walk around in the world knowing no one is looking out for you.
Our guest today is author and poet Leila Motley.
We'll be right back after a short break.
I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.
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You were named the Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland when you were 16 years old and you actually wrote this really beautiful poem about the city.
Can I have you read the poem?
It's called Love Poem to Oakland.
Dear Oakland.
Last night I got off a plane, rolled my neck, felt it crack and said honey, I'm home.
Said, baby, I ain't gonna leave you again.
This is my love letter.
This is my spilling over waxed mural of a song to you.
My prayers to the Panthers, to the Everett and Jones on MacArthur that smells so good.
Got that rubber chew of a home too far, that sweet spice of my city.
Oakland, can I cradle you like my daddy cradled me?
Hold you tight, say baby I got you.
Tough love, say fix your face for I'll fix it for you.
Fix these streets for I'll fix them for you.
Where did all the color go?
Where did all my sweat-laced church-clappin' hand-in-out pies on high street men go?
My sisters with their gloves on, with their afros out, don't care if they're afraid of us, cause we got these streets, we got this lake, we got Fruitvale Station.
Dear downtown, what I gotta say to make you love me?
What I gotta do to strip uptown back?
If I can't have this hair, this skin, then I don't want no 5 coffee, no 10 Cobb salad piled up with all this talk about how we've been criminals, been scared straight, so they can feed us back our shame.
East Oakland, I know you ain't forgotten about me.
I know you've been waiting for my tongue to click gums to throat, to lungs, scream till the bay dries up.
I know you've been sitting on your heels for me to find the key to the Alameda detention hall.
Tell your kids that mama hasn't forgotten about you, hasn't left you chained from your childhood.
Mama been at work, been waiting to set us free, to give us back our city.
Oakland, I'm talking to you.
Diamond to Laurel, to Uptown, to Chinatown, to Fruitvale, to Foothill, to Temescal, to Eastmont, to West Oakland.
We're ten steps from home.
A mile we race in.
They've been displacing our bodies, our words, our letters.
Been trying to tear us apart, but I know you've been loving us.
Been whispering our history.
Black Panthers to White Horse to Bart at night.
Oakland, we're fighting home.
We're clawing home.
We're coming home.
That's my guest, poet and author Layla Motley, reading her poem, Love Letter to Oakland.
Layla, tell us a little bit about this poem.
It's an ultimate love letter.
It makes me curious, the story behind the writing of this love letter.
Did it start with you returning home from a trip?
Yeah, I think I wrote this right after I went to Detroit to visit my family.
Because your father's from Detroit originally.
Yeah, and a lot of my family still lives there.
I was 15 when I wrote this poem and it's been a good eight years, so I can't entirely tell you the story behind it, but I think I think it came with like this initial reckoning that I think a lot of us do as teenagers when, for the first time, we're interacting with people outside of our families, outside of our homes, and trying to make sense of where we're from and what we've been given and what we want for ourselves and And, at the same time, like learning how to both love and criticize a place people, your childhood, all of these things.
And so I think that I came back home from this trip and started writing this poem about what it means to be from a place that is constantly changing and that doesn't always love you back, and how to love a place.
And how to care for it and how to fight for it, when we've been told that it is undesirable or only desirable in relation to the influx of whiteness and wealth.
You have both a deep love for the city, but you also can see the way the city has maybe harmed you in the ways that you're talking about, and that loneliness you feel walking the streets and being targeted by grown men.
Is that what I'm hearing from you?
Completely.
And I think that when particularly, we're framing historically black cities through violence, we have to remember that that interpersonal and intercommunal violence is almost always born out of state violence and a removal of resources.
And so there has to be a simultaneous like criticism of the harm that has been done to us and then the harm that we continue to perpetuate within our communities, and how we can hold each other accountable and show up for each other differently.
Where did you learn that?
Because so many people don't really come to that idea.
Look, I'm saying so many people, but I'm going to say me, okay?
Didn't really come to these ideas and understanding of your relationship with your hometown until much older in age.
Were these conversations you were having at home?
No, no, they weren't.
I mean, Oakland is a really specific place and has a kind of tradition and history and legacy of resistance.
And growing up in a time where Oakland was rapidly changing.
So much displacement, so much like loss.
I had to cope with that on a daily basis and understand like that there is power in fighting and in trying to maintain our homes.
And I think that that very much ties into this kind of legacy of rebellion.
I grew up getting to like be in conversation with people. former Black Panthers.
And I read a lot.
And I think that that definitely helped me kind of process it.
But I think it wasn't until I left home really briefly, I think, just even a couple months of distance, to kind of reevaluate and understand and choose my home.
And since then, I've kind of had to create an adult relationship with the city.
You reference a lot of things in the poem.
One thing that comes up is Fruitvale Station, which people outside of Oakland may only know through the death of Oscar Grant.
How much of that has made up your consciousness as you think about your city and your interactions with authority.
It was just a major event for the city that still reverberates.
Yeah.
Completely.
Fruitvale Station is like my home BART station.
And so for a lot of my life, all I thought about it is like, this is the place I go every day.
And they ended up painting a mural of him on the side of there's this big wall right beneath the train tracks.
And I think I probably learned about Oscar Grant when I was maybe 10, 11, 12.
And I think one of the most impactful things for me is like his mother and the way that she continued to fight for not only him but black children across the world and across the country.
And the amount of grief and harm that mothers have to carry, in particular when their children are unsafe in a world that they can't protect them from.
That's an interesting perspective to key in on at such a young age, because oftentimes when these stories are reported out a mother's grief is kind of a flashpoint in the story, but the larger story becomes kind of political.
It became about police and police violence, and the grief is almost secondary.
Yeah, and I think that the way that we position Black women in particular around police violence is always kind of at the sidelines, even though in reality often Black women are carrying the bulk of the weight of what it means to mourn and to fight and to keep a memory alive.
Is it true that your grandma was part of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, back during the civil rights era?
She was, yeah, in Detroit.
What stories did you hear about that growing up?
I heard a lot of stories about the Detroit Rebellion.
My dad grew up in the 60s in Detroit and he used to tell me this story about how, during the Detroit Rebellion, he lived in my grandmother's house and they would sleep on the floor to avoid the bullets coming through the windows.
I think my family has a strong history of resistance.
My grandmother was also the head of the Nurses' Labor Union in Detroit and she did a lot of work around caretaking and activism and organizing and there is definitely a legacy of that, as well as art and writing.
In your poem, you mention that you had contact with Black Panthers.
What's the story behind that?
I think I met Elaine Brown for the first time when I was 15.
And I performed a poem at a tea for like dozens of black women and black women organizers in Oakland.
And then I've gotten to be in conversation with Angela Davis and meet Erica Huggins.
And I mean it's so special to get to grow up among these people who have spent their entire lives working towards this mission and who continue to do so and have such an active impact in my community.
Let's take a short break.
If you're just joining us.
My guest is author Layla Motley, and her new novel, The Girls Who Grew Big, is about a group of teenage mothers in a small town in the Florida panhandle who forge a community through their circumstances.
We'll continue our conversation after a short break.
This is Fresh Air.
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You know, a lot has been made of your age.
You'll be talking about being a young writer until you're no longer a young writer.
You started writing your first novel at 14, and you said many times though, that you weren't a typical 14-year-old, that you had to grow up fast.
Can you tell us a little more of what you mean by that?
I grew up in a complicated family with a lot of experiences and emotions and feelings.
And so I was a very talkative kid.
I talked a lot.
And there wasn't necessarily the space or capacity for people to hear me.
And so instead of talking about my thoughts, at first I started talking to my fingers.
I'd whisper to my fingers.
And then once I learned how to write, I started writing.
So I started writing poetry when I was six.
And then I started writing short stories when I was eight or nine.
And then I started writing novels when I was 14.
And I think with each novel, it became like more and more just part of my DNA and part of who I am.
I also am fortunate enough to have grown up with a lot of artists, where art and discipline was important.
And I think that we have kind of this idea culturally that young people are not doing anything.
And I think that we underestimate the power and the amount of thought that young people have.
But also I do believe that we need to look at art for young people as important beyond just how it is consumed.
Your father also is a writer, a playwright.
So you would watch him as well in his creative pursuits.
What do you remember about that?
Yeah, my dad worked a lot when I was very little.
And he would come home really late at night.
And we lived in this six-bedroom apartment.
And so me and my brother would be in our room.
And we'd wake up when he got home and listen to his keyboard start clacking.
And that's when he would start writing.
I got to grow up with someone who was deeply passionate about writing and about art and about doing it for the love of it, regardless of the outcome.
And I think that that was incredibly important to my understanding of the importance of the practice of writing and of doing it daily and of loving it for what it is and not for what it gets you.
Right, because is it true that you wrote six books between your first novel Nightcrawling, and this current book that we're talking about?
Yes, that is true.
That's an incredible amount of writing.
And when I hear about someone working at that level it shows kind of a deep love for the craft.
But it also suggests that you're creating first and foremost for yourself.
Is that true for you?
Yeah.
I mean, until Nightcrawling and even during Nightcrawling, I didn't show my work to really anyone.
And so it was entirely for me.
And that was, I think, a really sacred experience that you don't really get to recreate once you start publishing.
But I think, having so many years where I had a word count goal that I met every day, regardless of what was happening, I worked full time and I would wake up at six in the morning and I would write, and I would write on the bus to work and I would write on BART on the way home, and I had a very consistent practice from a young age that I think helped me get to the point that when I started thinking of what I wanted to write after Nightcrawling, I knew how to write anything at any time, regardless of creativity or time.
But I struggled with figuring out how to write with the idea of a reader in mind.
How did you get over that?
How did you cross over?
I wrote six books and I threw them out.
Oh, you threw them out.
So will we ever see them or?
Probably not in that form.
I imagine that maybe one day I'll return to some of them, but I'm not super precious about my work.
So if I don't feel like it is clicking or that I'm in the right place to tell a story, well that I will leave it alone and I'll start over.
When you're someone writing for yourself and like constantly doing that practice.
How does it feel then to have your work consumed in such a spectacular way?
Because your first novel is a bestseller.
You're chosen on Oprah's book club list.
I mean, you're like right in the fire.
Yeah.
I mean, I think you have to understand the dissonance too of the amount of change that happens between 17, when I wrote Nightcrawling, and then 1920, when it was coming out.
I felt like an entirely different person.
I was an entirely different person and a different writer.
And it was almost like having my 17-year-old diary published and memorialized for the rest of my life.
And I think that's something that all writers have to cope with is like our work is a representation of the time in which we wrote it.
And once it comes out, it doesn't belong to us anymore.
And there has been like a lot of work in me to like respect the person who wrote that book and respect, really see it as a representation of a 17-year-old's mind.
And I think that's something we don't often get to see.
Is motherhood something that you aspire to experience?
Yeah, I am one of those people who's like wanted to be a parent since I was a child, because I am in a queer relationship.
I kind of have the blessing and burden of parenthood being a very intentional choice.
There's not going to be an oopsie.
And so I think in some ways, that means that I spend a lot of my time thinking about, like intentionality around parenthood and what it looks like to become ready to truly be selfless and to have your life orient around another person and to know that there is a certain amount of loss and death of self in becoming somebody's parent.
And I want to be as ready for that as possible, while also knowing that We're never ready and we're never prepared.
And parenthood is unpredictable and you don't know what kind of kid you're going to get.
But I do think that the most important thing is being ready to be accountable to that child for the rest of your life and for the rest of theirs.
Laila Motley, thank you for your time and thank you for this book.
Thank you so much for having me.
Laila Motley's new novel is called The Girls Who Grew Big.
Coming up TV critic, David Bianculli reviews the season premiere of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, with the cast of Abbott Elementary showing up in guest-starring roles.
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SVP Judy Abrams explains the importance of education and resources when it comes to planning to, and through, retirement.
It's interesting.
People put money into their retirement accounts for years, but they have no idea what's supposed to happen when they have to start taking money out.
When I'm speaking to a prospective client for the first time, one of the ways that I work to establish trust is to listen to them.
Is there anything we should know about their spouse or their children, or plans to move or their health?
Our job is to get the full picture.
Then we can take a look at their resources and see if we can improve their situation.
It's far more comprehensive than just managing the money.
When clients realize that we have the resources and the competence to be able to handle a wide array of financial questions, they know they're in good hands.
In January, the cast and characters from the FX series It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia showed up as court-appointed community volunteers on an episode of the ABC sitcom Abbott Elementary, also set in Philadelphia.
The story and the TV crossover continues tonight as the 17th season premiere of Always Sunny features the cast of Abbott Elementary as guest stars.
Our TV critic David Bianculli has this review.
The cross-network crossover featuring actors and characters from different TV shows and networks is not unprecedented.
The most prominent example is from 1998, when two series set in Boston the Fox comedy Ally McBeal and the ABC drama The Practice combined for a two-part crossover.
That was possible because David E. Kelly created both shows and won Emmys for them both.
ABC's Abbott Elementary and FX's.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Both are set in Philly but have different lineages.
Abbott, which premiered in 2021, is created by its star, Quinta Brunson.
She plays idealistic teacher Janine and has won Emmys for both writing and acting on the show.
Always Sunny, which premiered way back in 2005, was created by Rob McElhenney, who goes by Rob Mac and Glenn Howerton.
They co-star in their comedy as, respectively, Mac and Dennis.
When Mac and Brunson met at an Emmy function, they found they were fans of each other's shows and joked about a crossover.
Because both series are owned by Disney, the crossover eventually became a reality.
The trick, though, was to merge two shows with very different tones.
Abbott is a family comedy set in a Philly grade school and is framed as though it's being filmed by a documentary film crew in the style of Modern Family in the Office.
Always Sunny is a much raunchier sitcom, set in a Philly dive bar and presented like a standard filmed comedy.
Both shows have prominent, talented co-stars.
Sonny features Danny DeVito as Uncle Frank and Caitlin Olsen now starring in ABC's High Potential as Dee.
Abbott includes Cheryl Lee Ralph, an Emmy winner, for her supporting role as Barbara, and Tyler James Williams as Gregory Janine's boyfriend and a fellow teacher.
And neither show has a laugh track.
But how to merge the two series and styles?
In January, when the first part of the two-part crossover appeared on ABC, Abbott Elementary solved it by having Janine welcome the Sonny characters for a week of community volunteer work, while their ever-present camera crew captures the action.
Most of the gang from the bar is fine with it, but one Sonny character, Glenn Howerton, as Dennis, is resistant.
Welcome to Abbott Elementary, the best elementary school in the universe.
Is that what this is?
Ignore her.
We are the best volunteers in the universe.
This is Frank.
I'm Mac, Dee, Dennis, and Charlie.
Hey, guys.
A quick question.
What's the deal with all the cameras?
We have like a Vanderpump thing going on.
Don't worry about it.
No.
I don't think so.
I know quite a bit about filming.
The new volunteers, of course, don't fit in well at the grade school.
These are self-absorbed characters who make the friends from Seinfeld seem like model citizens.
The one exception seems to be Caitlin Olsen's Dee, who gets along great with Quinta Brunson's Janine.
Until, that is, Janine learns that Dee has set her sights on Janine's teacher boyfriend, Gregory.
Wait, um, you like Gregory?
Uh, yeah, you've seen those shoulders.
What is his deal?
Is he in a relationship?
Ooh, if he is, is he a cheater?
Okay, so he is actually with someone.
Me.
What?
Yeah.
Janine!
Nice pull.
Thank you.
It took a long time.
Yeah, you're good if I take a spin, though, yeah?
But now we learn more about that story and others, thanks to the new season opener of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, simulcast on both FX and sister network FXX, and streaming afterwards on Hulu.
The documentary crew supposedly filming things on Abbott also filmed the characters from Sunny.
And that outtake footage forms the basis of the crossover conclusion.
It's an approach that works very nicely.
On Sunny, the characters are allowed to be more like themselves, a little more foul-mouthed and a lot more abrasive.
While D seemed to be best buds with Janine while both of them were in the classroom, the outtake footage shows a different story, as D takes the camera operator aside and offers to shake up things.
Class, can I have your attention for one second?
You are being taught by a genius.
And class, if I may, you have a genius volunteer aiding you.
Oh.
You.
You.
You.
It's definitely you.
Right now, one, two, three.
You.
I notice you following that one around a bunch.
What is going on with that?
I'm not picking up star vibes from her.
She's a dud.
She's a giant dud.
But I have an idea.
You follow me around.
Make me the star of whatever this is and I will make this shit pop.
Right?
I'll steal her man.
I'll expose her for the dud she is.
What do you think?
Let's work together.
This crossover between shows is an experiment that's a total success.
Both programs and both casts get served well.
And there's more to come, sort of.
Later this season.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia spends several episodes presenting Danny DeVito as Frank, appearing on ABC's dating reality show series The Golden Bachelor.
And largely because of DeVito, who's been delightful on TV ever since Taxi.
That combination is lots of fun too.
Watch for it.
David Bianculli is a professor of television studies at Rowan University.
He reviewed tonight's season premiere of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Tomorrow on Fresh Air New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak on how the Supreme Court is increasing presidential power.
We discuss the term that recently ended, including the so-called shadow docket.
Look ahead to the next term and talk about Justice Katonji Brown, Jackson's warning in her dissents and the reaction of the other justices.
I hope you can join us.
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