How ‘Abbott Elementary’ Pulled Off Its Big Phillies Game Episode
by Whitney Friedlander · VarietyThey say that every trip to watch a ballgame is a different experience: a chance to see stolen bases and home runs; antics from the bleachers that end up on kiss cams and dance cams; fly balls soaring into the stands; or your daily caloric intake from hot dogs and popcorn. This unpredictability can be thrilling for baseball fans. But it seems anxiety-inducing for anyone brave enough to try to use the space to film footage for an actual scripted TV show.
And yet, this is exactly what “Abbott Elementary” director and executive producer Randall Einhorn did. He, along with much of the rest of the ABC mockumentary’s cast and crew, left the safe and familiar confines of their Warner Bros. sets to film the fifth season episode “Ballgame” during an actual Philadelphia Phillies game.
They hit it out of the park, garnering Einhorn an Emmy nomination for comedy series directing. But, just like any live theatrical event, even their best attempts at pre-planning were no match for reality and a lot of improvisation had to be done on the spot.
Some of this was dealing with the elements. The first of the two days of filming at the park covered wider shots, with 400 extras in the stands. Big silk screens protected the main cast to ensure clear audio and lighting. The actual day of the game, however, was too windy for those curtains. Einhorn realized this worked better for the story.
“I needed to show passage of time, so they start off in the shade, they go into full sunlight, and then they go back into full into shade. Then, it’s the nighttime,” he says. “I mean, that sold passage of time better than a clock could.”
Continuity concerns showed up in other ways, too.
“I shot 14 pages the day before the ball game, and basically, we had all these connected pieces,” Einhorn explains. “So, I’m shooting a scene with some with our cast. Something is supposed to happen on the ball field, and then I go back to my cast, who are commenting on what happened on the ball field. The next day, I had all these pans to the ball field that I needed to do the pan off and the back.”
In total, he says he his script noted about 70 pans that he had to connect from the ball field to the stands to what was recorded on the Phillies’ jumbotron known as the PhanaVision.
Einhorn also had to trust his actors — and not just the series regulars. Episode writer Ava Coleman’s script called for Phillies designated hitter Kyle Schwarber to hit a home run during the game.
Overachiever that he is, Schwarber hit four.
Because of “Abbott’s” mockumentary format, Einhorn says he always has three camera angles going at once: two for coverage and one master shot. This time, he also incorporated footage from the PhanaVision. When Schwarber’s balls flew into the air, the cameras “followed it out on the field like documentary cameras and panned up to the scoreboard,” he says.
For the actors, filming like this means that “nobody’s waiting for their scene and, therefore, they’re always reacting. And our cast is so good at knowing exactly where their character would be.” This meant that there was a camera ready to film real-time reactions and actual surprise and delight on the face of actress Sheryl Lee Ralph’s kindergarten teacher Barbara Howard, a character who is a known Schwarber enthusiast.
After the game, Schwarber also filmed a scene meeting the characters. The athlete wasn’t as confident and knowledgeable as he is on the field and admitted that he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. Einhorn, who had been warned that he had half an hour to film these exchanges before the stadium’s sprinklers went on, told him, “You do whatever Kyle Schwarber would do and we’re going to be good.”
They got the scene in four takes.
Most shocking of all of this is how calm Einhorn says he managed to stay during filming this episode.
“I’ve gotten so worked up in my past, I don’t do it anymore,” he laughs, adding that sure, it’d have been great if his hand-held radio had worked and he didn’t have to run around and scream directions at the camera crew and the actors. Instead, he says he rolled with it because “it’s just not worth it; it doesn’t help.”
Einhorn’s credits include mockumentaries “The Office,” “Parks and Recreation” and “Modern Family,” as well as more traditionally filmed programs including “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and “Wilfred.”
Early in his career, he received cinematography Emmy nominations for his work on “Survivor.” This “Abbott” episode was, he says, by far the most planning he’s ever done for a television program.
“I always have to have a plan … but for this episode, I really needed to have a plan,” he says. “I do these top-down graphics of where people are looking and where their nose is and where they walk to. I need to do that because it’s a mockumentary and it’s a lot trickier to film a mockumentary than it is just a normal comedy where you don’t need to worry about seeing another camera.”
He doesn’t pause to say yes when asked if he would do an episode like “Ballgame” ever again. But he’d make a few changes.
“I think I’d probably just be a little bit slower to say, ‘This is impossible,’ because the initial reaction is like, ‘How?’” he says. “It was really challenging. I really looked at it and thought, ‘This can go wrong in so many ways.’ I think what it has done is it’s made me even more of a planner.”
Aware of the obvious pun, he adds, “It was a big swing.”