Quinta Brunson has quickly become one of my favorite celebrities. She’s brilliant, funny, beautiful, and just all-around kick-ass. The fourth season of Abbott Elementary premieres tonight, October 9, and Quinta has been busy promoting it. She recently announced that this season would feature a random yet intriguing crossover with the cast of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. This week, Quinta appeared on Live with Kelly & Mark to talk about the upcoming season. As she was walking out, Quinta spotted a surprise in the audience: some members of her family! After commenting on it to Kelly and Mark when she got up on stage, she noticed that even more members of her family were in the audience, sitting in a different section. And that’s when the waterworks started.
Quinta Brunson got an emotional surprise from her family during a live interview on morning television. As Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos welcomed the Abbott Elementary creator-star to discuss season 4 of her Emmy-winning sitcom, she was moved to tears as she walked out to set and unexpectedly spotted multiple members of her family sitting amid the Live With Kelly & Mark studio audience.
Shortly after Brunson emerged from the backstage area, cameras captured her interacting with the crowd — and her eventual shock over recognizing her family waiting in the front row. Later, Brunson spotted more family members sitting in a different section of the audience, and she was clearly overwhelmed in the moment.
“I just saw basically I have family here. Oh my God!” the 34-year-old said, gathering herself as tears welled in her eyes. “That’s my literal, like, family. My sisters, my niece, and my cousin. I don’t want to cry on TV. That’s crazy.”
Brunson estimated to Ripa and Consuelos that her family must’ve traveled from her hometown of Philadelphia to surprise her, but that she “didn’t know” they’d planned the moment.
“I’m always just crying on TV. I’m so tired of it,” she joked. “Okay, make sure nobody else is here!”
The sweet moment came one day ahead of Abbott Elementary’s season 4 premiere, which producers Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker recently previewed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, in which they teased developments on the growing relationship between Brunson’s Janine and Tyler James Williams’ Gregory.
“We hope for it to go through the course of any normal relationship and to hit the ups and downs. We tend to approach everything from character. A lot of people thought we had this master plan for that, and ‘In this season and this episode, the two will kiss and blah, blah, blah,’” Halpern said. “But we’ve always tried to approach it from a character standpoint of ‘When are they going to be in a place where it would happen and when are they going to be in a place where things might get tough?’ This is all to say that we like to keep everything open in terms of character growth, but no, we don’t foresee at the moment that we’re going to pull the rug out from anybody.”
This was such a sweet moment, which you can watch below. That was so nice of her family to surprise her like that! Quinta is such a delight, isn’t she? She deserves every bit of success that she can get. Kelly’s joke about bringing out the rest of Quinta’s family made me laugh. I love Abbott and am excited for Season 4. During the interview, she also talks a little bit more about the crossover with Always Sunny, teasing that while Danny DeVito’s character, Frank, won’t be attending school, he will be making an appearance within Abbott Elementary itself. Does this change anyone’s predictions about the crossover’s overall plot? It sounds like it’s going to be more Abbott-centric than, say, the school going on a field trip to Sunny territory or the teachers ending up in Paddy’s Pub. Either way, this most likely means that Danny DeVito will interact with Janelle James and/or Cheryl Lee Ralph, and that’s going to be amazing.
Photos via YouTube and Instagram and credit: IMAGO/mpi099 / Avalon, Xavier Collin / Image Press Agency / Avalon