Six women whose names are all derived from Katherine make up The Katydids and together the improv group writes and stars in the upcoming TV Land series Teachers, premiering in January 2016. Katie O’Brien and Katy Colloton, two of the Katies from The Katydids, sat down to discuss the show while at the 2015 San Diego Comic-Con. Teachers began as a web series about teachers which TV Land saw and suggested become a half-hour comedy show.
“We had to have a written script, but in the writers room we would improvise a little bit,” said Katy Colloton, explaining the process of collaborating on the scripts and filming the episodes. “On set, we had the script and we would make sure we’d get that locked, but then we would play a little bit. Usually the last take or the last few takes they’d say, ‘Have fun,’ and now that we’re editing right now, those are the takes that we’ll use a lot of the times. The dialogue isn’t that different. When you’re just improvising it, it adds a little spark that makes it so much fun.”
The teachers in the show teach elementary school kids, and the kid actors actually come up with some of the best-improvised lines. “We discovered during the web series that kids improvising can come up with things much more funny than what we could ever have written,” said O’Brien. “We have this really fun episode called ‘Seal’s Face’ where Miss Feldman puts up a photo of Seal the singer and says, ‘If anybody can tell me what happened to Seal’s face, you get an A for the rest of the semester.’ We just let the kids improvise and a couple of them were like, ‘Maybe he got scratched by a tiger.’ We kind of discovered that we started to give kids lines but as the season went on, we’re like, ‘We should just let them improvise and capture whatever we can.'”
Watch the full interview with Katy Colloton and Katie O’Brien for more on season one of Teachers:
The Plot: “Teachers revolves around six elementary school teachers who are trying to mold the minds and lives of America’s youth, even though they don’t really seem to have their own lives together at all.”
