How ‘Abbott Elementary’ Took Over an Abandoned LA Mall for Ambitious Season 5 Twist | Exclusive

Note: This story contains spoilers from “Abbott Elementary” Season 5, Episode 9.

When “Abbott Elementary” production designer Michael Whetstone first heard that executive producers Quinta Brunson, Patrick Schumacker and Justin Halpern wanted to transform an abandoned mall into a makeshift school while Abbott underwent repairs, his mind immediately went to Palisades High School, which found a new home in a retired Sears after the Los Angeles wildfires destroyed the school in 2025.

The move for Pali High to the abandoned department store, which was open for business by April following January’s fires, was, in fact, the showrunners’ inspiration for the storyline after Abbott Elementary began shattering into pieces, with Whetstone noting they based the episode arc on “a school being uninhabitable.” In practice, however, “Abbott” didn’t embrace too many design elements from the real school’s transformation, given that Pali High had about $12 million to transform the Sears while “Abbott” was working in the lines of a budget of a network sitcom, albeit a celebrated one.

It was also budgetary constraints that deterred Whetstone from exploring the possibility of building a mall on a Warner Bros. sound stage, noting, “I’m always up for building something — we love building things on the show — but to build a mall the way they envisioned it, with multiple stories, it would have been cost-prohibitive.”

Thus began the search for an abandoned mall that could fit the bill without too much construction, which Whetstone admitted was fairly limited given the Los Angeles real estate market. “You can imagine there aren’t a lot of choices, especially in LA,” Whetstone said. “If a mall isn’t working, they’re usually repurposing it and redoing it … several malls in L.A. have been been redone, or they’re going to knock [them] down.”

That was precisely the fate of the chosen Westfield Topanga mall, scouted by location manager David B. Lyons, which was demolished shortly after filming for “Abbott Elementary” ended. In fact, the ABC sitcom was the last production to shoot at the mall before it was demolished, and probably made further use of the location than other productions, with Whetstone saying “we used literally every square inch that was usable in that mall.”

After signing a deal with the mall for a three-episode arc, Whetstone and his team had about a month of planning prior to arrival and about a month of prep to get the mall production-ready, while still preserving its broken-down essence that fueled both the challenge for the teachers to make the mall their new home and the comedy within that dilemma.

“Every time we’d go scouting, another 10 things we saw in there, whether they were store fixtures or a checkout counter, had disappeared,” Whetstone said. “Locations probably spent a week or two cleaning up broken glass … Warner Brothers safety had to come in and get rid of mold. We had the floors all clean, and then we had to dirty them back up with scenic tricks to make it look dirty.”

During prep, Whetstone and his team were also hard at work to ensure the site looked like an East Coast mall that had been closed for about 10 years, per Brunson, rather than a California structure that only recently closed its doors. That meant clearing store names from regional Philadelphia businesses, as well as national ones, with Whetstone explaining the network series “couldn’t show a store that wasn’t bankrupt and had an online presence.” Of the stores they got cleared were Philly-founded jeweler Bailey Banks & Biddle, KB Toys and, of course, Sears.

“We wanted it to look like you were in an East Coast mall,” Whetstone said. “Some of the signage we purposely damaged — we built it new and then damaged it and had a letter hanging off sideways.”

With the mall having closed during Christmastime, there was also plenty of holiday-themed set dec in the mall as well.

Prior to setting up shop at the mall, Whetstone and his team created a miniature model of the mall (pictured below) as they plotted out spots for each classroom and other gathering spaces, providing a reference to the show’s various directors during the arc. “Building miniature models and maquettes used to be something we did all the time, and then everything just got built in 3D,” Whetstone said. “But we actually worked in the mall mostly in 2D and then built a three-dimensional miniature model that we could pull apart, and that really helped us understand the space.”

While Whetstone had initially placed classrooms for younger grades led by Janine (Brunson) and Barbara (Sheryl Lee Ralph) on the lower level of the mall, the plan shifted after director Randall Einhorn moved the teachers upstairs, mostly in an effort to get Gregory (Tyler James Williams) and Janine’s classrooms across from each other for plot purposes. “There were only so many areas where Janine and Gregory could exist … across from each other … even though that seems crazy, a lot of the shops in these malls are too small to actually put a big classroom in,” Whetstone said.

Whetstone compared placing the teachers in their classrooms to a “giant puzzle,” noting that after Janine and Gregory were placed, then came Barbara, whose classroom was ideally placed closer to a bathroom as her students ventured out for a bathroom break, and then, of course, Ava’s office.

“The mall really dictated what we did,” Whetstone said. “I probably never scouted a location that many times … [it was] really hard to find a home for all the teachers. And once we had the raw space figured out, we went back and and designed each classroom.”

Whetstone’s favorite space in the mall was the teachers’ lounge, which was converted from an old Ruby’s Diner to feel similar to the original lounge, with Whetstone and his team bringing in familiar circular tables. “I’d say most of the spaces feel familiar — sometimes when you’re in the classrooms where you’re like, ‘huh, this doesn’t feel that odd.’ We did that purposefully.”

“Abbott Elementary” airs Wednesdays at 8:30 p.m. ET/PT on ABC and streams the next day on Hulu.

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