• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, April 18, 2023

One of the most treasured institutions in the lives of every kid who ever lived in Philadelphia and its suburbs since the 1930s gets a starring role in the season finale of “Abbott Elementary” on ABC Wednesday night.

The star is the science museum known as The Franklin Institute (often pronounced “In-stee-tute” by the local gentry).

Pictured above, this venerable museum in the heart of Center City is the home of a giant, walk-through beating heart and a 350-ton, 1926 steam locomotive that actually moves.

In the “Abbott Elementary” episode that will close the show’s second season, classes of young pupils take a field trip to the museum and have an overnight stay.

For many of the kids, it is their first visit to a museum that is a rite of passage for generations of Philadelphia’s children. 

For a TV blogger who knows this experience well, the sight of these eager kids staring wide-eyed and upward in the Institute’s great entrance hall for the very first time brings back long-ago memories.

The Abbott Elementary School children are then seen throughout the episode excitedly touring the museum’s famed halls dedicated to electricity, outer space, biology (where the giant heart comes in), rail transportation, aviation and more. 

In this way, the show becomes a showcase and prime-time promotion for one of Philadelphia’s most attractive tourist attractions.

Basing a sitcom episode in the Franklin Institute could only have been thought up by a Philadelphia native -- in this case, the show’s creator and star Quinta Brunson, who was born and raised in West Philadelphia.

It is clear from this episode and others that Ms. Brunson has great affection for her native city. Last season’s finale also featured a field trip to another destination familiar to all who ever grew up there -- the Philadelphia Zoo, the nation’s first official zoological society, which was established in 1859.

Whether Ms. Brunson knows it or not, the Franklin Institute even figures into the early history of television. Inventor Philo Farnsworth gave the first public demonstration of his all-electronic television system at the Institute in 1934.