Katy, Katie, Caitlin, Katy, Kathryn, Kate. It’s not coincidence that the six co-creators and lead actors in TVLand’s hilarious new sitcom Teachers basically share a name. They formed a comedy troupe in Chicago when Caitlin Barlow noticed how many Kate’s were among their improv comedy classes. Calling themselves the Katydids, they played what was supposed to be a one-off show and then just stuck together, performing both improv and sketch-comedy and eventually filming videos for the Internet.
“Some of us literally shook hands that night performing our first show,” says Kate Lambert. “And then we performed together. t was such a good chemistry. Everyone got along so well onstage and off. And it just felt really special. And that’s why we decided to continue with it.”
“It was an exciting time,” adds Katy O’Brien, “because improv is such an unstable career. It’s such a beautiful art form but there isn’t really a place for it to make money. I feel like for me personally, finding this group was such a turning point, because it was finding people exactly like you with the same interests. But what also was so cool is that we’re all totally different, we have different styles of comedy. All six of us have a different comedic sense of humor, and we feel like that’s why the group works because when you blend it together you get a little bit of everything. So people when they watch our stuff, we get a wide ranging audience.”
Barlow is the only member of the troupe who worked as a teacher after earning a masters of bilingual education from DePaul University. She taught fourth grade in the Chicago Public School System while performing improv and sketch comedy in the city. She borrowed heavily from that experience when creating the web series Teachers with her fellow Katydids.
“There’s a lot that goes on that I don’t think has ever really been explored on TV,” she says. “Like there’s inter-teacher politics and you, you’re trying to get your life figured out and you’re molding these students’ early lives and it’s a lot of pressure.”
The six comedians created their own characters—basically heightened versions of themselves, says Barlow—and turned them in to short sketches for the web. Barlow plays Ms. Cannon, a hippie activist who gets rid of gender stereotypes on the bathroom doors in the series pilot. Lambert’s Ms. Watson is still broken-hearted from a breakup that happened more than a year earlier and is constantly reminding her young class how painful life can be. O’Brien is the completely naive Ms. Bennigan, who awkwardly crushes on her worst student’s recently widowed father. They’re joined by Katy Colloton as the self-absorbed Ms. Snap, Cate Freedman as the laid-back Ms. Feldman and Kathryn Renée Thomas as former goth Mrs. Adler.