Quinta Brunson will receive the Mary Tyler Moore Visionary Award at Variety’s FYC TV Fest on May 6, a nod to the television trailblazer she says helped shape her own path. For Brunson, the honor lands as she heads toward Season 6 of Abbott Elementary and keeps one eye on the old sitcoms that first showed her what a TV career could look like.

Brunson said The Mary Tyler Moore Show was already part of the furniture in her home long before Abbott Elementary became one of broadcast TV’s few surviving sitcoms. She grew up watching Nick at Nite and said “that show went platinum in my household,” adding that The Mary Tyler Moore Show was “supremely important” to her. She watched it as a kid because it was “a really funny show,” and said its theme song is second nature to her.

The award carries extra weight because Brunson has described Mary Tyler Moore not just as a performer she admired, but as a model for how the industry could work. In Brunson’s telling, seeing Moore first on The Dick Van Dyke Show taught her that a person could move from featured player to lead, then build a career with her own business and studio. She said seeing Moore on The Oprah Winfrey Show alongside Winfrey was “really defining” and made her “never question whether or not I could do this.”

That influence sits alongside Brunson’s present-day reality: Abbott Elementary produces 22 episodes a season, and the show is heading into Season 6. Brunson said that with five seasons behind her, she and her team had to think differently about how they space out the story. “You don’t want to blow all the possibilities too soon of where these stories can go,” she said, adding that the volume of episodes pushes the show into places it could not have predicted.

There is also a quiet contradiction in the material Brunson is drawn to now. She said she is rewatching Girlfriends, catching up on old episodes of The Steve Harvey Show, trying Dharma & Greg for the first time and hunting down the pilot of Inside Schwartz on YouTube, a series that lasted just nine episodes in 2001. She said she is “really obsessed with one-season shows from that time,” because many of them were not canceled for lack of quality, but because television was so crowded that anything short of a ratings hit was unlikely to last.

Brunson’s award, then, is not just a salute to where she has arrived. It is a recognition that the path she followed was built from the kind of television she watched growing up — and from a belief, formed early and never shaken, that she could do it too.