The FX comedy gives Instagram sensation Brian Jordan Alvarez a showcase for his comedic genius.
This review contains mild spoilers for English Teacher.
Late into the first season of English Teacher, a new FX comedy premiering on September 2, an episode-long recurring joke reaches its ultimate punchline in the installment’s final few seconds, and it’s all about a concerning new teenage sex craze known as the “No Loads Refused Cumdump.” To reveal anything more about the joke’s context would be to potentially risk spoiling one of the greatest running gags I’ve encountered on television this year. But suffice it to say, you won’t see it creep up on you, and when it does, chances are you’ll laugh until you pee.
Then again, ruining this one moment wouldn’t rob any viewers of an enjoyable experience since these kinds of jokes — wholly unexpected, slightly naughty, and distinctly gay — are rife throughout English Teacher. In a television landscape where not-really-funny quasi-comedies are starting to become the norm, genuine laugh-generators like FX’s latest feel like a rare gift.
Created by Brian Jordan Alvarez, English Teacher largely functions as a workplace sitcom, following a group of well-meaning teachers at the Texas-based Morrison-Hensley High School. But as indicated by its title, the series is also frequently locked into one perspective: that of Evan Marquez (Alvarez), whose professional and personal lives never seem to be in order. When we meet him, Evan is being put under school investigation after a parent reports him for kissing his boyfriend, fellow teacher-cum-tech bro Malcolm (Jordan Firstman), in front of her son. Much of the season’s first half revolves around Evan’s futile attempts to navigate this scandal without losing his job — especially after Harry (Langston Kerman), a hot and flirty new gay teacher, arrives, complicating Evan’s agreement to no longer date other school faculty.
English Teacher isn’t shy about engaging with real issues. Notably, Morrison-Hensley is in the South, and the show’s writers wring out plenty of tension from the dissonance that comes from being an openly gay — or even just an extremely liberal — teacher working in an otherwise conservative community. But the show never feels like it’s patting itself on the back for being “political,” nor does it try to pretend like it’s “saying” anything especially important. In fact, the series actively sidesteps any appeals to respectability, often directly referencing the hypocrisy that queer people can have about themselves. (Though Evan claims that the kiss he shared with Malcolm was a “peck on the cheek,” a flashback eventually reveals it to be much racier.) Not since Max’s unfortunately canceled entertainment industry satire The Other Two has a comedy felt so scathingly yet playfully self-aware about the communities it supposedly centers.
With each episode clocking in around 22 minutes, English Teacher moves at a brisk pace, never once overstaying its welcome with unnecessary fluff. It’s the kind of easily digestible comedy one could understandably resent for airing on a premium cable channel like FX; now, we’re forced to settle for measly eight-episode seasons when we would gladly ingest triple that amount if it were on broadcast.
But being on FX is also what allows English Teacher to get away with much of what makes it so watchable. Though the series will inevitably draw comparisons to ABC’s Emmy-winning Abbott Elementary, English Teacher is immediately distinguishable from that major network sensation. Decidedly gayer and much more explicit, this isn’t exactly “family-friendly” entertainment.
Some of this can be credited to the surrounding school staff. Chief among them is Markie Hillridge (Sean Patton), a gym-bro P.E. teacher who finds it appropriate to teach a gun training course at school so long as it’s focused on gun safety. Though often at odds with Evan, he can also be understanding and touchingly observant — and sometimes even helpful. Markie has a small crush on history teacher Gwen Sanders (Alvarez’s frequent collaborator Stephanie Koenig), which annoys Evan, who counts Gwen as his best friend and is easily jealous. The makeshift colleague friend circle is rounded out by Rick (Carmen Christopher), a college counselor who couldn’t care less about the “guidance” part of his job, but does pack weed for school camping trips and spams his colleagues with emails from a stock guy he met at a TED Talk. And overseeing them all is Grant Moretti (Enrico Colantoni), a principal just trying to keep the school on the hinges despite the never-ending stream of problems popping up no matter how hard he tries — many of them directly traceable to Evan.
“Decidedly gayer and much more explicit, this isn’t exactly ‘family-friendly’ entertainment.”
But even the teachers can sometimes be overshadowed by the teenage students. Twitter sensation Ivy Wolk, in particular, is a more-than-welcome screen presence, delivering her sardonic one-liners with a twisted sense of affected glee. (“I’m posting ads on Backpage,” she tells Evan after receiving an F on an essay. “Because with grades like this, I’m going to have to hit the corner, sir.”) Other standouts include viral TikTok singer Aliyah’s Interlude (Aliyah Bah) and Rebel Moon star Savanna Gann, whose incessant bickering — always followed by an inevitable make-up — gives a whole new meaning to the term “frenemies.”
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Smartly, the series pits its millennial teachers directly against their Gen-Z students, mining tons of humor from the recognizable differences that exist between these particular generations. Jokes about vaping and social media abound, as do others about the younger set’s constantly changing political views. A highlight of the series pilot arises from Evan and Gwen’s genuine bemusement over their students’ newfound comfort around the R-word slur. “The kids this year, I feel like…they’re not into being ‘woke’ anymore,” Evan concernedly tells Gwen. “It circled all the way around and now they’re like for what they say they’re against.”
And when combined with its take-no-prisoners approach to other “politically correct” subject matter, English Teacher proves uniquely adept at finding the in-on-the-joke sweet spot for boundary-pushing comedy that never feels offensive. In an episode about the school’s annual powderpuff football game — where the girls get dirty on the field while the boys do cheerleader cosplay — members of the campus “LGBTQIA2S+ Alliance” try to get the event canceled on the basis that it’s an “old Boomer tradition where the boys get to make fun of the girls” and “football players are ‘gender-switching’ as a joke.” Evan convinces them to back off their cause by pointing out the irony of queer students “banning a drag performance at a school in the South,” but only after hiring a suspicious drag queen (the always game Trixie Mattel) to coach the players on doing “real authentic drag.” (Naturally, hijinks ensue.)
Though English Teacher marks Alvarez’s first real television project as a creator and lead, it’s hard to be surprised about the show’s brilliance when he has been entertaining audiences for at least a decade. As an actor, the talented comedian stole multiple scenes in last year’s robot-killer horror-comedy M3GAN. And his recurring role as Jack’s Spanish flight attendant fiancé in Will & Grace? One of the main reasons to tune into NBC’s hit-or-miss reboot.
Alvarez also made a name for himself with his TikToks and Instagram videos, regularly going viral with silly songs (“Sitting Is the Opposite of Standing”) and truly original character work. But perhaps the project most indicative of what was to come is “The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo,” a YouTube webseries from 2016, which Alvarez created, wrote, and starred in. Like English Teacher, “Caleb Gallo” followed an idealistic gay millennial surrounded by a host of zany personalities (including the Freckle of “sometimes, things that are expensive are worse” infamy). And like the new sitcom, the webseries found clever ways to explore (and normalize) queer life by placing its characters in a reality that felt just slightly off-kilter. The multi-hyphenate has clearly always had the goods. Just be thankful he now has the FX budget to show them off.
English Teacher premieres on FX on September 2. All episodes stream next day on Hulu.
