How ‘English Teacher’s’ Brian Jordan Alvarez tapped into hot-button topics to make 2024’s funniest new show
The devil works hard, but Brian Jordan Alvarez works harder. For the past month, the creator, writer, director, and star of “English Teacher” has been dining out on the “I Love Your Daughter” meme to promote the FX comedy. The TikTok trend started in September after a user posted a clip from a Season 2 episode of “Gilmore Girls.” In it, Kirk (Sean Gunn), who has made a black-and-white short film, tells his girlfriend’s father, “I love your daughter.” When the father asks what he has to offer, Kirk says, “Nothing. Only this,” and proceeds to awkwardly dance. The sequence in the episode is set to Melle Mel‘s “White Lines (Don’t Do It),” but the TikTok edit swaps it out for Olly Alexander‘s “Breathe.”
Alvarez, who first tasted success online with his 2016 YouTube series “The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo” and his viral TikTok and Instagram videos, jumped onboard the trend with daily videos filmed in every location imaginable — the kitchen, the gym, the gas station, the LACMA Gala — and took it a step further. He usually strips off his shirt, and his posts are accompanied with the plea “Stream English Teacher on Hulu.”
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“My arms are not tired yet. I go to the gym. I keep them ready for more,” Alvarez tells Gold Derby of his stripteases. “I am definitely in the moment where I’m asking myself, ‘How long am I going to keep doing this?’ For now, it’s still getting traction. I’m still getting hundreds of thousands of views when I do it. I’ve actually never ridden a trend like this, so your guess is as good as mine of when I’ll be done with it.” Perhaps until Season 2? Or at least the renewal? “That’ll be great. Both of those would be great natural stopping points.”
One of the best and most acclaimed new shows of the year, “English Teacher,” which concluded its eight-episode first season last month, has not yet been renewed, so every bit and kind of promo counts in this fractured media landscape. The irony is that “English Teacher” is the kind of new show that feels like it’s been with us for years. Alvarez plays Evan Marquez, an English teacher in Austin, Texas, navigating the complex sociopolitical climate of high school and his personal life, specifically his on-again, off-again boyfriend Malcolm (Jordan Firstman). The cast includes Alvarez’s real-life BFF and collaborator Stephanie Koenig as Gwen, Evan’s bestie and fellow teacher; Enrico Colantoni as Grant, the exasperated principal; and Sean Patton as Markie, the athletic director and gym teacher.
The pilot wastes no time dropping the viewer in on the action as Evan races to school for just another day of educating young minds (that soon gets derailed). And like any good workplace comedy, it makes you want to hang out with these people, a yearning that, Alvarez believes, was achieved in the first few minutes of the pilot in the cafeteria scene. Evan, Gwen, Markie, and school counselor Rick (Carmen Christopher) are just eating lunch, venting, and gossiping like longtime colleagues do. The scene was shot three times, the final time when they were six episodes deep into filming the season.
“We were all really comfortable with each other. We were also very comfortable with the scene because we had done the scene so many times that we were almost riffing on riffs of riffs of riffs,” Alvarez says. “It was like we knew on a basic level what that scene was about.”
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The scene was also cross-shot, so all sides of the cross-talky conversation were captured simultaneously, giving it additional verisimilitude. “I think all of that together conspired to make that scene really magical and really feel like these characters are really comfortable with each other, which then makes the audience feel so comfortable with the characters,” he continues. “Of course, when you’re doing it, you’re going, ‘Oh, this is annoying that we need shoot the scene again, but let’s just do it.’ But then it ended up being hugely to the show’s benefit because I don’t even think how much I realized like, ‘Oh, this is the first time meeting the characters and it’s so good that they’re so comfortable together.'”
When “English Teacher” premiered in September, it inevitably drew comparisons to ABC’s “Abbott Elementary.” But the only thing the shows have in common is that they’re comedies about teachers with their auteurs as the leads. “English Teacher” is edgier, irreverent, and tackles hot-button topics with sharp humor that’s a mix of cynicism and sincerity.
The fourth episode focuses on Markie’s gun club and his advocacy for a firearm safety program, which Evan vehemently opposes and goes to great lengths to disband. The show routinely subverts expectations by eschewing moral grandstanding — Evan isn’t always right just because he’s the protagonist — and upending commonplace, in media at least, reactions. The finale opens with a student coming out to Evan and seeking advice. Another show might turn this into an emotional embrace, but Evan laughs and tells him it’s 2024 and that he’s better off talking to his classmates — but “don’t talk to one of those nonspecific queer kids who may or may not be doing it for clout. Those people are mostly straight.”
“I think with hot topics in general, somehow we just found in the voice of the show that we could handle this stuff, that there was a certain perspective, or even I would say the show has a certain empathy and intelligence that allows us to really look at things that can be uncomfortable conversations,” Alvarez says. He credits FX and executive producer Paul Simms for always putting comedy first. “It’s just something about the tone of the show that we found early on in the writers’ room that I think has given us ability to talk about these things. And I’m glad we did. We’re just trying to look at life in a real way and really look at the way things are happening and look at the way even people really interact with each other.”
A school was the ideal setting for such interactions and varied perspectives, as was Austin, a liberal city in a conservative state. Alvarez himself attended high school in Sewanee, a “very liberal little pocket” in Tennessee. “A school is this place where people from every different part of life are forced to interact toward a goal, a common goal of educating these students and especially a public school. You’re going to get every perspective in that space and I knew there would be a lot of comedy in that,” he says. “That just felt familiar to me. And I had such intellectual English teachers growing up, especially at that high school, St. Andrews-Sewanee.”
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The 37-year-old, who recurred on the “Will & Grace” revival and co-starred in “M3GAN,” views “English Teacher” as the “natural progression” of his career. He’s still making stuff with his friends, but it’s on TV now, not just for the internet.
“Before I was even making stuff on YouTube, I was making movies with my parents’ handycam at 12 years old,” Alvarez shares. “I’ve had that bug for so long, and so it does feel so natural to me to be on, finally, a real professional set, showrunning, directing, writing some of these scripts, working with all these amazing writers, working with Jonathan Krisel, an amazing director, working with [Kathryn] Dean, our amazing line producer who also directed a really great episode this season. It feels comfortable and natural, and that’s also to the credit of these great guides I have. I mean, when I don’t know how some part of this process goes, I can ask Paul Simms like, ‘What do we do here?’ Or I can ask Jonathan Krisel, like, ‘How does this lighting set up work?'”
Alvarez directed three episodes in Season 1, including the fifth one, “Field Trip,” which introduces — with all due respect to every actor on the show — the MVP of season, Andrene Ward-Hammond. The actress plays Sharon, an overprotective mom on the hunt to stop students from playing Stone Face, a sex game she claims is the latest phenomenon, except no one else has ever heard of it. Her first scene on the bus went viral, thanks to the dead serious intensity with which Ward-Hammond plays Sharon — something that made her stand out among dozens of audition tapes.
“Andrene is transcendent in that role. We were looking at auditions for that part and a lot of them were very funny, but they were all being funny. They were all doing a comedic performance and then I got to her, and her performance was pure drama. It was like she was literally in a movie that was gonna win an Oscar and the most serious thing in the world was happening,” Alvarez recalls. “It just really jumped out at me and I FaceTimed all the writers that night and said, ‘Watch this audition tape. We have to cast this woman.’ And we just [did] — no callback or anything.”
Ward-Hammond appears in two episodes in Season 1, and hopefully there’s more of Sharon to come if and when “English Teacher” is renewed.
“I would be excited to make as much of this show as I possible. I’ve loved not only making the show in Season 1, but the audience reaction has been more than I could ever hope for,” Alvarez says. “People really got what we were doing [and] there’s always a chance that you’ll miss that mark, and we didn’t miss that mark. It means the world to me because we worked so hard on it. … It’s so fun, but it’s such work and I’m just so grateful that it worked because I really love the show.”
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