‘English Teacher’ Is Happy to School You on the Art of Dry Comedy
The charming new FX comedy English Teacher opens with its hero — Austin, Texas high school educator Evan Marquez, played by the series’ creator, Brian Jordan Alvarez — preparing for another day of work. As the pulse of Michael Sembello’s synth-pop classic “Maniac” (from the Flashdance soundtrack) pounds, we see Evan dancing in his underwear, doing his morning workout, grading papers, and otherwise acting like he is the master of all he surveys, the hero of his own story.
And then Evan gets to school, where he has no power, gets no respect, and is besieged on all sides by the students, their parents, and even other members of the faculty. At best, he’s a supporting character in other people’s lives. For most of the kids he teaches, he’d barely qualify as a walk-on part.
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The press notes for the series suggest that Evan “often finds himself at the intersection of the personal, professional and political aspects of working at a high school.” It’s fair to say that he struggles in all those areas. A parent has filed a complaint about Evan kissing his then-boyfriend Malcolm (Jordan Firstman) when they worked together at the school — entirely, Evan believes with good reason, because the woman’s son recently came out to her. His principal, Grant, just wants to be left alone. (The great character actor Enrico Colantoni hilariously embraces Grant’s apathy.) Evan and his best friends, history teacher Gwen (Stephanie Koenig) and gym teacher Markie (Sean Patton), frequently seem baffled by the students(*), who always seem either more passionate or less passionate than the adults expect, and almost always smarter than them.
(*) Several of them are played by prominent TikTok and Instagram creators, including Aliyah Bah and Ben Bondurant.
There’s a danger with a show like this turning into old(er) people whining about These Kids Today. But rather than morphing into a lazy exercise in bashing Gen Z for being too woke, English Teacher almost always makes Evan himself the comedic target. Alvarez (who has his own prolific career making IG and TikTok content) clearly knows how to write for himself, and he plays Evan as a fool, but a sympathetic fool. He means well, but inevitably goes about everything in the worst possible way. He thinks he’s the sane man in an insane world, but he’s even more ridiculous than those around him.
The students sometimes do silly things — one episode involves a girl named Kayla (Romy Mars) insisting that she suffers from “asymptomatic Tourettes,” a condition that can only be self-diagnosed — but even then, there’s a legitimate explanation that simply eludes our overconfident hero. (In this case, it’s Markie the neanderthal who turns out to understand the dynamics among Kayla’s friend group.) And when someone’s just being an idiot, it’s in service of a good joke, like Jeff (Bondurant) insisting that he only sold Molly and wore a Maga hat to school “as a bit.”
The humor is on the dry side, as you might expect from a show whose primary director is Jonathan Krisel, who created one of the most appealingly dry comedies of all time, FX’s lovely Baskets. Events escalate in unexpected ways — Evan is assigned to supervise the annual Powderpuff football game, and recruits a local drag queen (played by Drag Race alum Trixie Mattel) to teach the jocks how to do drag in a respectful way, and they get very invested in the task — but the performances are always underplayed, because this is just the lunacy that all involved have come to expect from public school life.
It is a seemingly impossible life for Evan. Everyone objects to nearly everything he does, and the complaints seem incompatible with one another. When he turns to his students for advice on dealing with the mom’s complaint about the kiss, most of them are annoyed that he’s wasting their book club time on this, others suggest he play up his sexuality or ethnicity to seem the victim, and one argues, “Gay doesn’t count anymore, and you talk like a straight white guy!”
Like a lot of FX’s extremely specific brand of comedies, English Teacher may require a bit of time to click with you, but after a few episodes, I mostly stopped taking notes, except to repeatedly observe, “I like this show.” Which I do.
The first two episodes of English Teacher premiere September 2 on FX, and stream the next day on Hulu, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen all the first six of eight episodes.
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