How English Teacher Made It to FX Without Losing Its Voice
The post How English Teacher Made It to FX Without Losing Its Voice appeared first on Consequence.
The origin story of FX and Hulu’s English Teacher begins with someone in bed. Before you worry (or hope?) that this is going to take an erotic turn, know that what was happening was perhaps one of the least-sexy things someone can do in bed: Scrolling through social media.
“It was absolute happenstance,” executive producer Paul Simms tells Consequence, about the process of discovering English Teacher creator Brian Jordan Alvarez. “I was lying in bed reading Twitter, because I’d read the rest of the internet already, and someone said, ‘Oh, [this web series] is really funny.’ I’d never heard of it, but I clicked on [The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo] and 30 seconds in I was like, ‘Ah, this is fun.’ And then I just kept watching.”
This was three years ago, at which point Simms was not only an established television creator, thanks to the classic NewsRadio — he had also become a master of bringing shows like Atlanta and What We Do in the Shadows to FX, with the creators’ original voices intact. In Alvarez, Simms says, he realized that “I would watch him in a show, which is always the only thing I can really go on. And so then I told someone I wanted to meet with him, and then we had a Zoom and I said, ‘You should have a real TV show.’ And he said, ‘Well, I sort of have this idea about a guy who is an English teacher.’ I’m like, ‘Great, let’s do that.’ So it was luck.”
At the time Simms reached out, Alvarez had shifted from making web series like the acclaimed Caleb Gallo to acting in the projects of others, appearing in 13 episodes of the Will & Grave revival as well as 2022’s M3GAN. However, Alvarez says that the idea of a show set in high school intrigued him because “people from every part of life are forced to not only interact, but actually work together toward a common goal of educating these kids. And the character of Evan, he’s really getting it from all sides, and he’s trying to figure out what is right.”
As the titular teacher of English, Evan faces pushback from students, parents, other teachers, and the school board. He’s not alone in the trenches, though: Helping him survive the chaos is Evan’s best friend and fellow educator Gwen, played by Stephanie Koenig. Koenig first met Alvarez on a student film shoot years ago, and she says that “it was very meant to be. When you meet your best friend, you’re like, ‘Thank God.’ Somebody who hits your soul and really sees you. That happened when I met Brian. And we made each other laugh — that’s so important. Like, laughing is number one for me.”
Koenig appeared in Alvarez’s Caleb Gallo, and the pair remained friends through the struggles faced by actors trying to get a foothold in the industry. Alvarez was one of the first people to read Koenig’s writing, she says, and “he was like, ‘You are a good writer.’ It’s just so nice to hear that, especially when you’re testing for things and not getting it and struggling and nobody really knows you yet. It felt like it was the first time I could take control, like take things in my hands.”
In addition to acting in the series, Koenig is also a staff writer — and was technically a writer before being cast. Before the shooting of the pilot, she was part of a mini-writers’ room working on scripts, but the team wasn’t totally sure she’d be able to appear in the show at all, because Koenig was already set to appear in the Apple TV+ limited series Lessons in Chemistry, which was shooting around the same time.
“Big props to the line producers for actually caring and working on the schedule, because that can be such a headache for them,” she says. “I’m sure that they probably did not wanna go through that, but they did mainly because [Jonathan] Krisel and Paul and Brian really pushed for me.”
Jonathan Krisel, a seasoned TV comedy director whose credits include Portlandia and Baskets, directed half of the eight-episode season, with Alvarez directing the other half. Together, they instituted an energy that allowed the cast to really have fun with the material, with overlapping dialogue and improv encouraged on set.
“I’ve laughed harder on the English Teacher set than I’ve ever laughed in my life,” Alvarez says. “We just let people play. We try some that are really on script. We try some where people aren’t overlapping much, and then we’ll make them overlap in the edit. We know what we want, we can feel it, and we just use a variety of methods to get there, so we know we’re going to have fun in the editing room.”
The amount of improv wasn’t something that Enrico Colantoni expected, he tells Consequence, and it was hard at times for him “because the writing, for me, is already so good. I come from a tradition of, ‘These are my lines. This is the scene, let’s make the scene work.’ And they were like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s great. Now let’s blow it up and do something else.'”
However, as the beleaguered school principal for whom every day is the worst day of his life, Colantoni leaned into that uncertainty. “It’s like, maybe this is where the character lives. That’s where I found him.”
English Teacher (FX)
This is Colantoni’s first time as a series regular on a comedy since the NBC sitcom Just Shoot Me, which ran from 1997–2003. Since then, he’s gotten a lot of dramatic work, playing one of TV’s best dads on Veronica Mars as well as appearing in shows including Flashpoint, Person of Interest, and Westworld — but he missed the comedy world. “With drama, you can stay reserved,” he says. “But with a comedy, you’re required to bring an open heart and a willingness to play and react. It requires a willingness to be silly and embarrass yourself and take a chance. But that’s where the fun is. That’s where you pinch yourself and say, ‘I get to do this.'”
Colantoni adds that he’s recently rewatched some episodes of Just Shoot Me, which as a ’90s-era sitcom definitely featured some material that might not be palatable to a 2024-era audience. “I go, ‘Could we do that show now?’ I don’t know,” he says. However, he feels that English Teacher “captures the pendulum swing of how people are just constantly changing… Well, they’re not changing their minds, but the world is changing.”
Setting the series in a school, Alvarez acknowledges, gave him and the other writers a real opportunity to explore those kinds of changes from a unique angle — something he realized “immediately. When I was writing it, it really flowed, and it felt natural for all these things to interplay.”
Simms says tackling issues like guns in schools and the right-wing outrage over drag culture “was part of the conversation from the beginning. It was one of the first things Brian and I talked about. But we were so focused on not being preachy and not being political and not feeling like homework and having it be funny.”
“I didn’t really realize how easy of a platform it was until we were in the writers’ room,” Koenig adds. “You have the student generation, and there’s so much to play in there. You have the faculty and their opinions and their ideals and their politics. And then you have the parents and their politics. So there’s so much story in that.”
Plus, she notes, “there’s a familiarity with high school — everyone’s been there, so it felt easy to talk about hot button topics. And what everybody’s fighting about is making the world better for the next generation.”
English Teacher (FX)
And while making television is a collaborative experience, Alvarez feels happy about the way the show has a clear voice, while capturing all these different points of view. “I feel like I got to make the show I wanted to make, and that’s to FX’s credit,” he says. “And to Paul Simms’ credit, and to Jonathan Krisel’s credit, I had amazing guides that really did want to make the real version of this show. And, we got to do it.”
Simms says that right from the beginning, Alvarez told him that “I don’t want to make a little boutique show that’s just for a little subset of people. I want this to be a show that everyone would like.” And Simms was on board for that, because Alvarez “has a distinctive voice that, if it appeals to me, I have to have faith that it’ll appeal to the rest of America.”
Adds Alvarez, “I’m ready to make as much of this show as they ask me to make. I can’t wait for more. We’ve got a lot more stories to tell.”
New episodes of English Teacher premiere Mondays on FX, and are streaming the next day on Hulu.
How English Teacher Made It to FX Without Losing Its Voice
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