Gareth Roberts
In the history of TV, there are a small number of shows that have livened things up and moved things along – series that jolted everything on to a different track. With English Teacher, an FX production currently available to stream in the UK on Disney+, it’s possible we might, at long last, have another one.
It’s a modest little comedy show in itself – eight episodes so far – which tells the story of Evan Marquez, teacher of English at Morrison-Hensley school in Austin, Texas. In a world of extremely high concept formats, that simplicity is refreshing in itself. You will not have to expend hours of mental energy keeping track of arcane lore and hundreds of characters. It’s just about an English teacher – bish bosh.
What makes English Teacher special and new is that it not only takes place in the modern world but engages with it truthfully. The school and its staff and students are, inevitably, stewed in “woke”, but this is addressed here openly, realistically and with every opportunity taken to mine a rich comic seam that most other comedies (particularly the ones with a school setting, ironically) have shied away from.
So, Evan has to deal with a student who self-diagnoses with an invented disease (“Asymptomatic Tourette’s”); he is forced to take over the running of the traditional end-of-season football game where the boys dress as female cheerleaders but keep it acceptable to the gimlet eye of the school’s LGBTQIA2S+ Society, all two of them; he is trapped into defining “non-binary” to a class full of students just waiting for him to slip up and spread him all over TikTok. Evan’s gayness and Latin heritage are of very little use to him on this front – because he “talks like a white man” and “white gay guys don’t count any more”.
This is all done matter-of-factly, not in either a tedious “look how unwoke we are!” way, which would be aesthetically hideous, or in a more sophisticated “deliciously politically incorrect” way. English Teacher is far too intelligent for either of those. This is just how the world is now, and how it works. “Who runs this school, us or them?” Evan cries despairingly at one particularly fraught moment. “They do,” the principal replies, as if it’s obvious.
There is something of the naughtiness and swagger of the early seasons of Teachers here, but thankfully English Teacher has none of the daytimey clumsiness of Waterloo Road or the increasingly juvenile antics of Bad Education. Its closest cousin would be Abbot Elementary, but despite taking place in a far less gritty environment it is much more grounded in tone.
Although this is all taking place in the Deep South, such is the cultural dominance of America that all this jiggery-wokery is instantly familiar to the British viewer. I’ve heard from a teacher friend that the show has already become a word-of-mouth smash with her colleagues, where tiptoeing about clashing intersectional interactions is a daily hazard: “This is officially my favourite new comedy in I don’t know how many years,” she says. “It gets the little battles you have to fight every day exactly right – the negotiating about every tiny thing.” We are all Americans now, for better or worse.
Nothing about this system works. Pupils and parents game it on all sides. Everyone’s too polite and agreeable and scared for their job to say (openly, anyway), “But this is nuts.” Yes, English Teacher is about a mad broken world, but it isn’t angry about it. This is TV that’s your friend. There are a couple of moments where you fear it might go syrupy – but thankfully they are immediately, and amusingly, undercut.
It is not cynical or sassy or glib. This is a show that is so agreeable that it can cheerfully get away with corny “Gilligan” cuts – Evan protests he absolutely refuses to do a thing, cut to him doing it – and they are funny.
Evan is played by Brian Jordan Alvarez, who also created the show and has written many of the episodes. Evan is clumsy, disorganised, somewhat aimless. And he is ordinary, which in today’s TV landscape makes him stand out. His one quirk is that he can’t keep his mouth shut, personally or professionally, particularly when it would be wise to. Alvarez is a casually brilliant actor, with the skill and the likability to underplay an everyman and get away with it. There’s nothing spectacular about the character, but Alvarez is one of those rare actors who can make subtlety and sure-footedness seem spectacular. His depiction of horrible personal embarrassment is of a very different kind to, say, Larry David’s, and this is a very different, much frothier show in tone and execution from Curb Your Enthusiasm, but it’s of that standard.
#EnglishTeacherFX. Very funny. Moves fast—without feeling too pushy. Best executed overlapping dialogue I've heard in a while. Satirizes changes in our identity and victim-obsessed culture. But lands real jokes. I think you'll like it. pic.twitter.com/b3LJW52a7b
— Robert King (@RKing618) September 3, 2024
And it cracks along, with none of the bloat and dead weight of so many of its streaming peers. For once, eight episodes don’t feel like enough.
There is no weak link in the cast. Evan’s colleagues are more colourful than him, but equally believable and well-observed. Stephanie Koenig is his best friend Gwen Sanders – a committed feminist who is outraged when the students rank her 26th on their secret “hottest teacher” Discord list. Sean Patton excels as Markie Hillridge, the burly, boorish athletics coach who defies expectations by possessing an instinct for human understanding that enables him to solve many of Evan’s problems with the more woke students.
Enrico Colantoni is masterful as school Principal Grant Moretti, whose approach to everything is to run away and hide. The smaller roles of the students, whose scenes could have gone horribly wrong, are also immaculately cast. There are two incredible guest performances by Jenn Lyon as a gun-totin’ Southern mom and Andrene Ward-Hammond as a paranoid “safety” chaperone convinced that the kids are all playing weird sex games – Stone Face, Reverse Glory Hole – that she’s read about online.
There are many funny lines I could quote here, but they are nearly all meaningless taken out of their dramatic context. That is bad for a reviewer, but a very good sign of superior writing. On paper, for example, this exchange – “Did we choose a dying profession?” “No, I think a dying profession chose us” – sounds fair enough, a bit witty. Coming where and when it does, it made me hoot.
It is a horrible cliché, but this is the kind of humour that arises from character. English Teacher feels real – hyper-real as all comedies are, but with the absolutely essential ring of truth. Of actual lived experience, not a commodified block of tripe used to score political points. The characters are strange and contradictory, frequently say one thing and do another, nobody is consistent. Rather like life.
English Teacher is a blast of fresh air into a stuffy classroom. It is a modern depiction of the modern world, and entertaining because it is accurate and truthful, in a comedy world that is either compliant through fear or avoiding the truth. We are all desperate for a cultural corner to be turned –well, maybe it just has been.