ENGLISH TEACHER
Created by Brian Jordan Alvarez
FX on Hulu
WHO was your favorite English teacher, the one who instilled in you a love of literature? Mine was Mrs. Maroney who, in front of 25 high school boys, extolled the Wife of Bath (from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) as a feminist icon and spoke of Tom Buchanan (The Great Gatsby) with such disdain that I thought he must be a bad neighbor or her ex-husband. When I wrote fervently about the novelist E. M. Forster, she read between the lines, understood why I dwelled on his gay themes, and graded the research paper with a nonjudgmental openness that was brave in a Catholic school in the 1990s. Mrs. Maroney was the catalyst for me to go on to major in English, earn a doctorate, and become an English professor myself.
A new TV series titled English Teacher, created by and starring Brian Jordan Alvarez, centers on the tumultuous teaching career of the loud and proud Evan Marquez, who vainly tries to inspire his students while standing beneath a sign that reads “English is Infinite.”
While that may or may not be true, all jobs are finite, and the openly gay Evan finds himself constantly in the crosshairs of petty coworkers and unserious students at Morrison-Hensley High. The school, located in Austin, Texas, is not so much a locus of learning as a cauldron of infighting and parental complaints, which, in Evan’s case, home in on his curriculum—and the fact that he once kissed his ex-boyfriend Malcolm in front of a dance class.
In the campily funny pilot (written by Alvarez), Evan and his colleague Gwen (played by Stephanie Koenig) navigate the cafeteria food line, where they kvetch about their students’ political hypersensitivity. Their bitch sesh begins with Gwen’s complaint that, in a time that they agree is now “post-woke,” she had to teach both sides of the Spanish Inquisition, causing one of her students to cry. Equally aghast, Evan replies: “And I have students showing me A.I. porn of Oscar Wilde having sex with women. He was gay!” Incidentally, Koenig looks and sounds like Tina Fey, the comedian and 30 Rock creator who drew the blueprint for this sort of series: weirdos in the workplace, elevating the eyeroll to an art form. Koenig takes the writing reins in the second episode, titled “Powderpuff,” in which Evan, refusing to kowtow to public pressure, recruits a drag queen friend named Shazam to teach the football team to “werk” while dressed as cheerleaders. He gets so excited that he attempts a split but ends up injuring himself on the field.
Born in New York City but raised in Tennessee, the 37-year-old Alvarez has a richly queer career that predates the mainstream success of English Teacher. Drawing on his Colombian ancestry—his mother was a teacher, not of English but of Spanish—he played Jack’s fiancé Estefan Gloria on the 2010s reboot of Will & Grace and the title role on The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo (a web series). But his funniest performance was that of TJ Mack (a riff on the department store), which originated from the actor’s posts on TikTok and Instagram, where he’s not above posting a shirtless selfie. Using a facial filter, he improvised the line, “Sitting is the opposite of standing”—sing it seven times to yourself—and the musicality of that obvious observation took the Internet by storm in 2023. Versions were produced in styles ranging from techno to country to Gregorian chant. Asked about the virality of “Sitting,” a grateful but incredulous Alvarez said: “People are often sort of questioning whether the Internet connects or disconnects us more and, in these moments, at least, it feels like the Internet is connecting us.”
In his role as teacher, Evan doesn’t take the bigotry lying (or sitting) down. Instead, to the steady flow of upbeat songs from the ’80s, he sprints to work, where his overworked principal, Mr. Moretti (a fantastically deadpan Enrico Colantoni), urges him to just apologize for the kiss and move on. Evan protests: “This is what homophobia is like. It’s insidious.” Moretti parries: “I don’t care what it is! I’m agoraphobic!” Later, on a camping field trip, he fends off a mother panicked that her son might participate in a sex game called “Just the Tip.” Tokenized as the resident gay guy, Evan is forced to explain the term “nonbinary” to a bunch of bored screen-agers who wield their smartphones like pocket panopticons. So it seems only fitting that he assigns them Orwell’s 1984 to read. Big Brother is watching you! Despite the administration’s admonitions, the principled Evan goes on to flirt with a new physics teacher named Harry after glimpsing the well-endowed Harry in the shower room at the local gym. Will they get physical? Only a second season can provide an answer.
English Teacher doesn’t shy away from addressing the impact of America’s current culture wars on public education. Topics include trigger warnings, guns, pronouns, and ChatGPT plagiarism. You don’t have to be an English major or even an LGBT person to get the joke, because comedies like English Teacher transcend such categories. Good comedy gets at the cringey core of life itself.
Colin Carman, an assistant professor of English at Colorado Mesa University, is the author of The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys.
