Last year, writer and actor Brian Jordan Alvarez went from cult comedian to social media sensation. Alvarez made some waves back in 2016 with The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo, a six-episode online sitcom that gave us one of the best 90-second bits of the decade. Since then, Alvarez has been known for his work on Instagram and TikTok, where he employs a variety of goofy voices and custom video filters to embody a cast of outlandish but endearing characters. His most popular persona, the pop star/wholesome family man TJ Mack, had a bona fide hit last summer with “Sitting,” which earned him a feature in Rolling Stone. It likely played a role in FX finally ordering his comedy English Teacher—the pilot of which was greenlit back in 2022—to series. Like the work that drew his online fanbase, Alvarez’s English Teacher is as cute as it is cutting, highlighting the humanity in our hyperbolic world.
Alvarez stars as Evan Marquez, a high school teacher of strong stated principles but shaky character. Like any gay American, Evan is going to be caught in the crossfire of the culture war whether he wants to or not, and as public school faculty, he’s perpetually on the front lines. Even in Austin, an oasis of liberalism in otherwise conservative Texas, he’s often forced to be the spokesperson or ambassador for queerness and progressivism, and he’s not very good at it. From a distance, he seems like the One Sane Man amongst the rest of the lazy, cowardly, or out of touch faculty, but in actuality he’s just a more garden-variety basket case, someone with quieter, more relatable problems and flaws. He’s not as good a teacher or a friend as he thinks he is, and though he talks a good game when it comes to ethics, he’d ultimately rather be right than do what’s right.
This makes him a solid core around which the rest of the colorful cast to orbit. The ensemble is a twist on a Breakfast Club-style clique of high schooler archetypes, formed out of teachers rather than students. Evan is an overachieving do-gooder who rarely does good, Gwen (Stephanie Koenig, another Caleb Gallo alum who also one of the show’s writers) is a “cool girl” who is actually deeply insecure, guidance counselor Rick (Carmen Christopher) is a stoner who alternates wildly between super hyped and serenely calm, and football coach Markie (Sean Patton) is a macho jock who demonstrates surprising flashes of social and emotional intelligence.
Markie is, so far, Evan’s most entertaining foil, a self-described “undecided voter”—which is understood to mean “conservative”—who represents 20th century masculine Americana. Markie falls into a similar category as Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec, a cozy conservative straw man who can say outrageous or offensive things but is ultimately a compassionate, reasonable guy. As much as this can seem like a contradiction in terms in the eyes of the extremely online, there are more Markies out there than there are irredeemably hateful Newsmax zombies. Markie can very easily be sorted into a particular box, but beneath the surface, he’s no more easily categorized than Evan.
English Teacher’s surprisingly gentle critique of American conservatism is accompanied by a proportionally silly depiction of modern youth culture. Even Evan, a well-meaning gay millennial, struggles to keep up with zoomers’ constantly updating terminology and sensitivity standards, and some of his students approach every interaction with him from a position of moral superiority. They’re the butt of the joke as often as Markie, but are likewise more complex than they seem. As more of the kids develop their own distinct personalities and comedic utility, English Teacher paints a picture of a generation of teenagers coping as best they can with a much weirder world than the one in which Evan and his colleagues grew up, and are less rigid and more forgiving than they present themselves on social media. While this could be written off as wishy-washy, Hollywood liberal bothsidesism, it feels more like a genuine effort to humanize the breadth of the American public.
The series is capable of balancing all of these ideas thanks to its ambitious joke density and its elastic sense of reality. Like any comedy in its infancy, English Teacher is still feeling out exactly how weird its world is going to be, proportional to its characters. The first two episodes—written by Alvarez and Stephanie Koenig, respectively—are confident, with a clear and consistent understanding of the voice of the show. (The voice is, after all, theirs.) Some of the upcoming episodes provided to critics (namely “Field Trip,” due out 9/23) are less snappy and distinctively quirky. These are the normal growing pains of a TV comedy, and it’ll be interesting to see how the rules and tone of English Teacher evolve if/when the show runs for a few years.
In the meantime, English Teacher has the key ingredient that any sitcom needs to hold an audience: fun characters viewers can look forward to spending time with. A sprawling network of local weirdos is beginning to take shape, from spineless Principal Moretti (Enrico Colantoni) to paranoid PTA mom Sharon (Andrene Ward-Hammond) to eerily quiet 11th grader Jeff (Ben Bondurant). Wherever the show’s tone ultimately lands, what will carry it through is this mosaic of a time and place where acting “normal” is essentially impossible, but being a human being is easier than it appears.
The first two episodes of ‘English Teacher’ are streaming now.
