The magic sauce of FX’s English Teacher is nostalgia. The show evokes high-school movies from another time: Its credits are scrawled in a neon-pink cursive that would be right at home against the backdrop of a John Hughes–movie establishing shot of a nondescript municipal building. Evan Marquez (played by Brian Jordan Alvarez) scrambles out of bed and zips off to his job while “Manic Monday” plays in the background, the 1983 synth sounds rubbing pleasantly against the ho-hum franticness of his coffee splashing around the cup holder of his beat-up car. If Abbott Elementary feels old school because it recalls the warm ’90s heyday of an all-ages prime-time comedy, English Teacher feels old school because its vision of high school runs 2025 through the philosophy of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The second season even features an “Oh Yeah” needle drop.
And like an ’80s high-school comedy, no one — teachers, students, administration, and parents — is bringing their best to this school. It’s not a tale of high achievement or saccharine self-discovery. No one’s a complete clown; no one’s a total villain; no one is the perfectly charming hero with an easy romantic arc. The cafeteria is full of trash, and the equipment is old. Everything’s just a little grubby. This is not a disaster or a triumph — this is just high school as a necessary, sometimes mortifying, and occasionally meaningful part of life. It’s refreshing.
The series, which released its second season in its entirety last month, was created by Alvarez with executive producers including Portlandia co-creator Jonathan Krisel and comedy producing legend Paul Simms. Its humor is largely about school Right Now. In season one, the good-natured, boneheaded gym teacher, Mr. Hillridge (Sean Patton), ropes Evan into giving a class presentation on nonbinary identity, something Evan is loath to do because he’s sure the kids already understand nonbinary identification perfectly well and they’re just trying to trap the teachers into saying something stupid. (This is exactly what’s happening.) In season two, the long-suffering principal, played by the ever-paternal, ever-excellent Enrico Colantoni, begs Evan not to stage a production of Angels in America because he doesn’t want to deal with the political blowback. This initially looks like a story about taking a bold stance, but when the students want to adapt Angels to be a bad play about COVID, the real punch line arrives: Evan doesn’t really care about the AIDS crisis. He just wants to do a play that he likes, and he can’t believe everyone wants to do this cheesy COVID thing instead.
English Teacher is not Stranger Things. Its nostalgia is not for the politics or aesthetics of a long-gone time and place. Why would you skewer the ’80s when it’s so fun to mock contemporary social-media phenomena and there’s so much material in AI trash cans and affirmative-action policies? What English Teacher is nostalgic for, instead, is an ’80s-era hard-knock-life, stop-being-so-sensitive approach to the world. It’s not the same as a cancel-culture screed (no one could call this show anti-woke), and it’s not being deliberately offensive or patting itself on the back for embracing hot-button issues of modern-day life. But it comes at its humor from the implicit confidence that everyone watching is on the same page.
In the show’s first season, for instance, drag superstar Trixie Mattel plays a less famous drag queen named Shazam whom Evan brings in to teach the football team about what is and is not appropriate when doing female impersonations for its powder-puff routine. She tells everybody about breastplates and tucking. Later, she’s thrown off school grounds for stealing office supplies and sports equipment. English Teacher is not afraid of culture warriors being furious about its depiction of drag in a school setting, and it’s not afraid of anger over depicting a drag queen as a low-stakes criminal. Shazam is a messy person, just like Evan and Principal Moretti and all the football players. No one here needs to be handled with kid gloves. Everyone can be a big boy. In season two, Evan’s best friend and fellow teacher, Gwen (Stephanie Koenig), and Principal Moretti spend a whole episode dealing with one student’s absurd testing accommodations. Gwen champions Chelsea for advocating for her needs, but Gwen’s obviously the patsy here, running to turn up the thermostat the second Chelsea asks. In the end, Evan gently informs Chelsea that she might as well cheat on the whole test; he’ll even give her the answers if that’s what she wants. “No!” she says. She wants to do it for real! All her ridiculous requests were just a power play, and the school was happy to roll over.
This sensibility is enticing. How nice to just joke about things and not have to be so sensitive. What a relief to relax into the grown-up assurance that everyone can dish it out and take it. Evan certainly can. He’s often the butt of the joke, and the joke is usually his own blinkered sensitivity. He gets his own assumptions about sexuality thrown back in his face by a character who announces he is “80-20 gay-bi.” He discovers that the military recruiter who comes to school is a real person with taste and a history and a life. He doesn’t want to consider that he might be an affirmative-action hire and that knowing that might make him feel pretty bad about himself. Every time, Evan’s ideas about the world are presented as delightfully underconsidered and ready to be punctured by reality.
The trouble with that attitude, unfortunately, is that it’s easy to forget that “We’re all on the same page — it’s fine!” can also be a cover. Taken entirely on its own terms, English Teacher looks like a throwback-y comedy with a pragmatic worldview, unafraid to portray its characters as people with flaws. In the context of the allegations against Alvarez, however, English Teacher also serves as a reminder that unless everyone affirmatively opts in, someone will always be left out of that “We’re all on the same page” equation. There’s a seductive quality to assuming that it’s cool to make jokes because everyone just gets it. It’s powerful, and it’s much harder to stand up to it than it is to just play along. Chelsea, with her ridiculous request for a rug brought from home, may very well be obnoxious. That doesn’t mean all accommodations are unnecessary or that some kids don’t sincerely benefit from a system that adapts to their needs.
Mostly, it’s a shame. English Teacher is a well-made show featuring strong comedic actors who haven’t yet gotten major breakout roles, and its second season proves the first was not a fluke. It has figured out how to grab the golden ring of being classic and current at the same time. But now the show will forever be associated with the allegations against its creator and lead actor, as it should be, and it’s too bad that everyone else working on it also has to reckon with the accounts of Alvarez’s behavior. At a moment of Hollywood contraction, when there are already too few exciting comedies on the TV calendar, there’s a real sadness in putting a giant bummer asterisk next to one of the few good ones.
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Brian Jordan Alvarez’s sitcom is nostalgic for an imaginary time when everyone could take a joke.
