As it wraps up its first season, FX’s new comedy English Teacher follows a gay English teacher, Evan Marquez (Brian Jordan Alvarez), as he, along with his colleagues, works to manage the demands and actions of both students and parents alike.
Before the show came out, many thought that it would simply be a ripoff of the popular show Abbott Elementary. This certainly hasn’t been the case, as the only major similarity that the two shows have is a school setting. Abbott is set in an inner city elementary school in Philadelphia while English Teacher takes place in a suburban Austin high school. The plots within the shows have so far been very different, and a large part of that is because English Teacher is set in a high school.
The first episode kicks off with Evan being under investigation for kissing his boyfriend in front of the students. While motifs of homophobia, entitlement, and the struggles that come with being a teacher are present in the pilot as well as the rest of the season, the show balances that with humor while still addressing some very real issues.
As someone currently in high school, a lot of the interactions between Evan and his students, and the students themselves, are painfully realistic. The high schoolers sound like actual high schoolers, which is something that a lot of shows have difficulty accomplishing. They say idiotic things and get into petty drama, but they also show a lot of kindness and care for other people.
Two students in the book club Evan is leading end up arguing, with one of them saying, “You’re bullying me because I told you not to talk to me,” after the other says that “Hispanic means Mexican” with full confidence. At that same book club, Evan swears after having told a student not to swear, and the entire club immediately starts oohing and telling him, “no cursing at school.” After this conversation, a student stops on his way out and tells Evan that “[they’re] on [his] side, OK? F— those people who don’t like little gay kisses.” He and the rest of the book club, who are the students that we spend the most time with, are showing their support for Evan in their own ways. They care about him keeping his job, and they care about the rights of queer people.
The show is witty and funny, and makes fun of a lot of different trends, behaviors, and people that you see in schools. For example, one of the first conversations of the show is about the kids “cycling back around” to being less woke, with one of the teachers saying that her student started crying when she wouldn’t teach both sides of the Spanish Inquisition.
The dialogue in the show is one of the highlights for me. The characters interrupt each other and trail off in the middle of their sentences, just like people do in real life. They also talk over each other, and their lines tend to overlap while still being understandable. All of this makes the show feel more realistic and less canned.
Evan being gay is a central part of the show and of his character. He has romantic plotlines throughout the first season, both with his ex-boyfriend and a new physics teacher at his school, but he also has plotlines where being gay doesn’t matter at all. However, the show doesn’t try to play down Evan’s gayness, or only mention it occasionally. Evan and his friends make jokes about him being gay, and it’s mentioned all the time by his students and by him. He’s comfortable with who he is, and we see him use that part of his identity to help support his students.
This is a certain type of queer representation that we don’t often see in TV shows. A lot of queer media centers around coming out stories, or characters being quietly queer. Stories like that are incredibly important, but so are stories that show queer people being confident in who they are, referencing it in conversation and in jokes with friends. Making jokes about being gay is something that a lot of queer people do in their daily lives, and it’s rarely shown in media the way that it is here.
Evan’s genuine care for his students is another thing that makes the show and his character so endearing. His students are often frustrating or ridiculous, like teenagers tend to be, but he’s a teacher in the Austin suburbs because he wants to make a difference. Evan wants to show the kids that being gay is something that is more than okay even if their parents are against it.
All of the teachers in this show, although they might not always be great teachers (for the sake of comedy), love the kids they teach and what they do. They’re teachers even though it’s hard and they have to deal with entitled parents and kids, because it’s important to them and they like to see their students thrive.
The season finale of English Teacher provides a sweet ending to the season, where most of the big plot points are wrapped up. There are a few loose ends, but there’s also a lot of resolution. There’s no big cliffhanger to draw viewers back in, and the show relies on people’s attachment to the characters and the humor to keep people coming back.
My biggest issue throughout the show is the lack of overarching plotlines. There’s only a few plotlines that feature in more than one episode, and a lot of the main plots of each episode are simply one-offs. I tend to enjoy plots that span more than a few episodes, simply because it gives them more time to be fleshed out. Because English Teacher is a comedy on its first season, having the majority of storylines be isolated isn’t as annoying to me as it would be in a different show because its focus is on making you laugh, not making you think.
English Teacher is a well-written sitcom that strives to balance humor and commentary on high school and society in general. It is not a family-friendly show, but the mix of crude and observational humor is entertaining. Queerness and jokes about it are omnipresent throughout the show, because it is a show about a gay man written by a gay man.