One of the year’s funniest TV shows boldly takes on issues most run away from. Luke Buckmaster says if you’re not watching English Teacher, you should be.
This sharp-witted and laugh-out-loud comedy series strides through a minefield of contemporary issues, whistling a merry tune, fraught politics and red button issues everywhere. Created by Brian Jordan Alvarez, who also stars in the titular role, the show’s set in a Texas high school, which is a magnet for all sorts of ideological brouhahas. The story takes on an extra dimension in that Alvarez’s character, Evan Marquez, is gay—but while his sexuality is central it doesn’t occupy the same focus it might’ve a decade ago. As other commentators have noted, Evan in comedic and dramatic terms is the straight guy, trying to make sense of cascading imbroglios.
The show’s overarching perspective is less “the world is crazy” than “things are complicated.” Early in the first episode Evan chats with fellow teacher and bestie Gwen (Stephanie Koenig) about how the kids are “not into being woke anymore” and how “it circled all the way around.” What exactly it is remains undefined, but you get what he’s saying. Lines like these suggest the writers are rushing in where angels fear to tread, positioning English Teacher at the center of all sorts of cultural storms while attempting something that’d intimidate most of us: trying to make sense of the ever-changing attitudes of youth. But it knows exactly what it’s doing and how to extract comedic mileage from the tumbledown town of modern existence.
There’s also the attitudes of the adults, and the unrelenting storm of politics surrounding them. At the cafeteria table the football coach, Markie Hillridge (Sean Patton), bleats to Evan and Gwen about how TikTok is run by “communist China” and says he doesn’t use banks because “taxation is theft.” It’s not explicitly said, but he’s surely the group’s potential MAGA supporter: a knockabout bloke for whom words like “progress” ring major alarm bells. Far from demonizing Markie, the writers give him a good heart, suggesting friendships or at least collegiality can be maintained despite major ideological differences and despite—sorry Markie—a sometimes extremely knuckleheaded view of the world.
Plus, the guy gets some good lines, for instance insisting to Evan in the first episode that “life is a football game, and you keep showing up in a goddamn tutu.” This moment arrives after Evan is delighted to discover that Markie successfully got the mother of a former student to drop a complaint she made against him, relating to Evan kissing his boyfriend in front of the class. But his delight doesn’t last for long: Evan learns that Markie achieved this by threatening to out her gay son, which outrages him, believing the ends don’t justify the means.
This is clever writing, approaching a thorny issue from conflicting character-based perspectives and imbuing the scenario with an air of absurdity. If we accept Evan’s reading, as most of us would, the right thing has been achieved in the wrong way; his personal crisis has cleared but the world remains as muddy as ever.
A similar framing is applied in the second episode, when a long-running school tradition—involving football players performing in drag—is under threat. Members of the school’s gay alliance argue this kind of inauthentic drag demeans people “who are actually nonbinary or trans.”
Evan comes up with a clever plan. Ascertaining that the alliance would be OK with the event if it were staged in a genuine drag style, he recruits an old drag queen friend (Trixie Mattel) to teach the jocks how to do it right. Principal Moretti (a hilarious Enrico Colantoni) is livid that he enlisted a person to instruct the kids without the school’s permission or via proper screening processes, screeching “she could be a lunatic, she could be a criminal!” Evan fires back: “because she happens to be a drag queen, she’s a lunatic and a criminal? Are you hearing yourself?”
Then it’s revealed the drag queen is, indeed, a criminal, who’s been stealing school equipment by the trunkload. Moretti informs Evan that he’s “basically conjured a conservative talking point out of thin air.” The football team puts on a good show and the episode ends in an upbeat way. But again, the world remains muddy as hell, the outcome positive but the process volcanically fraught.
From a screenwriting perspective, this is a neat trick, every happy conclusion tempered by a maelstrom of factors whirling around. All’s well that ends well? Not really.
