About 10 minutes into the first episode of FX’s new show English Teacher, a childhood memory came rushing back …
I’m 8 years old, and we’re watching E.R. as a family. Something happens on the screen—a gurney comes rushing through as people in white lab coats yell—and amid all this drama, I hear my dad, who spent part of his medical residency in an emergency room, groan loudly, “No, you can’t do that!” While my dad knows this is all entertainment, they hit a nerve so close to his real-life experience that it was temporarily hard for him to suspend disbelief.
This is the distinct feeling I had around 10 minutes into the pilot of English Teacher.
The series features Brian Jordan Alvarez as Evan Marquez, a high school English teacher in Austin, Texas. Evan faces the same daily juggling act many of us do: trying to get kids to talk about “unreliable narrators” in a world shaded with fake news and polarized worldviews while managing hot-button topics with young people as they figure out their place in the world. Oh, and someone needs to plan homecoming.
While at first glance, the show’s premise is easy to compare to ABC’s Abbott Elementary, a show beloved by many teachers, English Teacher knows it is on a different network (FX shows tend to be more forthright with cursing and sexual imagery) and considers the teaching profession with a very different lens.
The pilot’s opening conflict centers on a kiss Evan shared with his then-boyfriend and then-fellow teacher Malcolm. A parent complains about the kiss—described at one point as a “peck”—and Evan calls out the seemingly blatant homophobia at play.
Then, in a flashback of the kiss, we learn that it was much more than a peck. It actually included Malcolm grabbing Evan’s backside … in front of a room full of students. It’s an action that, when done in front of kids, I’d argue is incredibly inappropriate, regardless of gender or orientation.
And this is where, like my father, I wanted to yell at the screen, “Oh, Evan, you can’t do that!”
I sat with this moment, trying to figure out why I had struggled. It is fiction, after all. Then, I realized that I had come to the show with unmatched expectations. As most of my adult life has been as a real-life English teacher, I, perhaps unfairly, wanted the “English teacher” on TV to be one we could categorically root for. I wanted a character who showed the most noble side of our struggles.
English Teacher, though, understands that noble portrayals of educators may not be entertaining. Instead, it uses the premise to explore nuanced questions about navigating adulthood in a space inundated with adolescent growing pains. In doing so, the show repeatedly goes in a direction you don’t expect. English Teacher navigates romantic strife, existential dread about the importance of our work, LGBTQ+ issues, and even the occasional slapstick moment (Evan’s open-palm football smack as he hurries across the field made me audibly laugh) in unexpected and, often, very funny ways. The show, in its first three episodes, is less concerned about how teachers shape young minds and more about how bringing together people with this diversity of experiences, values, and age plays out in interesting, often awkward, occasionally tense, and sometimes revelatory ways.
The show raises an interesting question: What, if any, obligation does a piece have to the subjects it portrays?
Several teachers I spoke with found the show very funny, though there are those who feel that, in reaching for a punchline, the show is a caricature of their daily struggles that doesn’t quite grasp the deep sense of care, heartbreak, and joy found in our profession. In a world where educators already feel devalued, does English Teacher’s flawed main teacher make it even harder to root for teachers overall?
Yet, English Teacher also raises an important point about how we portray teachers in the media overall: They are often either noble, earnest, and endlessly giving, or they are problematic has-beens who abuse their power. English Teacher considers what it means to show a wider range of a teacher’s humanity, as the protagonist refuses both extreme portrayals; instead, Evan is a guy struggling with all the nuanced and complex situations adults face, like being attracted to your coworker or forging occasionally uncomfortable friendships with people you sometimes see more than your own family. He just has to deal with those issues while also trying to get kids to care about Love in the Time of Cholera—no matter how triggering—and help the football players prepare for the Powderpuff Game.
If you watch this show hoping for a teacher-hero you can stand behind categorically, that is not Evan. Evan believes himself to be deeply principled, but he is not a faultless teacher. As an educator, he makes bad choices (please background-check your friends before inviting them into your school). He also, though, clearly cares deeply about his students, from his book club to his honest desire to support them. Evan is not always noble, and he is definitely not perfect, but I’m still rooting for him, and I’m rooting for English Teacher as well.
