The new FX show “English Teacher” follows a gay Latino teacher in a Texas suburb who has to navigate a changing social landscape. In a country where schools are a cultural flashpoint — with bathroom bills, “Don’t Say Gay” laws and anti-LGBTQ+ book bans — the show arrives at the perfect moment.
Despite addressing these heady issues, “English Teacher” doesn’t inspire dread. It’s not even woke. In fact, it pokes fun at wokeness. Brian Jordan Alvarez writes, directs and stars in this irreverent comedy series, and while his character Evan Marquez might be oblivious, Alverez is clearly in on the joke.
The series opens with a relevant premise: a homophobic parent tries to get Evan fired for kissing his boyfriend at school in front of her son and believes that Evan made her son gay. The pilot follows Evan as he tries to make an appeal to the school board to save his job. If the series only followed this plot line, it would be an interesting show, yet Alvarez makes an even bolder choice to challenge the viewers’ expectations. At the end of the pilot, the charge is dropped, and Evan is confronted with a different problem: he wants to sleep with his new coworker.
One standout episode, “Powderpuff”, brings Gen Z gender politics to the forefront, when the “LGBTQIA2S+” club complains about the “boomer tradition” of the football team cross-dressing at the annual powderpuff game. After being confronted by the football guys who want the tradition to continue, Evan attempts to resolve the issue by bringing drag queen Shazam (Trixie Mattel) to teach the football team how to do “real” drag — which the LGBTQ+ students say will not offend them. It’s a textbook Evan Marquez shenanigan: well-meaning, bizarre and only partially successful. Shazam ultimately gets caught stealing all the printers — and ferret food — from the school, yet the football team performs the routine anyway. Evan is triumphant but so caught up in all the drama, he neglects his actual students. After Evan gives a moralistic monologue about the situation to the class, a student raises her hand and responds: “This is literally book club. Like why are we talking about this?”
The focus of the show is primarily on the teachers, who are often too self-absorbed to the point that you wonder who is even teaching the kids anyway. Evan may appear as a moral crusader, but ultimately he is self-interested. In the episode “Field Trip,” he is offended that he wasn’t invited to a faculty hang out, just to admit that he actually wouldn’t have gone because he doesn’t like helping people. He just wanted to be invited.
The show clearly reflects Alvarez’s sensibilities, with each episode opening with Evan jamming out to 1980s pop anthems like Michael Sembello’s “She’s a Maniac” and a neon pink title card. The students are Gen Z, but the school could be the set of a John Cusack movie — the imagery of the ‘80s creates a stark contrast with the tone of the show, as the period was defined by the AIDS epidemic and homophobic hysteria. In 1978, Proposition 6 tried to ban gay people from teaching in the state of California. This history, a clear precursor to today’s troubling anti-gay legislation, is somber, which makes “English Teacher” such a welcomed intervention as it acknowledges this reality without caving to it.
Rather than requiring perfection from the LGBTQ+ community in the name of positive representation, “English Teacher” lets gay people be bad. Evan is well-intentioned, but he’s a bad teacher: he pursues his coworker, brings a kleptomaniac drag queen to school and laughs off a gay student asking for his advice. These might all sound like conservative talking points, but that seems to be Alvarez’s point. In trying to refute homophobes, we have been forced to take ourselves too seriously. “English Teacher” is intent on ensuring that in the face of prejudice, queer people maintain a key privilege: the privilege to laugh at ourselves.
Contact Sawyer Gouw Ranzetta at [email protected].