English Teacher: Brian Jordan Alvarez's Quiet Workplace Argument

English Teacher premiered on FX on 2 September 2024, next-day streaming on Hulu, across eight episodes. Brian Jordan Alvarez created the show, stars in it as Evan Marquez, a gay English teacher at a fictional Austin high school, and wrote or co-wrote the majority of the season. FX renewed the show for a second season in December 2024, which will air in late 2025.

Seven months on, with the renewal secure and the full season available, English Teacher has clarified into the most unexpectedly substantial American workplace comedy to arrive on a major network in the last several years.

The form the show is working in

The American workplace comedy has a specific lineage. The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, Cheers, Newsradio, The Office, Parks and Recreation, Superstore, Abbott Elementary. The form’s specific affordance is that it puts a recurring ensemble in a recurring physical space that has specific professional demands, and it generates comedy by rubbing the ensemble’s personalities against the demands. The form has been in a specific rut across the last decade, with the post-Office single-camera documentary register calcifying into a default that most writers no longer examine.

English Teacher declines the documentary register. The show is shot single-camera but with a specific cinematic framing, long-ish holds, actual sound design, a willingness to let the camera stay on a face after the joke has landed. The effect is to pull the show slightly out of the workplace-comedy mainstream and toward the tonal register of contemporary indie film. The show is funnier for the gap.

The specific workplace

The high school is the show’s central structural asset, and the show is using it seriously. Alvarez has built an Austin high school that is specifically recognisable as a 2020s American educational institution: the administration is underfunded, the parents are oppositional, the students are cynical about the institution’s stated values, and the teachers are continuously calibrating between what they believe and what they can defend in the parking lot. The show’s comedy is generated by the specific micro-negotiations that this calibration requires.

Alvarez’s Evan Marquez is positioned in the specific middle of these negotiations. He is out. He is not closeted. He is also not, the show is careful to make clear, the character who is loudly asserting an identity at every opportunity. Evan is a working teacher who is trying to keep his professional life intact while the specific cultural conditions around him keep threatening to make his personal life a workplace issue. Alvarez plays Evan as a man whose default posture is amused exhaustion.

The ensemble

The show’s breakout, in my view, is Stephanie Koenig’s Gwen Sanders, the specific middle-aged history teacher whose friendship with Evan is the show’s emotional centre. Koenig, who has been working in writers’ rooms and small supporting roles for years, is playing a character who could easily have been a type, the well-meaning straight ally, the specific kind of liberal-but-tired Texas professional, and instead plays her as a fully interior person. Gwen has her own marriage. Her own fatigue. Her own specific relationship to the school’s institutional politics. She is not an Evan accessory.

The scenes between Evan and Gwen are where the show’s writing is most consistently strong. There is an episode, the third of the season, in which Evan and Gwen spend a teacher workday afternoon in an empty classroom eating granola bars and working through a specific parental complaint against Evan’s curriculum. The scene runs about eight minutes. It is the season’s best writing. Nothing specifically funny happens. Nothing specifically dramatic happens. Two colleagues talk through a problem. The comedy emerges from the specific rhythms of their conversation, which the show is willing to hold at length.

Sean Patton’s Markie, the head football coach and Evan’s eventual friend across specifically ideological difference, is the casting choice the show uses most carefully. Markie is a straight, socially conservative Texan man who is nevertheless neither a villain nor a cartoon. Patton plays him as a man with specific values, specific blind spots, and specific capacity for actual engagement with Evan’s life. The show’s willingness to let Markie be a real character, as opposed to a foil, is one of its specific political achievements.

The comedy of identity

English Teacher is a show about a gay teacher at a Texas high school in the 2020s, which is a premise that carries specific political freight, and the show is doing something specifically interesting with the freight. It is neither defending the teacher against a hostile world nor using the teacher as a vehicle for ideological positioning. It is, instead, treating the teacher’s gayness as a specific fact about his working life that produces specific professional problems without itself being a dramatic engine.

This is harder to write than it looks. Contemporary American television has two dominant modes for handling gay characters in institutional settings. The first is to make the character’s identity the specific centre of the drama, with coming-out plots, homophobia plots, identity-discovery plots. The second is to render the character’s identity as so unremarkable that it never generates story. English Teacher declines both. Evan’s gayness is a fact that specific parents, students, and administrators are continuously trying to make into a problem, and Evan’s specific labour, across the season, is to prevent the fact from becoming the drama.

The show’s most carefully handled plot, a parental complaint about a specific kiss Evan shared with his former partner Malcolm at a school event in front of a student, is the clearest example. The show does not resolve the plot with a big speech or a public vindication. The plot resolves administratively, the way such things actually resolve in real schools, with specific HR meetings and specific pedagogical compromises and specific private exhaustion. The handling is precise.

The Malcolm plot

Langston Kerman plays Malcolm, Evan’s ex, who is now in a new relationship and trying to maintain a friendship with Evan that is specifically complicated by their shared history. The Malcolm subplot is the one the first season does most carefully. Kerman and Alvarez have a specific on-screen chemistry that makes their scenes feel like actual adult conversation between two people who know each other too well and are navigating the specific awkwardness of continued closeness after romantic separation.

The show’s decision to not push Evan and Malcolm toward reconciliation is the right one for the first season’s tonal register. The friendship is more interesting than the romance would be, and the show’s patience with the friendship is part of its broader argument that adult relationships are worth the screen time they take to develop.

The direction

The pilot was directed by Alvarez himself, with subsequent episodes handled by Stephanie Laing, Jude Weng, and Brian Jordan Alvarez again. The directorial register across the season is consistent. The high school is photographed specifically as a working institution rather than as a stylised backdrop. The classroom interiors are cluttered in the specific way actual classrooms are cluttered. The lighting is the specific fluorescent-plus-afternoon-window register of actual American public-school architecture. The show looks like the place it is claiming to be.

Where Season 2 goes

The first season ends with a specific administrative resolution that positions Season 2 to push the workplace dynamics further into the school’s institutional politics. I do not want to spoil the final episode’s turn. I will say that the season’s last twenty minutes set up a specific Season 2 argument about what teachers are permitted to teach and what parents are permitted to object to, and the argument is positioned to be handled with the same specific patience the first season gave the Malcolm plot.

The show’s central risk for Season 2 is scale. English Teacher works because Alvarez’s writing is willing to stay small, to trust the workplace, and to generate comedy from the specific texture of institutional life. The temptation, for shows that renew quickly, is to escalate. The best workplace comedies have resisted the temptation. The question is whether English Teacher will.

Why it matters

The specific achievement of the first season is to have made a workplace comedy that takes its workplace seriously, that takes its central character’s specific identity seriously without centring it, and that trusts the audience to follow conversations at the pace of actual conversations. This is the form doing the thing the form is best at, and Alvarez has shown a specific writing sensibility that the current American comedy ecosystem has been producing less of than it should.

Watch the first episode. Then watch the third episode. Pay attention to the classroom conversations. English Teacher is the show the American workplace comedy needed, and the fact that FX is letting Alvarez keep making it is, on its own, one of the more hopeful production stories of the current television moment.