The culture war often doesn’t have a physical frontline; it’s fought in op-ed columns, through social-media memes and inside people’s heads.
Public schools are an exception. There, the state infantry of teachers, enlisted to handle potentially explosive ideas, face wave after wave of challenging students, backed by air support from helicopter parents.
“English Teacher,” which begins Monday on FX, is a deft, brutal trench comedy of this battle. Brian Jordan Alvarez, the creator and viral-video comic, stars as Evan Marquez, a high school teacher in suburban Austin, Texas, struggling to get through each day with his ideals intact and his shirts unstained.
His students are wily shape-shifters, a tech-enabled alien species whose ways and attitudes keep their handlers off-balance. “The kids this year, I feel like they’re less woke,” Evan tells his best friend, the history teacher Gwen Sanders (Stephanie Koenig), who concurs. One student, she said, told her she needed to teach “both sides” of the Spanish Inquisition.
Evan’s real troubles begin, however, when he learns that he’s under “investigation” after a rich, influential parent reported him for having kissed his ex-boyfriend (Jordan Firstman) in front of students.
His principal, Grant Moretti — a walking anxiety attack played wonderfully by Enrico Colantoni — admits that Evan shouldn’t have to deal with this, but he’s too beaten and besieged to do anything but plead with Evan to help him make the problem go away. One of Evan’s students suggests he claim discrimination as a gay Hispanic, but another says, “Gay doesn’t count anymore, and he talks like a straight white guy.”
The cast of overworked educators — rounded out by Markie Hillridge (Sean Patton), the libertarian gym teacher, and Harry (Langston Kerman), the hot new physics teacher who catches Evan’s eye — naturally brings to mind ABC’s “Abbott Elementary.” But in that show, set in a grade school, the students are younger and sweeter, the classroom politics more peripheral.
In “English Teacher,” the kids are bigger and more psychologically intimidating. They can be devious, like the class that asks a teacher to explain the concept of “nonbinary” so they can record the awkward talk and put the video online. They can be lazy, like the student who hands in an essay that includes the line, “As an A.I. language model, I am not able to complete this request.” They are cynical and sincere, naïve and sophisticated.
All this could become a setup for easy punches at Gen Z-ers and their suburban parents. But “English Teacher” is willing to spoof everyone. It strikes a balance between admiring and satirizing Evan’s idealism, aided by Alvarez’s performance, which strikes just the right note of curdled exasperation. And the setting — a reddish suburb of a blue city in a red state — provides a wide range of targets. (The targets are sometimes literal, as when Evan is horrified to learn of the existence of the school’s gun club, which Markie prefers to call a “firearms-safety program.”)
The delightful second episode, written by Koenig, proves the show capable of taking surprising turns. When the school’s annual powder puff ritual, in which the male football players dress up to cheerlead at a girls’ game, is protested as offensive, Evan brings in a friend (played by Trixie Mattel of “RuPaul’s Drag Race”) to teach them authentic drag. Meanwhile, Gwen turns the girls’ scrimmage into a tutorial on female self-defense. (“I don’t know how much football they learned,” she says, “but they’re not going to get killed at a highway rest stop.”)
The show’s eye for cultural flashpoints and its generous spirit of satire remind me at moments of “King of the Hill,” that great social comedy of Texas. “English Teacher” can veer into caricatures, and it’s nowhere near as formally inventive or varied in tone as FX comedies like “The Bear” and “Atlanta.” But it is a blessedly funny straight-ahead sitcom, which at this point is the true rarity on TV.
And amid its broad-strokes zeitgeist gags, it has enough quirk and complexity to capture the weirdness of adolescents and the people in charge of them. Evan might have a hard time getting his students to read and analyze Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” But in their own way, they, and “English Teacher,” live it: They contradict themselves; they contain multitudes.
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