The start of a new TV show is a fraught time for its creators and stars. Years of work have gone into its debut, yet the window of time in which to attract viewers is brief. Add a splintered media environment and an oxygen-sucking presidential election, and the chances for cultural relevancy slip further.
Most showrunners make the press rounds and hope for the best. Brian Jordan Alvarez unwittingly came up with another strategy: becoming a meme.
In September, shortly after the debut of “English Teacher,” an FX show that Mr. Alvarez created and stars in, a TikTok user with the handle @clozvr posted a clip from an old “Gilmore Girls” episode mashed up with the song “Breathe” by Olly Alexander.
In the “Gilmore” clip, Kirk Gleason, the awkward character played by Sean Gunn, has made a black-and-white art-house movie. In it, Kirk tells his girlfriend’s father, “I love your daughter.” When the father says, “What do you have to offer her?” Kirk replies, “Nothing. Only this,” before breaking into a goofy break dance.
Mr. Alvarez saw another TikTok user dancing in an apartment to the clip and found it “weirdly captivating,” he said. He decided to film his own version in the Nashville airport, lip-syncing to the dialogue and the song and dancing as he rolled his suitcase.
Credit Mr. Alvarez’s dance moves or his actorly commitment to an absurd premise, but somehow the clip has racked up 10 million views.
It is a return to form for Mr. Alvarez, who got his start making short comedic sketches with friends that he posted on YouTube. But, he said, he has “never ridden a wave like this.”
“TikTok as an algorithm loves dancing and pushes those videos,” he said. “Then it becomes addictive. ‘Wait a minute: If I just do this dance every day, I’m going to get millions of views?’”
Mr. Alvarez started to film himself in everyday situations — at the gym, stepping off an elevator, filling up at the gas station — lip-syncing and dancing to the “I love your daughter” sound. By the third video, he was taking off his shirt, kicking up his leg in a doglike fashion and appearing to dry-hump the air.
“My whole life I’ve had an expressive form of dancing,” he said. “I’m doing it quite earnestly. I don’t think it’s supposed to be as funny as people are finding it.”
Mr. Alvarez did not initially make the videos to promote “English Teacher,” but viewers took it that way. “People started commenting, ‘Fine, I’m going to start steaming your show. You convinced me,’” he said. “I started leaning into that, writing ‘Stream English Teacher on Hulu’ in the posts.”
By all accounts, the strategy has worked to raise the profile of “English Teacher,” which stars Mr. Alvarez as a gay teacher navigating modern teen culture at a high school in Austin, Tex.
“Desperation is a powerful thing,” Mr. Alvarez said of his efforts to get more people to watch his show. “I knew with the way TV works, there’s an acute moment around when it’s released. I was posting clips, reviews. Out of all of that, this was the thing that worked — just dancing.”
Mr. Alvarez’s videos kicked off an unlikely dance trend. A PBS station in Maine even posted a version starring the cartoon character Daniel Tiger. The popularity has allowed Mr. Alvarez to create a cultural moment around the show, something he finds ironic given his start on the web.
“I came up putting things on the internet as a way of getting my art out there,” he said. “That has culminated in me having this mainstream TV show. To then end up going back to the internet to get people to go and watch the mainstream TV show? It’s funny how it’s all the same thing.”
Mr. Alvarez has so far posted nearly 30 videos of the dance, which he shoots in one or two takes. TikTok trends have a short life span, of course. But Mr. Alvarez said that he was going to stick with what worked.
“I hopefully have a decent barometer for when to move on,” he said. “For now, I’ll keep doing them every day.”
The post To Help His TV Show, He Became a Meme appeared first on New York Times.
