Brian Jordan Alvarez's Hilarious FX Comedy

If there is a complaint to be made about English teacheris that there just isn't enough of it. The show's first season only features eight roughly 20-minute episodes, which, to be fair, is in line with other FX comedies like What we do in the shadows OR David OR The bear (aside from the fact that the latter is indeed a “comedy”).

And yet I couldn't help but feel that in this case it wasn't enough. Because with such a sharp ensemble, a smart perspective, and a sense of humor finely honed from the start, this seems built to keep going, toward a standard 22-episode season, even, hopefully, for years and years. That, to be sure, is a big problem for a freshman series. If its initial brevity means English teacher currently shows more potential than he actually has time to realise, but that also means he still has plenty of room to continue growing in the seasons to come.

On paper, English teacher he might seem like Quinta Brunson's drier, more sarcastic, more world-weary older brother Abbott Elementary Schoolwhich is currently picking up acclaim and viewership for FX's sister network ABC. In practice, well, actually, it's not that far off. Creator Brian Jordan Alvarez (The Merry and Wonderful Life of Caleb Gallo) plays Evan, an educator at a suburban Austin high school. Though he is full of good intentions and firmly held principles, real life has a way of bringing him back down to earth.

In the premiere, for example, he’s relieved to learn that a complaint filed against him by a homophobic parent has been dismissed—until he learns that the parent was only persuaded to do so after Markie (Sean Patton), the school’s gym teacher, threatened to report his (already graduated) son. Evan is immediately and understandably offended, but Markie takes a more pragmatic view: “No one gives a shit about your high-sounding ideals, bro,” he snorts. According to Markie, he was simply using whatever tools he had at his disposal to do his friend a favor. In the end, not even Evan can argue.

This kind of tension, between Evan's stated ethics and his messier, sillier reality, is the driving force behind English teacherfueling both its narrative twists and its humor. The series doesn’t shy away from the kinds of hot-button topics that tend to dominate political headlines about the state of American education; in the six chapters sent to critics, it tackles drag queens, gun safety, and deep-pocketed helicopter parents ready to invade the classroom the moment a teacher dares to give a student the bad grades he or she deserves.

But it doesn't necessarily take them in the directions a cynic might expect. It would be very easy to imagine a version of English teacher that turns those arguments into great teaching moments, with Evan changing hearts and minds through eloquent yet passionate monologues. This is not that show. This is a show where when Evan ago when you give one of those speeches, it's met with a deadpan, “Wow, you really healed me. Thank you.”

Nor, conversely, does it engage in cheap jabs at snowflake Millennials, snobby Gen Zs, or the chasm between them. Evan and his colleagues, especially his chipper best friend Gwen (Stephanie Koenig), are often baffled by the mores of the younger generation, who seem no less easily offended for being “less smart.” His tone is one of affectionate curiosity, both toward the faculty and the student body. Even something as patently absurd as the junior class’s brief obsession with “symptomatic Tourette’s” (which one girl haughtily explains is actually much harder to deal with because “people have no idea of ​​the battle” its self-diagnosed victims are fighting) turns out to be, itself, a symptom of surprisingly understandable motivations. And when Evan himself gets caught up in an over-the-top protest against Markie’s shooting club, the curiosity is more about what his reaction reveals about him as a person, rather than confining him to a neat, ideologically coherent box.

Instead, English teacher revolves around characters who seem fully formed from the start. In the opening minutes of the premiere, Evan, late for work, shoves a non-travel mug into his car's cup holder, spilling coffee everywhere; it feels like a small but telling reflection of his tendency to want to do his best, do his best, and ultimately screw up anyway. His colleagues are just as sharply drawn. Guidance counselor Rick (Carmen Christopher) seems perpetually on the verge of losing his shirt over stock advice from a TED Talk that's actually a TEDx Talk. Markie brags about rewatching Zero Dark Thirty with night vision goggles. (“You looked Zero Dark Thirty more than once?” replies Gwen.)

Most hilarious of all is Principal Moretti, played by Enrico Colantoni with the deep weariness of a man who got over it several decades ago. Perhaps he once had ideals or ambitions or a fighting spirit. Now, in what could be a preview of Evan's future ending, every day is governed only by the desire to keep the peace and not lose his job.

While it is possible to be nitpicky about some of the gags or plots that don't work Enough as they should, in truth, most of them could probably be remedied with more time. A fight between Evan and Gwen might feel more earned if the series had gotten there more slowly; a fun romantic subplot falls flat because Evan's love interest, physicist substitute Harry (Langston Kerman), simply disappears for long stretches of an already short season. And as engaging as Evan is as a protagonist, English teacher It would probably work even better if it were a real ensemble, if only there was more time to relax with the rest of the cast.

But here I am again, sighing that this show isn't long enough. All I can do is sit back and hope the class comes back for another session next year.