FX’s ‘English Teacher’ is an improbable, radically playful triumph

If you’re in the mood for a brilliant, warmhearted, low-stakes comedy, I have good news: Brian Jordan Alvarez’s new show, “English Teacher,” which debuted Monday on FX, might be it. Set in Austin, Texas, the series (created by Alvarez) gets exceptional mileage out of a broad and politically prickly premise that could easily have been mishandled: Alvarez plays Evan Marquez, a gay English teacher trying to teach classics such as “The Red Badge of Courage” at a public high school in a blue city in a red state. Evan spends his working hours dealing with difficult parents, squabbling student groups (the football team, the LGBTQ+ club) and Morrison-Hensley High’s vaguely supportive but conflict-averse principal, Grant (Enrico Colantoni).

While “English Teacher” does deal with students, they’re not really the point. (Neither is the literature Evan teaches; “Dead Poets Society” this is not.) The main players are Evan’s co-workers, including his best friend, Gwen (Stephanie Koenig), a history teacher; Markie (Sean Patton), a PE teacher with whom he sometimes clashes (Markie also teaches the school’s gun safety class); and guidance counselor Rick (Carmen Christopher). The series opens with Evan’s ex-boyfriend Malcolm (Jordan Firstman) leaving the school after a parent complains that the couple were seen kissing on campus, an order from the district forbidding Evan to date other faculty and the introduction of an attractive new teacher, Harry (Langston Kerman).

The show has a sunny, lived-in feel that establishes firmly, from the pilot, that teachers have lives outside school. Virtually every episode begins with Evan off-campus — waking up (sometimes with someone else), or working out, or racing to class. It’s playfully packed with ’80s and ’90s hits. (One episode opens to Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie,” another closes with Scandal’s “The Warrior,” and characters fight to the strains of New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give” and flirt with the Bangles’ “Eternal Flame.”)

The writing achieves pitch-perfect, down-to-earth realism with its dialogue while never doing quite what you expect story-wise. And the editing is savagely efficient: As sitcoms go, this one might be an anti-mockumentary, not just avoiding the extended reaction shots that made “The Office’s” mugging Jim Halpert a meme, but also cutting away almost before you’ve processed the punchline.

One feature that makes “English Teacher” unusual is its resistance to the hyperbole we’ve perhaps come to expect from American sitcoms. This isn’t a show where everyone hates their life. Evan isn’t happy, but he’s not miserable. He generally likes his colleagues, even if some occasionally annoy him. He doesn’t hate his students (although he often finds them silly and thinks they can do better). They, in turn, aren’t awful (although they don’t respect him all that much).

Evan isn’t a hero, he’s not a saint, and he isn’t especially keen to inspire the kids. He does try to defend a few principles here and there, but he’s not averse to self-preserving compromise. He knows how to shut a loony parent down (or out). He’s a little selfish and has some issues with his friends (who also have stuff to say about him, but like him anyway). Summed up that way, the show sounds so oddly sane that it can’t possibly be funny.

Somehow, it is. Although “Abbott Elementary” is one of its obvious progenitors, I kept returning to “Parks and Recreation” as the point of comparison when trying to understand what this show does differently. It features a similar (government-funded) workplace in which ideologically diverse colleagues must peacefully co-exist, as well as an appealing right-leaning character: Markie in “English Teacher,” Ron Swanson in “Parks.” (Both also stage at least one crazy town hall.)

The distinctions, however, are instructive. In “Parks,” caricatures predominate. The protagonist, Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope, is a bubbly optimist who strongly believes that she (as an avatar for the government) can bring about positive change, whereas Nick Offerman’s Ron — a nonbeliever in the government’s ability to do anything — is mysterious, twinkly and borderline magical. “English Teacher” has no parallel set of ideologues. The show can’t be divided into believers and nonbelievers. Liberal or not, they’re all just mildly selfish, mildly chaotic people for whom political principles function more as a hazy backdrop than as the place from which all their actions and decisions flow. Markie’s crude advice to Evan when he’s being targeted by a parent, for instance, is purely tactical: He recommends Evan frame a statement he’s writing to emphasize that he’s being persecuted as “a proud gay man.” Why? It’s the smartest and most savage political approach.

It’s eventually Markie, not the principal, who goes the extra mile for Evan and gets the investigation dropped — by threatening to out the parent’s gay son to her social circle. “You can’t use homophobia to fight homophobia,” a startled Evan says when he finds out what happened. “We work with the tools we have,” Markie replies, playing a video game.

That might feel a little like a Dwight Schrute moment, but this isn’t a show where the liberal protagonist is always right. Catholic in its targets, “English Teacher” is an equal-opportunity offender (though it also manages to mostly avoid falling into false equivalences). And if it pokes plenty of fun at the TikTok generation, it genuinely likes the group, too. (When Evan grouses about his students “educating” him about a medical condition he claims is made up, it’s Markie who maps out for him why his student claims to be thus afflicted and all the high-stakes social signaling he’s totally missed.)

But the parents might be this show’s real wild card. Standouts this season include Andrene Ward-Hammond as a suburban mom obsessed with the sex games she “knows” the students are playing (one is called “Stoneface”) and Jenn Lyon as Linda, a gun-toting blond Texan bombshell — and honey-sweet restaurateur — who wants to take Evan down. (Also Maria Sager, playing a Latina mom who takes Evan to task at Linda’s town hall and derails Linda’s orchestrated attack. It’s a tiny little scene I can’t stop thinking about: For one thing, everyone concerned actually speaks perfect Spanish — a rare thing in English-speaking shows. Also, they sound like real people.)

It’s tough to generate decent comedy in a setting this explosive, mere months before a presidential election, without getting tangled up in the dicey, truly high-stakes politics. “English Teacher” somehow walks that tightrope without seeming to notice it’s there. It helps that the characters in this world aren’t miserable and that they loudly advocate for themselves. They don’t feel undefended. Maybe that’s what opens up space for jokes that might not play nearly as well in lesser hands. Take a moment from the pilot: When Evan presents the principal with the statement he has spent the week working on, in which he lambastes the ludicrous investigation to which he’s being subjected, Grant — emanating affable impotence — says he forgot to tell him that the investigation was dropped. “Can you read it anyway?” Evan asks. The principal obligingly skims Evan’s statement (“Gestapo usually has a capital g,” he murmurs) and absent-mindedly sticks it in the shredder.

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“English Teacher”

The first two episodes premiered Monday on FX and are available for streaming on Hulu. Subsequent episodes air weekly.