Brian Jordan Alvarez’s Hilarious FX Comedy 5

If there’s one complaint to be made about English Teacher, it’s that there simply isn’t enough of it. The show’s first season comprises just eight 20ish-minute installments — which, in fairness, is well in line with the likes of other FX comedies like What We Do in the Shadows or Dave or The Bear (setting aside whether that last one is really a “comedy” at all).

And yet I couldn’t help feeling that in this case, it wasn’t quite enough. Because with such a sharp ensemble, smart perspective and finely honed sense of humor right out the gate, this one feels built to keep going — toward a broadcast-standard 22-episode season, even, hopefully for years and years. This, to be sure, is a great problem for a freshman series to have. If its initial brevity means English Teacher currently demonstrates more potential than it actually has the time to fulfill, it also means it’s got plenty of room to keep growing for seasons to come.

On paper, English Teacher might sound like the drier, snarkier, world-wearier older brother to Quinta Brunson’s Abbott Elementary, currently raking in accolades and viewers for FX sister network ABC. In practice — well, actually, that’s not too far off. Creator Brian Jordan Alvarez (The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo) stars as Evan, an educator at a suburban high school in Austin. Though he’s bursting with good intentions and firmly held principles, real life has a way of dragging him back down to Earth.

In the premiere, for instance, he’s relieved to learn that a complaint filed against him by a homophobic parent has been dropped — until he learns said parent was only persuaded to do so after Markie (Sean Patton), the school’s gym teacher, threatened to out her (already graduated) son. Evan is immediately and understandably offended, but Markie takes a more pragmatic view: “No one gives a shit about your highfalutin ideals, bro,” he scoffs. As Markie sees it, he was simply using whatever tool he had at his disposal to do his buddy a solid. In the end, even Evan can’t argue with that.

That sort of tension, between Evan’s stated ethics and his messier, sillier reality, is the driving force behind English Teacher, fueling both its narrative turns and its humor. The series does not shy away from the sorts of hot-button topics that tend to dominate political headlines about the state of American education; in the six chapters sent to critics, it takes on drag queens, gun safety and deep-pocketed helicopter parents ready to invade the classroom the moment an instructor dares give a student the bad grades they actually deserve.

But it doesn’t necessarily take them in the directions that a cynic might expect. It would be very easy to imagine a version of English Teacher that turns those topics into Big Teachable Moments, with Evan changing hearts and minds through the eloquent yet impassioned monologues. This is not that show. This is a show where when Evan does get to make one of those speeches, it’s received with a deadpan, “Wow, you really healed me. Thanks.”

Nor, conversely, does it traffic in cheap jabs about snowflake Millennials, snotty Gen Z-ers or the chasm between them. Evan and his colleagues, particularly his chipper best friend Gwen (Stephanie Koenig), are frequently baffled by the mores of the younger generation, who do not seem to be any less easily offended for being “less woke.” Its tone is rather one of affectionate curiosity, toward faculty and student body alike. Even something as obviously absurd as the junior class’ brief obsession with “asymptomatic Tourette’s” (which one girl haughtily explains is actually way harder to deal with because “people have no idea the battle” its self-diagnosed victims are fighting) turns out to be, itself, a symptom of surprisingly relatable motives. And when Evan himself gets caught up in an overwrought protest against Markie’s gun club, it’s more curious about what his reaction says about him as a person than it is in confining him to some tidy, ideologically consistent box.

Instead, English Teacher pivots on characters who feel fully formed from the get-go. In the opening minutes of the premiere, Evan, late for work, shoves a non-travel mug into his car cupholder, sloshing coffee all over the place; it seems a tiny but telling reflection of his tendency to mean well, try his best, and ultimately make a mess anyway. His coworkers are sketched with similar precision. Guidance counselor Rick (Carmen Christopher) perpetually seems on the verge of losing his shirt over stock tips from a TED Talk that’s really a TEDx talk. Markie brags about rewatching Zero Dark Thirty in night vision goggles. (“You watched Zero Dark Thirty more than once?” Gwen responds.)

Most hilarious of all is Principal Moretti, played by Enrico Colantoni with the bone-deep exhaustion of a man who passed “over it” several decades ago. Perhaps he had ideals or ambitions or a fighting spirit once. Now, in what may well be a preview of Evan’s eventual future, his every day is ruled only by the desire to keep the peace and not lose his job.

While it is possible to get nitpicky about a few of the gags or storylines that don’t work quite as well as they should, in truth, even most of them could likely be remedied with more time. A blowup between Evan and Gwen might feel more earned if the series had built up to it more slowly; an amusing romantic subplot fizzles because Evan’s love interest, physics substitute Harry (Langston Kerman), simply disappears for long stretches of an already-short season. And as endearing a protagonist as Evan makes, English Teacher would probably work still better as a true ensemble — if only there were more time to kick back with the rest of the cast.

But there I go again, sighing that this show isn’t nearly long enough. I’ll just have to sit back and hope class will be back for another session next year.