In “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen retells the following classic joke: “Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other says, ‘Yeah, I know — and such small portions.’” That’s how I feel about a lot of comedy, especially TV comedy, these days.
Firstly, it’s terrible. Whenever I go back and watch a movie by the Marx Brothers, an installment of “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” or an episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (even something as recent as “30 Rock” or “Community”), I’m wowed not just by the quality of the jokes but by the sheer quantity of them. Every minute is jam-packed with thought and care — these shows have a density to them. An old comedy was a testament to the skill of the writers who came up with its jokes and to the actors who managed to sell them, but it’s also an indictment of the current status quo. So much of what airs today is diffuse by comparison, either because rapid-fire comedy isn’t hip anymore, or because writers’ rooms have forgotten how to do it. Everything is vaguely humorous, sure, but where — pray tell — are the jokes?
Secondly, the portions are too small. A season of television used to mean half a year’s worth of episodes — read: 26 of them! I think that every time a network orders a “miniseries,” as they increasingly do, an angel loses its wings.
Enter “English Teacher,” Brian Jordan Alvarez’s debut comedy series which aired on FX in September and streams on Hulu. It’s wonderful. The writing is smart, managing to pack comedy into every nook and cranny. It’s joke after joke after joke, one often setting up the next. Still, unlike the worst sitcoms, the comedic timing never feels formulaic or repetitive.
The writers are to thank for avoiding this pitfall, of course, but so is the genius cast. Their deliveries feel fresh, and their line-reads are tantalizingly unpredictable. Alvarez and Stephanie Koenig lead the cast as a dynamic pair of best friends/coworkers at a Texas high school.
Koenig previously appeared in Alvarez’s 2016 webseries “The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo,” another unique comedy with a great ensemble cast. I had seen “Caleb Gallo” prior to “English Teacher” and was nervous that Alvarez wouldn’t be able to recreate the webseries’s lightning-in-a-bottle energy in the sitcom format, but I how wrong I was! Alvarez and Koenig’s chemistry is just as perfect in “English Teacher” as it was in “Caleb Gallo.”
The other teachers are also well written and well acted — they form a tight-knit unit, running like a well-oiled machine. Still, it was the cast of students that won my heart. I don’t think any screenwriter could ever manage a 100% verite depiction of the idiosyncratic way high schoolers actually speak, so even though “English Teacher” only gets 90% of the way there, it's still an impressive feat. Guest stars Romy Mars (the beloved third-generation Coppola nepo baby) and Ivy Wolk (the once starlet of TikTok, the now starlet of Twitter) really nail their bit-roles as Alvarez’s students.
A lot of the ground the show covers is political, taking aim at the culture war battles going on in our classrooms and school boards. Its premise (gay English teacher at a school in the Republican south) could lend itself to the cheap “comedy” of dogmatic liberalism, but Alvarez manages to paint a more nuanced picture. Unlike “Parks and Recreation” (which derives its comedy from the conflict between virtuous, technocratic civil servants like Leslie Knope and cartoonishly stupid and manipulative conservative elites like Bobby Newport), “English Teacher” manages to write charming characters on both sides of the aisle. Still, it has its own perspective — i.e. it doesn’t indulge in cheap both sides–ism. The end result is a splendid little time capsule of our political and cultural moment. I can imagine an AP United States History class in 2124 watching clips from “English Teacher” as a primary source about life in the Trump era.
Ultimately, my only problem with “English Teacher” has to do with that joke, specifically to the second part of it — “and such small portions”! FX only bankrolled a paltry eight episodes! If their executives are as “fearless” as their tagline suggests (or even just business savvy, seeing as Twitter gives the impression “English Teacher” is generating a lot of buzz), they’ll order a second season with something in the neighborhood of 20 episodes.
