Evan Marquez, the idealistic educator played by Brian Jordan Alvarez in his new FX series English Teacher, is a far cry from the comedian’s distinctively online characters. Since 2020, the actor (Special, Grace and Frankie, the Will & Grace reboot) and longtime producer of queer comedy found a wider audience through a sort of bizarro online drag. His delightfully off-kilter menagerie of TikTok characters – a rich southern aunt, a bald man with a one-month Airbnb rental and a dream, the large-mouthed TJ Mack, extolling the virtues of Sitting in unnervingly catchy fashion – all have exaggerated face filters, implacable accents and outsized personalities. Evan Marquez, by contrast, is somewhat of a normie – a high-school English teacher in Austin, Texas, who looks and talks like Alvarez and just wants to do a good job.
It’s a surprising, risky move, in a promising, if slight, series full of them. For of course, what constitutes doing and keeping a “good job” as a gay teacher in a southern school, dealing with burned out colleagues, helicopter parents and very online students, is up for interpretation. The eight-part series, created and often written and directed by Alvarez, is at its best when probing different points of view, then drily undercutting expected sympathies. And in particular, when a gay teacher often playing the straight, righteous man to teenagers’ outrageous schemes and black-and-white thinking, is just as much wrong as he is right.
