“You’re Team Mustache, huh?” Brian Jordan Alvarez asks me after we hopped on a Zoom to chat about his critically-lauded comedy series, English Teacher. I was delighted to cast my vote to Alvarez since he recently has been asking his Instagram followers if he should keep his or, horror of horros, shave it off. I have become more vocal for my love of mustaches, so I am glad to see that democracy for at least facial hair is alive and well.
“People keep saying that they can’t vote, because it’s not fully grown in yet,” he tells me. “You already see what it’s going to look like–the potential is there!”
In FX’s English Teacher, Alvarez stars as Evan Marquez, a beleagured yet optimistic molder of young minds in Austin, Texas, who battles the students who resist learning, the parents who think they know better, and other teachers whose viewpoint on teacher is, shall we say, different than his own. English Teacher is furiously funny, and Alvarez wrote or co-wrote the majority of this first season’s eight episodes. I even joked with Alvarez that a close friend of mine, who teaches high school Spanish, had to get up and walk away when we watched some episodes together, because Evan’s interactions with the students felt paticularly “too real.”
There is a sort of unofficial joke about how gay people come out or feel most comfortable with adults that teach the subject that Evan Marquez teaches. Maybe it’s all those books with characters that have to overcome adversity in their particular circumstances, but there is a certain level of tolerance that English teachers exude more than others. I had to know what Alvarez’s favorite subject was in school.
“I never know how to explain this without it sounding silly, but I went to this private high school for free because my mom was, and is, a professor at the university called University of the South,” Alvarez says. “The high school next door is called St. Andrews Swanee, and it has a standout English program that felt like an English literature conservatory. I am not sure if this happens in other schools, but we would read short stories from The New Yorker and it just felt really cool. I liked English class at that school, and I did a piece of creative writing there that is like lost in the wind somewhere. It was back when computers were kind of new–like 2002. It was about my pseudo-aunt that I have in Colombia who married my uncle and [about] how they started writing to each other and calling each other before we were so used to anything digital. This is such a tangent, but I wrote about that in my English class which was my favorite subject at my pseudo-intellectual high school in the sticks of Tennessee.”
Some audience members have expressed surprise that English takes place in Texas rather than, say, a more liberal area. A lot of the season’s greatest tensions come from people with opposing viewpoints, and Jenn Lyon’s Linda Harrison is one of the highlights of this first batch of episodes. Shows like English and HBO’s Somebody Somewhere (set in Kansas) are great examples of how not all queer people live in deep blue bubbles.
“We shoot it in Atlanta, and we have a lot of shots of Austin in the openings,” he says. “When I was writing it, I was spending a lot of time in both cities. I came up with the show on the fly when Paul Simms and I talked about creating something. I was hesitant, because making a show is so hard. I wrote something over the next few days, though, and I set it in Austin since I was spending so much time there. It made sense as an interesting place that reflected where I went to high school in that it’s essentially a blue bubble in a red state. You just have so much to play with. I grew up in the South but I was born in New York City, and people often think I am a New Yorker. Austin is just a very cool city, and any excuse I have to go there, I go. I love it there so much.”
“School Safety” is one of the most subversive, thoughtful episodes of the season. As Evan enters the school, he hears gunshots, and he tries to drag students away from the fire. ‘Is this gay panic?’ one young person says in their confusion. Evan is mortified to discover that the school, under the tutelage of Sean Patton’s Markie, has a robustly attended gun club that teaches the kids how to handle firearms, and he begins a crusade to shut it down. How do you take such a taboo, volatile subject and approach it with comedy? Alvarez’s answer is quite unexpected.
“The big question was how do we talk about this in a deep, smart way, but also make it funny,” Alvarez says. “How do we not hit people over the head with something that has been talked about so much. In a way, I don’t know how we do it, but I know what feels like when we’re examining these subjects. I was just on TikTok, and I saw someone explaining these deep plane facelifts. Have you seen these?”
I hadn’t, but that didn’t stop me from looking it up as we talked.
“It’s a facelift, but they pull up multiple muscles up as well,” he continues. “With the writing, we’re taking our time with it as the particular idea was really percolating. With this show, we had a small room and a kind of big room, and after the trikes happend, we had another room. We had a lot of time and opportunity to deepen these thoughts while also trying to make them funny. It reminds me of that facelift, because we are picking up little by little at a time. It takes a lot of time and attention to work from the smartest part of yourself to examine what we really want to say.”
English Teacher is streaming now on Hulu.
