English Teacher Premiere Recap: Does FX’s School Comedy Make the Grade?
Hear that bell? Yes, FX is taking us back to school with the new comedy English Teacher.
Monday’s premiere introduces us to Evan, played by star and series creator Brian Jordan Alvarez, who grooves to the ’80s classic “Maniac” before heading into work (late) as a teacher at an Austin high school. He marvels to his colleague Gwen (Stephanie Koenig) at lunch that his students are “not into being woke anymore.” (“They’re saying the R-word again,” Gwen notes.) Gym teacher Markie (Sean Patton) then launches into a rant against Communist China, but they loudly remind him, “No politics!” Evan also locks eyes with the cute new physics teacher Harry (Langston Kerman) before getting called into the principal’s office. Uh-oh.
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Principal Moretti (Enrico Colantoni) seems annoyed that he has to do any work at all, but he informs Evan that he’s under investigation for kissing his boyfriend in front of the students. Evan says it was just a peck, and he theorizes that the mother complaining is just mad because her son turned out to be gay. The principal doesn’t want to be bothered, though, so he just tells Evan to write up a statement for the school board. Evan gets sent home for the day, and he has lunch with his ex Malcolm (Jordan Firstman), aka the boyfriend he kissed at school. Malcolm works in tech now and loves the benefits (“I’m getting braces for, like, no reason”), but Evan can’t see himself taking a job that doesn’t mean anything to him. Oh, and he and Malcolm hook up, too, just for old time’s sake.
Evan works on his statement for the school board, but he gets distracted by a call from Gwen. (Plus, we see in a flashback that his kiss with Malcolm in school was more than a peck. With a butt grab, no less.) At school, Markie encourages Evan to declare he’s “a proud gay man,” but Evan counters: “I’m not that proud.” Markie knows the mother who complained about the kiss, too, and knows her son is gay. Evan’s book club meeting gets derailed by students asking about the investigation. (When one student suggests he say he’s being harassed because he’s Hispanic, another one protests: “Hispanic means Mexican.” Evan’s mother is Colombian, for the record.) Evan says he wants to remain a teacher because “I like watching young kids bloom and grow” — but the students all agree that sounds creepy.
As if he didn’t have enough problems, Evan then gets recruited by Markie to explain the concept of being non-binary to his students, with Markie introducing him as “our very special gay guest.” Gwen shows up, too, to offer support — or just to watch him crash and burn. Evan tries his best, but quickly gets bogged down in deciding if the term “hermaphrodite” is still OK to use, and finally, the students admit they just wanted Markie to fail at this so they could film him and watch it go viral. After all that, Evan delivers his statement to the principal… but he learns that the mother accusing him has dropped the case. And she did it because a friend talked to her — Markie.
Evan finds Markie and thanks him profusely for helping him, but Markie says he just threatened to tell all her friends that her son is gay. Evan protests (“You can’t fight homophobia with homophobia!”), but Markie advises him to stop trying to fix the world and just take the win. And one last thing: A condition of the case being dropped is that Evan has to agree never to date another fellow faculty member, and then he formally meets Harry the cute new teacher, who compliments his shirt. Even though it’s just a plain white shirt. This is going to get complicated, isn’t it?
Now we want to see your report card: Give the English Teacher premiere a grade in our poll, and hit the comments and tell us if you’ll keep watching.
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