FX’s hilarious new comedy “English Teacher” has sadly come to the end of its first season. The half-hour comedy is one of the most critically acclaimed new shows of the year, and frankly, we’re not surprised. From a cult classic YouTube series to skits that would make “SNL” envious to an unexpected social media breakout, star and creator Brian Jordan Alvarez has demonstrated a unique comedic voice.
Set in contemporary Austin, “English Teacher” finds Alvarez playing Evan, a thirtysomething educator attempting to understand his Gen Z students and often realizing he isn’t “with it” anymore. In some ways, it’s the flip side to another show you can watch on Hulu, “Abbot Elementary,” but with, dare we say, adult situations added in. Alvarez gives a lot of the credit for keeping the show’s voice honest to veteran executive producer Paul Simms but has heaps of praise for the executives at FX. They knew what they were signing up for.
“I remember us having a conversation about how the show was sort of about fashions and about changing fashions and moments in the culture,” Alvarez says. “So, they really work hard on it, but that voice, that texture of dialogue, and that way that the people interact and the way that the characters are, it never really got to a point where I felt like that was in peril. They were champions of what I was trying to do, and they were interested in making it better, and they did make it better, and I’m grateful.”
There are spoilers ahead as our intentional post-season finale interview finds Alvarez explaining Evan’s big choice at the end of the episode, how the actors for the show’s hilarious book club were found, whether Evan’s colleagues Gwen (Stephanie Koenig) and Markie (Sean Patton) are meant to be together, ideas percolating in his head for season two, and much, much more.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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All the original work you’ve done before, “English Teacher,” including “The Gay and Wonderous Life of Caleb Gallo,” featured a very specific voice. And not necessarily one we’ve ever seen on FX. Your deal with the network was announced in 2022, and then it was a year and a half until the show went into production. Was it a tough process to crack that voice for FX?
Well, so we shot the pilot in the fall of 2022 because things in the trades sometimes get announced a little bit late. So, I started this whole process fall of 2020 with [executive producer] Paul Simms, and we were sort of off to the races, and that was over Zoom and stuff. That’s 2020 into 2021. So, it’s been a while. And then the pilot was announced, I think, in May of 2022 and went into production fall of 2022. And what you’re accurately noting is that the pilot was shot in the fall of 2022, and we didn’t shoot the season until the winter of 2024. So, a year and a half is right, but it was more between the pilot and the season.
What impressed me when I first started watching the show was that I could see some TV executives being like, “I don’t know how we can make this work on streaming or cable.” And I felt like you found a way to make it work. How hard was that to do? How many revisions did you have to go through?
It was not very hard because it’s to FX’s credit and Paul Simms’ credit. They’re basically experts at that. They’ve done it before. They did it with “Atlanta.” And Paul is just a brilliant writer and producer. FX has amazing executives who are really interested in making your show, and that’s just a specific thing. They’re trying to make your show as good as you can. So, now I get to have this wonderful experience where I look at the show, and I like it better than what I would’ve been able to make on my own. So, I’m just very grateful to them. I think FX they’re just smart people. A lot of them have been there for many years. Kate Lambert is a great executive. Jonathan Frank is a great executive, and also John Landgraf who’s at the top of FX. This is a very deep-thinking guy.
And like I was saying, with the timeline, we worked on this show for years, and some of the conversations are just philosophical. What is this show really about? I remember us having a conversation about how the show was sort of about fashions and about changing fashions and moments in the culture. So, they really work hard on it, but that voice, that texture of dialogue, and that way that the people interact and the way that the characters are, it never really got to a point where I felt like that was in peril. They were champions of what I was trying to do, and they were interested in making it better, and they did make it better, and I’m grateful.
Where did the genesis of having your main character be an English teacher come from?
I think I just knew that that was going to be an interesting environment where there’s a lot of natural dynamics to explore, right? Because it’s all these people from all these different parts of life, who are forced to come together for this common goal of educating these students. And there’s disagreement about how to educate them, and there’s disagreement from the parents and disagreement from the administration and disagreement from the students themselves on how they want to be educated, disagreement from the teachers. So, I think it was mostly that. And then there’s just this famous idea that gay guys, we connect with our English teachers in high school. And so maybe, in a way, I was like, “Well, if I was going to be a teacher, I’d be an English teacher.”
Which by the way, pays off at the beginning of the last episode.
Oh, right, exactly. And also, not to mention my mom is a Spanish teacher. My sister is a media arts professor. Well, they’re both professors at universities, but it’s in my family, really.
Did you feel like you had to reach out to other teachers to accurately depict it?
Yes, I luckily have a lot of teacher friends. One of my friends here around LA, I believe he’s a chemistry or a physics teacher. I think he’s a physics teacher. And yeah, there were interesting conversations sometimes when I would say, “Would this really happen?” One thing was in the pilot: my character, Evan, is being investigated because he kissed his boyfriend in front of a group of students. And so what was funny, my friend here in California said, “Well, the union would get involved, the teacher’s union.” And then I found out the teacher’s unions are much less present in Texas, so then we didn’t need to bring that in as a plot point. But it’s funny because teaching also is different in different parts of the states and all over the world.
What was the most important storyline for the show? What did you want narratively to happen by the end of the first season?
Narratively, I’m not sure. We were exploring a lot, and TV shows are ongoing. I think it’s a slight sidebar, but the most important thing for me was exactly what you’ve already mentioned, which is getting that specific texture, that specific voice out there, and really having the show feel the way it needed to feel. And I feel like we’ve done that spectacularly, and I’m just so grateful to all of our amazing writers, too. I mean, you all get in this groove together, and you start just making each other laugh so much. The field trip episode with the mom who’s saying all this wild stuff that would make us laugh so hard that we were crying in the writer’s room and then on set again. And just like we had these amazing writers, Dave King and Zach Dunn, Jake Bender and Emmy Blotnick, and Stephanie Koenig, who plays Gwen in the show, is in the writer’s room as well. She wrote the powder puff episode. The most important thing to me was making sure we were making the show that we intended to make and not some lesser version of it. And honestly, I feel like it’s exceeded my expectations in a way that I’m so grateful for. It feels like more than a sum of its parts. It feels special, and I’m just grateful.
Why was it important to place it in Austin?
So, Austin is similar to where I grew up because initially, first of all, I was born in New York City, and then I lived there until I was four years old. And then we moved to a tiny town in very, very rural Tennessee. We just had a Walmart. We didn’t even have a Red Lobster or an Olive Garden. A small town. And then, I went to public school for all of elementary school and middle school. And then, in high school, I went to a private school up on this mountain 40 minutes away from where we lived. And it was in this highly liberal town in quite conservative Tennessee. And so those kinds of environments became interesting to me. These liberal pockets are in conservative places, and Austin is known for being very liberal. There’s the famous phrase, “Keep Austin weird.” Austin is known to be a very liberal place in this more conservative state. And so I had been spending a lot of time in Austin, and I even thought, “God, it would be fun to live here.” So, I think when I was in the process of writing this, I was just dreaming about Austin and thinking, “Wouldn’t that be a cool place to ?” and also I was thinking, “Wouldn’t it be a cool place to shoot?” But we ended up shooting in Atlanta, which was also wonderful. But it is set in Austin, and we have a lot of shots of Austin in the show. We sell it as best we can.
Was there one episode you were maybe most worried about going into production? That might be tough to pull off?
That’s a great question. In the field trip episode, something unique happened with it, which is that I had come to think of that episode as one that was not going to be a crowd pleaser, one of my favorites because there’s almost no big thing being tackled. It’s more just an interpersonal episode about the relationships between the characters. And then we have this interesting side character that comes in and is a big part of the episode, and it’s just very human interaction-based and very funny. But to me, it was always one of the episodes that made me laugh the hardest. And there was this night on set when Stephanie and I were in this tent doing this guitar scene for that field trip episode. And the actress, Andre Ward Hammond, who’s so brilliant, who plays Sharon, would pop into the tent and say all this stuff. And we were crying. We couldn’t get through the lines because we were laughing so hard. And long story short, that episode became a huge crowd pleaser and has basically gotten the most attention out of any of the episodes, which to me feels great because I go, “Yes, that’s what I thought. This is so funny.” I can’t believe it. So, I’m so glad that the audience agrees in a way that I almost didn’t expect them to.
One of the things I love about the show, and they sort of come and go is you sort of have this chorus of teenage students.
The book club kids.
And they’re also so well cast, and I know they’re not actually teenagers. They must all be early twenties.
Yeah, early twenties. Yeah.
Can you talk about casting them, what you were looking for, and how important that aspect of the show was to you?
I think we just wanted to find really interesting voices, and those scenes were already well-written, I think. And it’s to FXs credit and Paul Simms’ credit, this idea that they were always saying, “Yeah, but we want to make sure that it’s not just that the kids are learning from the teachers. We want the teachers to be learning from the kids a lot.” So, that book club became this manifestation of Evan sometimes asking questions that the youth needed to help him answer. He’s saying, “How does the world work right now?” So, they were written with that in mind. And then it was just a matter of finding really interesting, unique characters. And there are so many different ways we found people in that book club specifically. Some of them were straight from the local Atlanta casting director, who did an amazing job, Chase Paris. And then two of them were big TikTokers that I followed, or one of them was sort of a medium-big TikToker. And one of them is huge, Aliyah, since we shot the pilot, she’s exploded, and she has a whole pop career, and she’s becoming a big megastar, and she’s such a talented actor as well. And then Ben Bonderant was somebody I found from TikTok because years ago, somebody had tagged me in one of his videos saying, this guy reminds me of your comedy. And so I just started following him. I remember Aliyah; the first video I’d ever seen of her was her just walking over a freeway or something on a sidewalk, saying, “One thing about me. I’m going to walk. I’ll be passing highways and byways.” And she just had this awesome personality. And so some of the people from online sent tapes, and some of them were amazing. And so we had people like that. Also, in the book club uniquely, the Pablo character, that people love a lot, he has curly hair, and there’s a scene where he snaps, and he’s also big in the school safety episode. He was a background actor in the pilot, and he kept saying all this funny stuff, and we were like, “This kid is so funny. We got to give him a line.” So, we gave him two or three lines, and that’s always a big decision on a set because there are budgeting concerns if you’re going to add a cast member. But Pablo was just so funny, and we gave him some lines in the pilot, and then we just started giving him more and more and writing for him. And he was a real find as well. So, that book club especially really came together organically, and we’re so happy with all of them. The girl who plays Becca, Savannah Gann, is so funny, and she knows how to sell every line. And yeah, Monica [Scarlette Amber Hernandez] and Hartman [Matthew Smitley], those characters are so great.
So, I definitely want to talk about the last episode.
Yeah, please. I want to know what you think of it. Nobody has seen that. So I’m like, how is the reaction?
I mean, I’ll be really honest. As someone who’s super gay and super comfortable being gay, it was a little like, “Whoa.” [Laughs.]
It was like you were feeling the stress of bringing these coworkers to a really gay environment.
It’s very much “I don’t know if I’m comfortable with you coming to the gay warehouse party.”
Yeah. Wow, that’s interesting that as a gay person, it made you feel even more queasy or something. You were feeling Evan’s tension.
Yes. I was like, “Oh my God, his friends are going to get him fired.” That sort of thing.
I love that reaction
He’s already had the whole thing in the first episode about dating a co-worker! But whose idea was it to have his birthday party at the leather bar?
The room came up with it. But I do remember Paul pretty specifically walked in, and we were trying to crack a final episode, and we had some thoughts about how to end the season. And he said, “You know what could be cool is if now, at the end of the season, we bring the audience with us to somewhere they haven’t seen before, somewhere that could be unique to the lead character in this show.” And so we came up with this idea of going to this Eagle Bar, not just a gay bar. And in the show, it’s called Tom of Austin, but it’s this sort of eagle-style leather bar. Right. It was a great idea, and it really pays off, in my opinion.
I don’t know if it’s because we, as viewers, have been conditioned to always think this, but one of the biggest surprises of the episode is that Evan doesn’t choose Harry.
I know, I know. What do you think of that? That’s what I want to know. What do you think of that, or how did you experience that when you first saw it?
Well, the best part about it is it’s a shock. It’s a surprise.
Good, good, good, good. Okay, good. That means we built it right. We don’t want to be tricking you, but we want to be selling that. He’s probably going to go with Harry. So, we want that to be a turn.
But the good thing about the turn is then you stop and think back about it, and you’re like, oh, but Malcolm has actually been there through most…
Been here all along. They’ve been in love all season.
Exactly.
So you would say it worked for you. On some level?
It does work because during the season, you’re sort of like, “Why is he pushing him away?”
Right? Right.
This guy is a good match for him. Why did they break up? Was that the concept that you guys were going for?
Yeah, I think you totally got it. It’s this thing in life where sometimes you are resisting someone wonderful who’s just would be a wonderful part of your life, and you’re doing it for a variety of reasons, but some people literally can push away love. And so I think it’s a comment on that in some ways. But yeah, I remember when that came to us. It’s like, “Well, what if we set it up so that you think he’s going to pick Harry, and then he picks Malcolm?” And then I think we could all feel the same thing you’re feeling when we first brought up the idea like, oh, that would really be satisfying because Malcolm is someone that you’ve come to love over the season, and you’ve come to be like, “Well, why aren’t they together?” And I think the seventh episode also sets that up really well, where they’re kind of having this argument, and he comes and visits him. And yeah, I feel really happy with that. And Jordan [Firstman] and Langston [Kerman] are both such amazing onscreen presences. It’s a joy to get to explore both of those characters through the season, and especially in that final episode, really get to spend time with Harry, really get to spend time with Malcolm at school.
The other thing though is you do leave wide open another storyline, which is teased throughout the entire season.
Which is the Harry’s trailer…
No, isn’t it Markie and Gwen?
Oh, Markie and Gwen. Yeah, you’re right. I didn’t think of that as being left wide open, but yeah, you’re right.
Well, tell me if I’m wrong. It’s insinuated that they’re having fun on the side.
Oh, we didn’t mean to insinuate that, but you should take from the show, whatever you want to take from the show. Well, he’s definitely got a crush. That’s clear. Yeah.
And you didn’t have to keep that in the final episode, but you did. It’s the little teaser for a second season?
Yeah, it just feels real to those characters. As you write, you get to know the characters. And this idea of Marie having this crush just felt genuine. And I think Sean Patton is such an incredible actor and such a great comedian, but he can have such gravitas, and he can have such meaning and tenderness. And so that’s so beautiful. Seeing Marie, this strong guy with these very outspoken opinions, also has this real tenderness and this crush. I mean, what’s more tender than that? I like Markie feeling like he likes Gwen and wondering if she likes him back. And then ultimately, at least in this episode, feeling quite disappointed. That doesn’t seem to be the case. She says, “We got back together with Nick,” and we love that Nick character so much as well. And I’m excited to play with that more in the future.
That’s my last question for you. If you’re lucky enough to get renewed, do you know where you want to take the show in a second season?
I’ve thought about two things. Well, I’ll tell you one of them, which is just a simple idea. But I do think in the show, we mostly let the kids have their phones because it’s interesting. I think a lot of kids do have their phones during school, but I do know that in a lot of classrooms, teachers have a whole thing where the kids all put their phones away at the beginning of class. So, I would like to do an episode that explores that, and what are the kids going to do to get around this ridiculous rule that they can’t be on their phones? Are they going to have two and three phones, or are they going to start gluing a phone to the bottom of their shoe or whatever? So yeah, that’s what I got.
“English Teacher” is now available on FX and Hulu