English Teacher Gets Gen Z

In The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin crafted his trademark workplace narrative between big meetings where everyone talks over each other and brisk “walk-and-talks,” in which two characters work out their issues on their way to the big meetings where everyone talks over each other. Alvarez stages lots of those big meetings. Cafeteria lunches, class discussions, after-school book club meetings—these scenes are often frenzied set pieces, with 30 Rock–levels of joke density. But, instead of walk-and-talks, English Teacher stitches itself together with scenes that take place between two people, each on their way somewhere else. Stolen asides in the hall, quick duck-ins to the principal’s office, confabs in between class periods. If The West Wing’s style was about a big, unwieldy group of people marshaling all their energy to common purpose, English Teacher is about a big, unwieldy group of people whose energy is flying all over the place. Whatever the mission is, whatever it was, the goal is just to get to the next period.

What we soon learn is that Evan is in trouble. During the last school year, he apparently kissed his then boyfriend, Malcolm (Jordan Firstman), in front of a class of students. One of those students, the child of an ultraconservative local business owner, has since graduated and come out as gay himself. His family blames Evan for this undesirable turn of events, and so they’ve asked Principal Moretti to fire him. By the end of the pilot, Evan’s out of danger, but with a new mandate from the district that he be forbidden from dating co-workers. The sudden arrival of a new, hot history teacher, Harry (Langston Kerman), then, sets up a season’s worth of slapstick social scenarios.

But the will-they-won’t-they between Evan and Harry is, at best, a minor thread in this incredibly self-assured first season. The show’s real interest is split between the faculty lounge and the classroom. Specifically, it’s about the question of control. What happens when teachers are teaching students who want to be teaching their teachers? In a knockout midseason episode called “Kayla Syndrome,” Kayla, a student in Evan’s class, tells him that she suffers from a disease called “asymptomatic Tourette’s,” a form of Tourette’s syndrome that features none of the symptoms of Tourette’s and is only self-diagnosable. Despite the obvious silliness of this, Evan finds himself alone on an island of incredulity. When he asks for clarification, another student steps up to defend Kayla by describing, in a condescending, sing-songy tone, what Tourette’s is. Evan interrupts her by saying, “I know what Tourette’s is.” And the girl replies, “Sounds like you’re halfway there, and you’re taking the opportunity to be educated, which is … honorable.” When he accidentally says something, later in the conversation, that upsets the class, Kayla herself replies, “You can’t blame people for making really huge mistakes when they haven’t learned the etiquette.”