FX's Brilliant 'English Teacher' Is So Anti-Woke It Circles Back to Woke

By Dustin Rowles | TV | September 12, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | September 12, 2024 |

“Kids these days, they’re not into being woke anymore. It’s circled all the way around, and now they’re for what they say they’re against,” Evan Marquez (Brian Jordan Alvarez) says in one of the first lines delivered in the new FX series, English Teacher.

“Right, and they’re saying the ‘R’ word again,” his fellow teacher, Gwen (Stephanie Koenig), adds.

“Like you have that kid, what was he saying about the Spanish Inquisition?” Evan asks.
“That I have to teach both sides of the Inquisition. He got upset. He started crying. It was a whole thing.”

This opening exchange in English Teacher, created by its star, Alvarez, foreshadows the comedy’s central theme. Unlike other school-set comedies such as Abbott Elementary or the now-canceled AP Bio, this show isn’t about lessons learned or how students improve their teachers. Instead, English Teacher, the funniest new show of 2024, tackles the challenges of educating a new generation of high school students who came of age during MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and the pandemic.

Set in the progressive city of Austin, surrounded by the more conservative state of Texas, the series follows teachers who were once considered progressive but now find themselves navigating a whole new world. They’re dealing with students who use pronouns like “it” or frequently employ therapy-speak, expecting accommodation for their “trauma,” which can range from serious sexual abuse to a bad hair day.

This environment is a minefield, but it’s also ripe for comedy, especially when explored through the lens of teachers who are most exposed to these situations. What’s remarkable about English Teacher is its ability to poke fun at the “nu-woke” without punching down. The show gently chides from a place of love and occasional frustration, but it’s never mean-spirited. In essence, it’s a politically incorrect comedy created by politically correct people.

For example, in the second episode, the high school’s football team wants to continue a longstanding tradition of dressing up as cheerleaders and performing cheers. The school considers canceling it, not due to angry parents but because of student objections, specifically from “the LGBTQ+IA2S+ Alliance.” They argue that boys are perpetuating a Boomer tradition of “gender switching” as a joke, which they find offensive to non-binary and trans students.

While acknowledging the absurdity of the situation, Mr. Marquez seeks to honor the queer kids while allowing the football team to engage in light-hearted fun. He reminds the Alliance about ongoing efforts to ban drag in the South, to which they counter that the football team’s performance would be acceptable if it were authentic drag rather than a joke. The compromise? Recruiting a drag queen, played by Trixie Mattel, to help the football team dress in drag authentically, satisfying everyone except the perpetually exasperated principal (played by Veronica Mars’ Enrico Colantoni).

In the third episode, Mr. Marquez faces an even more politically charged situation: a student claiming to be traumatized by self-diagnosed “asymptomatic Tourette’s,” which is supposedly even worse than symptomatic Tourette’s because “people have no idea what kind of battle people like Kayla are battling inside every day.”

Here, again, it would be easy to make fun of the student, Kayla, and dismiss her, but English Teacher does something even better: Yes, the show still jokes about this clearly made-up disease, but Coach Hillridge (Sean Patton), who seems to understand the kids better than anyone, roots out the real problem and figures out how to resolve it. Another classmate is using Kayla’s “condition” to extract sympathy and climb the social ladder. (Hillridge is my favorite character, something like a cross between Ron Swanson, Bobby Moynihan, and Charlie Day).

The show masterfully balances humor, wisdom, and empathy while critiquing a new generation of students who may lack resilience and are sometimes parodies of wokeness. But underneath the virtue signaling, the teachers still understand that they’re just kids dealing with the same insecurities that have plagued us all for generations. English Teacher manages somehow to do the impossible: Express our frustration and annoyance with the kind of kids who might claim that “reading is ableist” while also finding the humor in it and yet still remain sensitive to the genuine underlying problems.

If the rest of the season is as good as the first three episodes, English Teacher is poised to be the best new comedy of the year. It accomplishes the seemingly impossible task of addressing our annoyance with certain aspects of modern youth culture while still treating young people with understanding and respect. I cannot recommend it more.