Review: On ‘English Teacher,’ School Is a Battlefield

The culture war often doesn’t have a physical frontline; it’s fought in op-ed columns, through social-media memes and inside people’s heads.

Public schools are an exception. There, the state infantry of teachers, enlisted to handle potentially explosive ideas, face wave after wave of challenging students, backed by air support from helicopter parents.

“English Teacher,” which begins Monday on FX, is a deft, brutal trench comedy of this battle. Brian Jordan Alvarez, the creator and viral-video comic, stars as Evan Marquez, a high school teacher in suburban Austin, Texas, struggling to get through each day with his ideals intact and his shirts unstained.

His students are wily shape-shifters, a tech-enabled alien species whose ways and attitudes keep their handlers off-balance. “The kids this year, I feel like they’re less woke,” Evan tells his best friend, the history teacher Gwen Sanders (Stephanie Koenig), who concurs. One student, she said, told her she needed to teach “both sides” of the Spanish Inquisition.

Evan’s real troubles begin, however, when he learns that he’s under “investigation” after a rich, influential parent reported him for having kissed his ex-boyfriend (Jordan Firstman) in front of students.

His principal, Grant Moretti — a walking anxiety attack played wonderfully by Enrico Colantoni — admits that Evan shouldn’t have to deal with this, but he’s too beaten and besieged to do anything but plead with Evan to help him make the problem go away. One of Evan’s students suggests he claim discrimination as a gay Hispanic, but another says, “Gay doesn’t count anymore, and he talks like a straight white guy.”