This piece was originally published on December 17, 2024. On November 12, 2025, FX cancelled English Teacher after two seasons.
For many, the premiere of FX’s English Teacher in September marked the long-awaited arrival of Brian Jordan Alvarez, the comedy series’ creator and star. For the better part of the past decade, Alvarez has been making things on the internet — first YouTube sketches, followed by a beloved web series called The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo and, most recently, a menagerie of characters on TikTok, the most famous of which, TJ Mack, has gone viral multiple times over. “I’ve had enough amateur practice rounds of this to know what I’m doing,” he told the New York Times ahead of the premiere. On English Teacher, he plays Evan Marquez, a beleaguered high-school teacher in Austin, Texas, trying to separate the colliding streams of his personal life as a gay man and his work life in conservative environs. The show received universally good reviews for its topicality and wit: It was “a deft, brutal trench comedy,” “radically playful,” simply “the best new sitcom.”
L.A. comedy nerds may recognize many members of Alvarez’s old crew on English Teacher. Stephanie Koenig, his longtime collaborator, writes on the show and plays Gwen Sanders, Evan’s fellow teacher and, in a replication of their real-life dynamic, his best friend.
